As you all know, because you received our GDPR compliant, single opt-in, please re-subscribe email the other day, we recently went through the process of requesting our email friends’ permission to keep their details and continue using them to send updates and interesting stories, thanks to GDPR.
So far, so good… We have had a 17% opt-in from the first wave of emails, and Hilary will soon be sending a final wave to those who didn’t open, or didn’t click the button, so we’ll see. In the end, we'd like to see around a 35% opt-in rate, which is our average click rate on email campaigns. Does that make sense?
However, it wasn’t as easy to execute as we might have made you believe in our previous blog, GDPR and Mailchimp lists, not because the steps are complicated, but more because the emotional attachment we hadn’t realised we’d formed, was being severed…
In fact, it was pretty scary because you see Push Start Marketing decided to take the rocky road (mmm rocky road) and unsubscribe every single email address and name before bcc’ing everyone outside of Mailchimp. When I pressed that ‘unsubscribe’ button, my heart was in my mouth and I must have read the Outlook email ten times before sending it. When it was done and before replies started coming in, I pretty much sat there hugging my coffee, watching the screen for 15 minutes! It was scary.
We figured our email system isn’t at the widest end of our sales funnel, and it really only serves the purpose of reminding people we’re still around, and we still know what we’re talking about, and we can still help if you’re stuck with any marketing issues. Plus, our database was made up of contacts we had met anywhere and everywhere! That being said, it is still a service to our clients and potential clients and is therefore still important enough for us to take proper care of.
That is why we decided to let everyone go… Because if they love you too, they’ll come back.
In our opinion if for no other reason, this is why the data protection changes that GDPR encompasses are brilliant! We have been forced to clean up our database, stop wasting time and energy on people who really don’t care about us, and let us focus on the people who do.
Push Start Marketing is built on trust (and our four pillars), but trust is really at the core of what we do and who we work with. So, now thanks to GDPR everyone we email can trust that we aren’t wasting their time, and we can trust that we are bolstering a relationship that has a mutual benefit.
So, stop being scared of GDPR, if you love them let them go and if they love you too, they will come back.