How to stay GDPR compliant with your cold emails!

Sending mass cold email has never worked since 2002. People have become less receptive and developed the habit of tuning out marketing emails received in their inboxes. In 2018, GDPR replaced the 1995 Data Protection Act, by Introducing hefty penalties for marketers who send bulk emails. This begs the questions, is cold email marketing dead? The answer is Yes and No. Yes, the days of getting customers, by blasting off 100,000 emails are dead. No, you can still get customers by smartly crafting personalised emails and sending them 5 to 10 people within a certain account!   Many marketers do not consider this as cold outreach because they don't get to use their list of 10,000 emails, which they have accumulated over the years. GDPR's has placed marketers in a void. But this situation could be utilised by improving their cold email methodology.  

Contents

  • Video
  1. Find Prospect
  2. Transparent Source
  3. Follow up
  4. Data Security
  • Conclusion
 

Watch The Video

You can watch this informative video by Sampath Mallidi for more insightful information. Sampath has been doing sales for all of his career and has founded and bootstrapped Intandemly, a SaaS startup in early 2018.  

1 Find Prospects

Your prospect is someone who has explicitly requested for your product.  The Best way to find such people is by setting keywords alerts on a social platform like Twitter or Facebook, or niche-specific websites like ProductHunt, BetaList, HackerRank and so on. For example, if you find a community sharing their opinion on products or companies which are similar to you, they are your potential prospects. This is an exhausting task. You will have to invest a lot of time in segmenting multiple lists of emails before you start your email outreach. Intandemly's 7 Days Free Trial offers you the tools you will need to reach people in a specific account. Get a free trial here.  

2 Transparent Source

Being transparent about your intent and your source of information is necessary. Here's a sample phrase used by Sampath Mallidi in the video
I am reaching out to you because I found your email address on LinkedIn!. And It looks like your company might benefit from our product/service. If you'd rather not hear from me, let me know and I'll delete your information.
  Two points you must highlight in your email:
  1. Source of the information
  2. Agree to delete the Information, if requested
 

3 Follow up

If your email recipients asked you to delete their email address, then you are required to delete their email address from your database, as per your promise. If they didn't reply, and you must follow up with them, make sure the reasoning is explicitly mentioned.  

4 Data Security

GDPR's introduction should make marketers practice better data security. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind while send out cold emails.
  1. Only give access to people who need it.
  2. Make sure the data you have stored is secured.
  3. Only hold on to the data as long as you need.
  4. Don't share this data with anyone else.
 

Conclusion

As mentioned in the beginning of this article, sending mass emails to multiple will not yield the same result as it did a decade ago. Whether you are following cold outreach or not, practicing general data protection should be one of your concerns. Sampath has touched multiple more points in the video. If this article was helpful to you, the video will certainly provide you with a better context of the situation.