The new GDPR regulation has had an important impact on email marketing. Thus, if you use email marketing you need to make sure that your business is compliant with GDPR regulations.
To put it short, you will have to make changes in how you seek, get and save consent. As we will see in this post, e-mail verification plays a key role in GDPR.
Why Email Verification Is Important For GDPR
The new regulation requires companies to collect consent for email addresses that is “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous”.
To be compliant with GDPR, email consent should meet several important requirements, these include:
- A positive sign-in. Your customers have to actively opt-in. Pre-checked boxes are not compliant with the new legislation.
- Consent request should be separated from T&Cs or other services you provide. This means that you should never bundle consent with any of your services, like downloading a study.
- Provide an easy way to withdraw consent. You should allow your subscribers the opportunity to opt-out.
- Save the evidence of consent. It means that you must be able to prove who, when, and how each of your subscribers consented.
- Verify your existing lists. GDPR requirements do apply to all consents, not just to those given after 25th of May. Therefore you should check if your existing subscribers’ consent is compliant with GDPR. If not, you should run a re-permission campaign. One of the most challenging aspects in GDPR regulations and email marketing is running a re-permission campaign. For sure, it is not an easy task. It requires detailed planning and strong execution. But, if done correctly an e-mail campaign is going to doubly beneficial by reminding your customers about your brand and also help you meet the GDPR compliance standards.
Preparing a Re-Permission Campaign
If you consider running a re-permission campaign, you have to identify where you store your data. Usually, you save your data in several different places like your CRM, email servers (either on-premise or cloud), or your email marketing platform.
To ensure optimal conversion for your re-permission campaign, your e-mails list need pruning, checking and updating. A straightforward approach that you might be tempted to take is to merge all data into one system, probably CRM, and run the campaign.
It seems simple right? Maybe yes, but we are sure it will not bring you the results you are expecting. Why? Because of the fact that your email consent lists are pretty old, and many items are outdated.
For example, few mailboxes could have been deleted. Also, it is possible that today, several domains that in the past were configured for email, are not accepting emails anymore. Hence, instead of running an effective campaign, many of your emails will just bounce and you will not benefit from the time and money you invested in the campaign. Fortunately, there is a simple method to solve this issue.
WinPure Email Verification
WinPure Email Verification is a cloud-based email verification service that lets you upload up to 100,000 emails. It supports .txt and .csv files and is very simple to use. You just have to drag and drop your files.
Let’s see how it works and how can WinPure Email Verification help you.
The first step is to perform a pre-validation, which compares the emails addresses you uploaded with our database of bad domains. Also, at this stage, we check the syntax for each email address to discard the invalid ones.
Once we perform the pre-validation, we will then validate every e-mail address using three rules:
- Syntax Checking. We check the overall syntax and remove any entry that does not contain ‘@‘ sign or has invalid characters.
- Domain Checking. We verify if the domains exist and that it is able to receive e-mails.
- Mailbox Checking. We verify the mailbox against the ISP to make sure it exists.
When we finish the validation, we present you with several options. For example, you can download all e-mails. Or you can download just the OK ones, or just the bad, or unknown ones. You are free to choose which option suits you best. If you choose to download just the good ones and then you find out that you also need the unknowns, there is no problem. We store your lists for 60 days. Moreover, we preserve the original filenames.
Conclusion
We know that running an e-mail campaign is a complex endeavor. Moreover, with less than two months until GDPR regulation will come into effect, you have a short amount of time to make sure that your email marketing program is compliant. WinPure Email Verification, with its simple to use interface and drag & drop dashboard, provides you the best solution to verify your email lists. You don’t have to think about upfront costs. No matter how many emails you need to verify, you will just pay as you go.
You can start using WinPure Email Verification today by registering for a free account here.
Related Read: How to Prepare Your Data for a Sanctions Screening Process
