Email marketing under the GDPR: the practical minimum

Put an unsubscribe link in every marketing email, and honour unsubscribes. HelloCRM adds the link to campaign emails, plus the header that makes Gmail and Outlook show their own unsubscribe button. A password reset email carries no such link, because there is nothing to opt out of.

An unsubscribed address goes onto a suppression list that outranks a later import. This matters because re-importing an old spreadsheet would otherwise quietly re-subscribe people who had already asked not to be emailed.

It is also worth letting people leave a single list rather than everything. In HelloCRM the preferences link you can put in an email opens a page where the recipient decides list by list; the unsubscribe link, on the other hand, unsubscribes from everything, because that is what someone clicking it asked for. That way a customer who drops a newsletter they rarely read can still receive the messages that matter more to them.

Emails to bouncing addresses hurt deliverability: after a while mail stops reaching the good addresses too. A persistently bouncing address has to come out of sending.

There are two kinds of bounce. A hard bounce means the address does not exist; a soft bounce means something temporary, such as a full mailbox. In HelloCRM a hard-bounced address retires itself before the next send, and soft bounces are counted: five soft bounces from one address within 30 days count as a hard one.

On request, hand over or erase a person's data. In HelloCRM everything you hold about a person downloads in one click, and erasure reaches the copies too. Documents that must be kept by law keep the transaction and lose the person.

Such requests are rare, so it is easy to forget where else someone's data sits: in the mailbox, in an old spreadsheet, in the shop. When everything is in one place, the answer is simpler and a copy is less likely to be missed.