92% of Marketers Think GDPR is a Good Thing and an Opportunity for Better Marketing

Couldn’t make our GDPR event on 19^th September – GDPR From a Marketing Perspective – or just looking for a recap of what was discussed? Here’s a quick summary of the event including some key insights from our pre-event survey, quizzing 40 senior marketers on their perceptions of GDPR.

Nick Burrell, Co-Founder, and the key GDPR consultant inside CleverTouch took to the stage emphasising that GDPR is not only a risk to marketing activity and the size of marketing databases, but it’s also a risk to marketer’s jobs. Marketers will be expected to achieve the same results as pre-GDPR and with the likelihood of trying to achieve that with a much smaller database in a post-GDPR world will be a challenge.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Nick shared a positive outlook for organisations that have a Marketing Automation platform and a CRM system properly integrated - they are already 80% of the way to being GDPR compliant, if they implement a few policies and procedures. For example, opt-in campaigns, reconciliation of subscription lists and smart preference centres.Out of the 40 organisations who responded to our pre-event GDPR survey:

• 78% stated their executive team are aware of GDPR (probably because of the financial implications of breach).
• However, only 10% have allocated extra budget for GDPR…

We feel marketers need to seek additional budget or bring budget forward from next year to a) become GDPR compliant but also to b) run more campaigns to drive marketing opt-ins. Nick seriously encouraged the audience to start stressing the importance to management and the c-suite to seek sponsorship and extra budget for a GDPR compliant project.

Elaine, Strategy & Client Services Director, CleverTouch Consulting then took to the stage to provide a case study of Metso, a multi-national client of ours that we’ve supported with GDPR compliance.Elaine stressed the importance of having a process:

1. Understand GDPR and its implication for Marketing and Sales
2. Create a GDPR compliant environment with Marketing Automation and CRM
3. Preference (re)design and development
4. Customer journeys and opt-in campaigns
5. Review and optimisation
6. Amending the marketing mix for a post-GDPR world

Elaine explained how we have taken Metso through this process, whilst also re-optimising their Pardot and Salesforce environment. We are currently at the stage of finalising a preference centre and re-invigorating their customer journey. Many organisations are at a much earlier phase in the process compared to Metso however, with 40% of our surveyed marketer’s still looking to implement a GDPR compliant environment.

Most interesting is that despite the fear and apprehension of GPDR, 92% of the marketers we surveyed think that GDPR is a good thing and see it as an opportunity to deliver more engaging marketing.

Our next event will take place on 2^nd November at Wellcome Collection, London – Preparing for GDPR Through Marketing Automation – unlike most of the GDPR events out there, ours are free to attend. You can register for this event here.