How to Comply with Data Privacy Laws

Overview

As regulations about data and privacy continue to roll out, it is essential to keep an eye on how you contact customers to ensure their protection and comply with the law. This guide will walk through several best practices for complying with data protection regulations in your marketing.

NOTE: The information provided here is intended to be educational and should not be constructed as legal advice. AVADA encourages all of our customers, as well as all E-commerce merchants, to seek legal advice for counsel on how they specifically should ensure that they are compliant with data protection regulations.

How to comply with data privacy laws

Keep your privacy policy updated

To get started, it is vital to keep your privacy policy up to date so that it meets regulation guidelines. As a best practice, your business privacy policy should be concise, transparent, intelligible, and in an easily accessible format. If you are potentially collecting information about children, your privacy policy needs to be clear and written in plain language so they can understand it.

Include the following points in your privacy policy:

- Information about your business's location and where someone could get in contact with you

- Information about the data you collect, use, and share (i.e., the purpose of collection, the data is used, whom the data will be shared with, how long you will retain their data, etc.)

- Information about their rights in regard to their data.

In case you make any changes to how you handle someone's data, it is necessary to update your privacy policy to reflect those changes.

Collect consent

In order to remain compliant, you will want to collect marketing consent from your subscribers. When collecting consent, it is important to note what a customer can expect by subscribing to your marketing and what you will do with the data you collect. AVADA makes it easy to add fields to your signup forms that make them suitable to comply with data protection regulations.

If you use AVADA forms and have subscribers who are in more regulated locations, such as the EU, you may wish to include this consent language on all of your forms.



If you have separate sites for customers coming from different locations, you can have two different signup forms. One with more specific information designed to comply with data protection regulations, and one without the additional information for customers from other locations.

Regardless, it is better to be over-protected than under-protected when it comes to collecting consent. For more information around targeting customers in the EU, head to How to Set up GDPR Compliant.

Include an unsubscribe link

As you build your email campaigns, all of your emails must contain links to your unsubscribe page and even your business's contact information.



AVADA requires all emails to include an unsubscribe link, due to the CAN-SPAM Act and sender reputation. If you don't give your recipients the option to opt out and choose whether or not they want to receive your emails, they are more likely to mark them as spam in their inbox service. On the other hand, spam complaints can have a significant impact on your email deliverability.

By default, all email designed by AVADA, whether in workflows or campaigns, include an unsubscribe link. If you remove it, you cannot send your messages.

Clean your lists regularly

It is necessary to not email customers who have not opted-in to your marketing as well as those who do not regularly engage with your brand to maintain good deliverability in the eyes of inbox providers. The process of identifying customers who are not engaged and excluding them from your messaging is called list cleaning. For more information, check out our article on list cleaning.

Updated on: 06/09/2021