Data Management and Reporting Archives - Act-On

HIPAA-Compliant Marketing in 5 Easy Steps

Act-On — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 22:20:01 +0000

For digital marketers in healthcare, HIPAA compliance is more than just a regulatory box to check — it’s an ever-evolving discipline that demands constant vigilance. This involves mastering the cornerstones, like the data security of your customers’ personal health information (PHI). But it also means mapping out the corners of marketing where HIPAA risks may take you by surprise.

So in this post, we’re shining a light on a few of the unexpected HIPAA compliance risks in marketing. From social media engagement to embedded videos, here are five key steps to ensure your marketing is HIPAA-compliant.

Keep Track of Your Website Trackers

Between updated guidance in December 2022, clarified guidance in March 2023, and a court ruling in July 2024, HIPAA regulations around how and when healthcare orgs can track customer interactions on their own websites have been evolving at a (relatively) breakneck pace.

Despite the back-and-forth, experts maintain the crux of the issue hasn’t changed. Say you use a marketing pixel to track a website visitor on a page that includes personal health information (like an authenticated page or even an online appointment scheduler). If you share that data, along with an IP address or other identifiable information, with a third-party tool without the required Business Associate Agreement (BAA) in place — that equals sharing PHI without authorization. And that’s a violation.

So, a few best practices to follow here:

Regularly audit your site for all third-party trackers
Remove any marketing pixels from authenticated, password-protected pages like patient portals
Remember that videos embedded on your site through YouTube or Vimeo allow those platforms to capture data from your visitors

These guidelines are changing quickly as the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the judicial system figure out exactly what kind of online behavior coupled with an IP address qualifies as PHI. But staying on top of your trackers — including any that might have been installed by past employees or agencies pre-2022 — will help you respond swiftly if/when HIPAA guidance tightens up again.

When your marketing is HIPAA-compliant, everyone’s data is safe and secure, and everyone’s happy.

Thanks to GDPR, digital marketers are now pretty comfortable with cookie consent managers. But while these tools and HIPAA authorization both involve obtaining user consent, they serve fundamentally different purposes and shouldn’t be confused. Consent to collect data on your website does not equal HIPAA-compliant authorization to share electronic protected health information (ePHI).

HIPAA requires specific, written authorization for using ePHI in marketing communications. This goes far beyond simple cookie consent, requiring detailed explanations of how PHI will be used.

Ensure your organization has separate, clear processes for both website cookie consent and HIPAA authorization for marketing communications. The latter should be more detailed and clearly state how ePHI will be used in marketing efforts.

Maintain Audit Trails — for Your Team and Your Vendors

HIPAA wants you to show the receipts. Literally.

HIPAA audit logging requirements mandate that you keep comprehensive logs of all activities related to electronic PHI. They have to be stored securely and made available to review in case of any investigations. This includes:

Tracking access, modifications, deletions, and data movements
Capturing information to identify who’s responsible for each action
Recording the date and time of activities and the specific data affected

Don’t forget — these audit log requirements apply to all of your vendors’ access to your data, as well as your own team’s. Make sure any mar-tech vendor you work with has verifiable audit logs available. For example, here at Act-On, we provide comprehensive audit logs to all our clients who need to maintain HIPAA compliance.

And to really ensure your HIPAA compliance…

Choose a HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Automation Platform

Marketing automation platforms use your audience data (like demographics and website behaviors) to segment and personalize your marketing campaigns. Choosing a marketing automation provider that offers HIPAA compliance ensures you can reach prospects and drive engagement while protecting data security.

Look for features like:

Data encryption, both in transit and at rest
Separate HIPAA data environment
Strict access controls
Regular audits and detailed audit trails (as mentioned above)
Comprehensive employee training

Here’s the kicker: Even if a platform has Fort Knox-level data security protocols, they still need to sign a BAA to be HIPAA-compliant. Most enterprise-class marketing automation platforms don’t want to be held liable for HIPAA compliance, so most refuse to offer BAAs to their customers. Double-check before you waste time evaluating features.

Or, save yourself the trouble and learn about our own HIPAA-compliant marketing automation platform.

Make sure you take a very close look at your operations to sync up HIPAA and marketing compliance.

Mind Your Reviews

Finally, responding to online reviews doesn’t require technical expertise — but it does require HIPAA savvy. An inappropriately worded response could cost tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

Here’s why: Even if a patient shares their entire medical history in a review, you can’t even acknowledge they’re a patient when responding. As the American Medical Association cautions, “A patient’s own disclosure is not permission for the doctor to disclose anything.”

Instead, stick to general statements about patient care, give the reviewer contact information to directly address concerns, and be liberal with disclaimers like “We can’t comment on specific cases”. And only allow staff members who have been trained in HIPAA guidelines to respond to reviews.

Staying HIPAA-Compliant Means Staying Up-to-Date

Staying HIPAA-compliant requires constant vigilance and an understanding of how these regulations apply to digital marketing. It’s not just about avoiding fines — it’s about maintaining the trust of your patients, customers, and prospects.

Especially in marketing, those regulations are continually evolving. So keep up with the latest guidance, regularly audit your own marketing practices, and work closely with HIPAA-compliant partners to make sure your audience’s sensitive data is well protected.

[Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal advice. Always consult with legal professionals for specific guidance on HIPAA compliance in your marketing efforts.]

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Automation: Keeping Data Secure

Act-On — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 22:49:29 +0000

As we were recently reminded, businesses live and die by their tech stacks — with Cloudstrike’s single buggy software update grinding industries like aviation and finance to a halt, and costing over $5 billion in direct losses.

