To avoid GDPR penalties, your list provider must be impeccable

The government’s hot on the data protection of mailing list subjects, with means your provider must meet high standards

To avoid GDPR penalties

Fundamentally, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) means businesses must take steps to ensure the personal information used in direct marketing doesn’t get them in trouble. This requires not only doing your due diligence properly but ensuring your mailing list supplier has done theirs too.

There are some obvious places to start but the very first should be to source safe mailing lists and this can be done in a number of ways.

Fire away

Before signing up to anything, ask your prospective list provider a number of questions. These should include what their legal basis is to collect data, how they’ve compiled with the fairness and transparency laws and if they can provide documented evidence of it, what actions will be taken if a data subject objects to their information being processed, how they can help keep your mailing list accurate and who their data protection officer is to put data subjects in touch with should they ask.

Back to the present

A list provider’s responsibilities don’t end at data protection. GDPR also ensures reasonable steps are taken to keep personal information held by clients up to date and correct – not only when sold but over time. 

Consequently, in addition to painstakingly getting things right in the first place, list providers must keep their eyes and ears open for any changes as soon as reasonably possible. Corpdata, for example, updates its client’s live lists twice a month, so if a contact indicates their preferences have changed it’s routinely caught in the net.

The long game

If like many you intend to use your list over a period of time, perhaps to build awareness or nurture prospects to the action you require, it’s particularly essential your marketing list is fail-safe.

Picking a provider that cuts corners so everything looks great and inexpensive in the first few months only for cracks appear down the road can destroy clients. Of all the business decisions to take risks with, don’t do it with GDPR.

While some of these expectations seem unrealistic, list providers now have a duty to to make the impossible possible. If they offer you anything less, it’s time to pick a new one.

This article comes courtesy of Corpdata, the business list provider
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