The new European Union general data protection regulation (EU GDPR) has a direct impact on marketing practices, including email marketing.
If your business is based in the EU or process and collect personal data (in this example, an email list) from EU citizens, the General Data Protection Regulation affects you.
The GDPR says you must obtain freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent from your contacts. You also must clearly explain how you plan to use their personal data.
If you have an existing email list of clients or customers, you must ask for consent and clearly define how you will use their data. Also, you must give an option for your email list to opt-out and remove their data.
There will be penalties for noncompliance. For a small company, the penalties may not be worth mentioning, but for larger companies, the penalties will be significant.
Click here for more information on the GDPR
