How to grow your email subscribers after GDPR

We also loved the Star Wars opening crawl meme that went viral on Twitter.

It’s a law, we should be serious about it, and we are, but when in a fix, a small hearty humor can be just that little bit of inspiration you’d be looking forward to.

Now coming to the point.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is here.

One of major changes enacted by this regulation is the concept of user consent. Previously many brands could use questionable tactics to procure user data without proper consent. That has changed tremendously since GDPR was announced.

Here are some ways that many marketers use to gather your data with question methods:

Passive opt-in: Automatically subscribing users to your email when they exchange information (for example, making a purchase). Here, many marketers presume that the user is okay with receiving emails.

Purchased or scraped email lists: Buying or scrapping contact information like email, phone numbers and more via online services or listings. The users in these cases generally have no or low amount of interaction with the brand, which ends up sending them unsolicited emails.

After the rollout of GDPR, these tactics can spell doom for your business. It’s also a process that one should shy from as you’re not really generating quality prospects. These users would generally unsubscribe from your list immediately, pay no attention to you and in the worse case scenario, might even file a complaint with their local governing bodies against you.

Now, you might be wondering, is it all bad for business? Is GDPR going to affect my business negatively?

On the contrary, we feel GDPR has brought in some major positivity in the market. When you actively ask for user consent, you make a connection with people who really like your product or your business. This means that you are generating quality leads for your business, you are one step closer to making a good case as to why people should buy into your ideas.

In this blog, we are going to show you how you could create opportunities across the customer journey to grow your email list in the GDPR era.

Be clear and visible from the start

The best practice to grow your email subscribers is to be clear wherever you’re trying to harness new subscribers.

For example, if a unique visitor is buying a product on an e-commerce website, he would need to provide you with his or her contact details, or maybe they would need to create an account. This is a potential avenue to add this person as an email subscriber. But, how do you do it?

Well, it’s easy, add a byline with an optional unchecked checkbox asking for consent, for example, “I would like to receive offers or promotional emails from this website.” If the user does check this box, you can send emails until they opt-out.

Being clear and visible from the start is important.

Start with your website

Your website (either desktop or mobile) is the first place any new prospect would show up; it’s the place that dictates your customer’s journey.

Therefore, it’s important to focus on your website and how you could generate email leads through your website.

For example, you could use smart overlays on your website’s specific pages like a product page, checkout page and more to generate more email signups.

Here are a few things you should follow to encourage higher email signups —

Use Banners and Overlays – Banners and overlays on your web pages are a great way to encourage visitors to exchange their contact information with you, especially when you can offer them a lucrative offer or discount.

Ask for consent when visitors create a new account – Post-GDPR, this method is the must. Add a checkbox that explicitly asks the signee if they’d like to opt-in for emails and convey as much detail as you can about the nature of your communication. You might segregate these checkboxes based on the nature of the emails. Add these checkboxes in all your sign-up/create account forms.

Create an opportunity post purchase – You should also push for collection after a visitor makes purchases from your website. At this moment, the customer is probably happier than usual and has a better chance of providing consent.

Build a gamified experience for your visitors

The consumer mindset loves winning and incentives. The concept of gamification and incentivization is rapidly becoming a great way to capture email leads.

Puma, one of the world’s leading sports apparel and shoes manufacturer, adopted this tactic with the help of Insider and saw a significant uplift in their conversions. A simple concept of using scratch-to-win games also allowed visitors to exchange their contact information for hefty discounts and gifts.

One could also use other gamified experiences like Insider’s spin the wheel email collection tool on their mobile websites, to bolster subscription rates as well.

Leverage the Mobile Ecosystem

So, you know that a user hasn’t provided consent yet to receive emails, maybe he or she did not heed attention to your consent checkbox or an email asking for consent before GDPR rolled out.

Not all is lost.

Leverage mobile devices and the channels available on it.

You could use, for instance, mobile app push or in-app lead generation to solve it. Here is one way to do this — Serve contextual push notifications asking your users to provide their consent to receive email, and voila, more email subscribers.

GDPR has brought in a big change of how we function with email marketing. It has completely changed the game, and if you want to keep winning, you need to change yourself. I’d like to learn more, how do you think, we can combat the growing pains of losing subscribers and opportunities at the same time. Tweet to us here, we’d love to know what’s your take.