Why marketers everywhere need to worry about GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new data security and privacy law out of the EU that went into effect on May 25, 2018. When it does, it gives citizens of that entire region greater control of their online privacy, and means stiff fines for those who violate it. 

How stiff? The law states that the heftiest fine can be 20 million euros or 4% of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year – whichever is higher.

If you’re a company that houses or transmits EU consumer data, you must comply with GDPR. That means being able to identify and report on how you are collecting, storing, managing, and using EU customer data down to the individual level, and it means having a process in place to eliminate that data from all of your systems at the request of any consumer from the EU. 

For many organizations this poses a number of challenges:

• Consumer data is frequently stored in multiple systems across multiple departments with each system under the purview of a different owner
• Companies that use 3rd party data to append and expand their prospect data need to ensure that their entire data supply chain is GDPR-compliant.
• Very few companies have a comprehensive process and methodology for eliminating consumer data from their many systems. Most of us are good at responding to Unsubcribe requests but not many of us have formal processes to purge all related data about the consumer who is unsubscribing.

Now is the time to get a handle on your data management process. There are three key pieces to the puzzle:

1. Beefing up your opt-in process so that you mitigate the chances that someone will reach out and ask you to purge their data.
2. Putting a process in place to track and manage your consumer data and vendor’s GDPR compliance.
3. Defining a process and methodology for purging consumer data.

Marketing teams are using CabinetM’s platform to manage the tracking and management of consumer data and vendor GDPR compliance. By using our marketing stack configurator, and leveraging our directory of more than 8,000 products,organizations are able to visualize where customer data is being housed across organizational silos, track who is responsible for the data, and make note of the GDPR policies of those vendors supplying or integrating 2nd and 3rd party data. 

If you need help, contact CabinetM. We’ll show you how you to track and manage your GDPR compliance.

Author Sheryl Schultz is president and co-founder of CabinetM. To learn more about ways to manage your marketing technology, or to learn how you can add your GDPR compliance to your CabinetM vendor profile, contact her at sschultz@cabinetm.com.