News

• Posted by fiammybe
• Posted on 6/7/2018

GDPR and our mailing list

GDPR is here, and we took it as an opportunity to freshen up our mailing list.

You must be suffering from a very specific form of selective blindness if you managed to dodge all the mails in your inbox that told you about how suddenly your privacy is of the utmost importance to a wide range of known and unknown companies. And oh yes, if you would like to give them the explicit permission to continue to use your data. Pretty please?

I took it as a nice opportunity to opt out of most of them, certainly those companies that I stopped using several years ago, but never explicitly unsubscribed (if that was even possible). I'm sure most people did something similar.

At ImpressCMS, we had this mailing list that was lying dormant for more than a year, so we looked at the entire GDPR circus as a nice opportunity to refresh our mailing list. This will sound blasphemous to many marketing people, but we don't care about the raw numbers of email addresses we have in our mailing list, we care about how many people are actually interested in what we send them.

We sent a last mail to our original subscribers asking them if they wanted to keep in touch, and if so, to subscribe to a new mailing list which was setup in a GDPR-compliant way (explicit consent, you know the drill).

This resulted in a huge drop in subscribers (we lost almost 70%), but now we have a fresh list of interested people to contact, which is a good starting point for the future.

Next step is to promote the mailing list again, because that part of the site didn't make it during the migration. Once we have that nailed, we can start growing the list again.