Tuesday 2¢: Got a GDPR hangover? Time to Think ‘Why’ and ‘What’

Welcome to the Tuesday 2¢. It’s Tuesday, the weekend is a distant memory and it’s time to let off some steam and give our 2 cents on a hot industry topic. This week, following the frenzy of GDPR, we're probably all feeling a little jaded - but Ian Truscott makes us look forward, to how we can build up what we may feel we have lost.

I am writing this on vacation, after an intense week of GDPR preparation, a week during which as an industry, we have been putting a lot of thought, effort and creativity into how we maintain and retain our subscriber base, as well as the mechanics of engaging folks and ensuring that our websites display the right warnings and our marketing automation systems are correctly automating.

We’ve heard stories of decimated customer databases, some even giving up and starting again, and like yours, my inbox is full of emails imploring me to confirm my subscription to a service that, in some cases, I had no idea had my contact details in the first place. We’ve witnessed that there are only so many ways an organization can write a begging letter, so thank god that bleak moment in marketing creativity has ended.

If you are still unsure about GDPR, we’ve written about it a bit on this blog and my colleague Doug provides this advice. I also argue that it can be used as an opportunity instead of letting it huff and puff and blow your marketing house down.

But whichever way you see it, I am sure this is not the end of the matter. Maybe this is just a pause before we all get in a froth about the first company which gets sued or chased by the GDPR ambulance chasing lawyers, or maybe we are in the eye of the storm, feeling calm before all hell breaks loose. But let’s take this moment to move on from the ‘who’ (our now squeaky clean customer database) or the ‘how’ (our now compliant websites and double opt-in processes) and consider instead the ‘what’ (the content).

I say the ‘what, but, as I’ve written before, it really starts with ‘why’ and maybe when we pause to reflect on the efforts of the last few months, it’s time to think about why we do all this.

There are marketers who started this week with a GDPR hangover of a decimated database - nobody replied to their begging letters to subscribe - and why is that? It’s because gleeful consumers, like you and me, are using this opportunity to sort their email wheat from the chaff.

And bloody hell, there is a lot of chaff and the reason those marketers have a decimated database is not because of what they did last week or how they worded their begging letter, but what happened during the weeks and months before.

What did they do to nurture this relationship?

What did they share?

What did they do which offered sufficient enough value to you that would overcome the tiny inconvenience of clicking on a link to say, yes please, I’ll have some more of that?

So post GDPR, we really need to think about the ‘what’.

Ted Rubin has talked about seeing a Return on Relationships, an ROR instead of an ROI, and I like this focus on the relationship. As post-GDPR marketers, unable to blast banal content to a fat and random email list, it’s time to earn the consumer's attention and build a relationship with them through offering something valuable: useful content.