GDPR and why solicitors should not cull their email marketing lists

GDPR and why solicitors should not cull their email marketing lists

There has been so much fear spreading about GDPR recently (mainly from people selling GDPR training) that I wanted to give you something straight from the horse’s mouth.

In this case, the horse is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The summary is that if you have a good email list and you have been terrified into believing that you have to ask everyone on that list to confirm that they still want to hear from you, you will like this. You don't need to.

This is what the ICO say (on their website) about existing email marketing lists:

“What are the rules on electronic mail marketing?
The rules on electronic mail marketing are in regulation 22. In short, you must not send electronic mail marketing to individuals, unless:

  • they have specifically consented to electronic mail from you; or
  • they are an existing customer who bought (or negotiated to buy) a similar product or service from you in the past, and you gave them a simple way to opt out both when you first collected their details and in every message you have sent.

You must not disguise or conceal your identity, and you must provide a valid contact address so they can opt out or unsubscribe.”

Therefore, if someone has enquired about your services and you have kept in touch with them on an email database, AS LONG AS you give them the chance to opt out each time (unsubscribe), you can keep on emailing them.

If you use a decent email marketing provider that puts an unsubscribe link in each email you will be safe.

I have always used and avocate the use of Aweber. It puts in the unsubscribe link for you. You cannot remove it.

Even without GDPR this is just good practice. You do not want people receiving your emails if they do not want to hear from you. It simply doesn’t help them and it doesn’t help your business.

If you haven’t yet got a decent email marketing system, you really should be signing up for Aweber.

Click here to take a free Aweber trial:>>

Case Study

One Partner Law Firm Changes Direction

We’ve been working with Nick about 10 years and throughout this time I have always valued his expertise.

When we first made contact with Nick we had been recommended to get in touch with him by another solicitor to “give us a hand with marketing”.

At that time we were focusing on personal injury work, but we had already decided to enter the medical negligence market.

Obviously breaking into a new market takes time and we still needed the income that came from the personal injury work to finance this going forward.

Nick put together a high conversion website which meant we had all the personal injury work that we needed allowing us to build the medical negligence side of things up gradually.

Now we specialise exclusively in medical negligence. Nick has been part of that growth in terms of strategy and the use of Google Adwords to generate good quality leads.

As part of that, he helped us with the entire website build, making it very marketing focused and it has worked extremely well.

As a result our firm has gone from strength to strength, more than doubling fee earing staff and turnover.

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