Sentori email marketing blog

In this blog post we're looking at the implications of email marketing upon your organisation's privacy policy. In our experience, these requirements are often inadequate or neglected. It's well worth a rewiew!

On top of these specific pieces of advice, we would also encourage you to provide a prominent link to your privacy policy at point of sign up.

If you're tracking opens and clicks, you must say so

If you're tracking who opens and clicks your marketing emails (and who isn't?), then your privacy policy should be updated to inform people that this is the case.

Sample text covering tracking of opens and clicks:

"If you are subscribed to any of our mailing lists we may use web bugs (invisible images) contained in the email to track whether you open the message. Unless you have chosen not to download images automatically in your email client, your opening of the email will report back to our systems that you have read the message. We may also employ tracking of any links you click in our messages. Any data we collect is used by our marketers for analysis."

Data retention

With email marketing it is very likely that you are retaining data on individuals (in Sentori this forms the basis of your reports). We would recommend that you are transparent about this to your subscribers.

"By interacting with our email newsletters certain behavioural data may be collected and used to improve the accuracy and relevance of our marketing activities. This data will only be retained as long as is necessary. By unsubscribing from our newsletters we must, by law, retain records that your email address is suppressed from our future marketing emails."

Unsubscribes

Your privacy policy should emphasise that your organisation only participates in permission-based email marketing; once that permission is retracted (by an unsubscribe), be clear that you will honour that individual's request.

"Should visitors subsequently choose to unsubscribe from mailing lists or any registrations, we will provide instructions, on the appropriate webpage or in communications to our visitors, or a visitor may contact us by email (privacy@yourdomainname.com) detailing the sending email address of the communication that they wish to be removed from."

And finally...

Having re-visited your privacy policy, it may also be worth reading a couple of our previous blog posts to ensure that your wider knowledge of the law and your email footers are also up-to-date:

• Legal requirements for email footers
• Email marketing law in the UK

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, please post a comment below.