For healthcare organizations, tools that manage consumer data hold the same potential. Yet, data breaches and other violations of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) continue to happen. In 2024 alone, Kaiser and HealthEquity reported exposing the personal data of millions of customers due to web tracking and third-party account access, respectively.

With recent HIPAA updates around online tracking technologies and increased scrutiny on how organizations are sharing data with third-party vendors, it’s clear: healthcare marketers play a pivotal role in maintaining HIPAA compliance, making sure their patients’ (and prospects’) data stays secure and private.

At the same time, consumers still expect personalized content and messaging. So let’s dive into HIPAA-compliant marketing automation — what it looks like to do it right, and the risks involved if you get it wrong.

Our lawyers would like us to say: We aren’t lawyers, and this isn’t legal advice. Consult with your own lawyers about any specific healthcare marketing questions.

What HIPAA compliance means for marketers

HIPAA aims to safeguard protected health information (PHI), including medical records and dates of appointments, as well as personal information like names, birth dates, and IP addresses, when linked to health-related data.

In order to stay HIPAA-compliant, organizations need to keep this data secure and protected by implementing security protocols such as encryption, access controls, and audit trails to prevent unauthorized access and breaches.

HIPAA applies to two kinds of organizations:

Covered Entities — healthcare providers, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses
Business Associates — companies or individuals doing work that involves PHI on behalf of a Covered Entity, such as consultants, marketing agencies, IT service providers, data analytics firms

When sharing PHI with third-party vendors (like a martech solution), HIPAA requires a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to ensure compliance.

Marketing under HIPAA includes some specific definitions and requirements. For instance, a health insurer promoting a home and casualty insurance product would be considered marketing, but a pharmacy sending prescription refill reminders would not. Marketing communications require covered entities to obtain written, detailed authorization from the recipients. HIPAA also prohibits selling PHI or patient lists without authorization.

Healthcare information is simply too sensitive to risk exposing in a data breach or other incident.

HIPAA-compliant marketing automation

Marketing automation platforms collect data about your prospects and customers, use that data to segment your audience, and allow you to personalize your messages based on those segments. In other words, marketing automation has a lot of overlap with areas of HIPAA compliance.

Specifically, that includes:

Data collection, storage, and encryption
Access controls to ensure only authorized users can access PHI
Maintaining proper audit trails
Managing consent and authorization (note that traditional consent managers, like the ones used for cookies, are not HIPAA compliant when it comes to authorization for marketing messages)

Finally, since marketing automation platforms are built to personalize content and communications based on behavioral segmentation — i.e., what content your users engage with or pages they visit on your website — recent developments in HIPAA guidance could have a major impact on your ability to use these tools effectively.

New developments in HIPAA digital marketing

Since 2022, healthcare organizations have been under heightened scrutiny for how they track and share consumer data — such as appointments scheduled online — with Facebook and other tech platforms.

In 2022 and 2023, The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which oversees HIPAA compliance, released updated guidance around collecting and sharing PHI online — clarifying when and if disclosing an IP address to a third-party vendor (like a website tracking tool) violates HIPAA.

For example, sharing the IP address of an individual visiting a hospital’s job postings would not constitute PHI, but if someone visited an oncology webpage in connection with seeking a second opinion, disclosing their IP address would violate HIPAA.

Specific elements of these guidelines are being contested in court, but the OCR seems to be committed to its increased scrutiny of digital PHI collection and sharing. That’s why industry experts recommend healthcare organizations “consider how to make their marketing technology stack HIPAA compliant and get a BAA on file for each vendor”.

The risks of non-compliant HIPAA marketing

The most straightforward risk of violating HIPAA guidelines around marketing and data privacy is being hit with significant fines from the OCR — anywhere from $100 – $50,000 per violation, multiplied by the number of patients impacted. For instance, small practices have been fined tens of thousands of dollars for improper PHI disclosures while health insurance provider Anthem, Inc. paid $16 million after a data breach impacted 79 million people.

Keep in mind, companies don’t have to be directly responsible for sharing customer information in order to get hit with a HIPAA violation. If they were found to be negligent in anticipating and preventing a data breach, they can still be fined and held liable.

But HIPAA fines aren’t the only potential consequence of failing to protect your consumers’ health information. There’s also the possibility of class-action lawsuits and action from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), targeted at companies that mismanage consumer health data, even if they aren’t strictly subject to HIPAA.

For example, these companies were recently fined for sharing users’ personal health information with third parties, without consent:

Health system Advocate Aurora Health agreed to pay $12.5 million to settle consolidated lawsuits
Telehealth and prescription discounter GoodRX got hit with $1.5 million in FTC fines
Online therapy BetterHelp had to pay out $7.8 million to impacted users

Finally, there’s a huge risk to brand trust. Being known for putting patient data at risk is a reputational hit no organization can afford.

The moral of the story: covered entity or not, when you’re dealing with consumers’ health information, staying HIPAA compliant is never a bad idea.

Take a closer look at your marketing automation options: many aren’t HIPAA-compliant.

The best HIPAA-compliant marketing automation platforms

But while there are risks to using consumer data in healthcare marketing, there’s also opportunity. Research from McKinsey shows consumers trust healthcare organizations to protect their privacy and data more than other industries — double the rate for technology or retail companies. And more than half of the consumers surveyed would like to see more personalized messaging and communications about their health and wellness.

Instead, choosing a HIPAA-compliant marketing automation platform allows you to personalize communications without compromising data security or customer trust. That requires features like:

Strict access controls
Comprehensive employee training
End-to-end data encryption
Regular audits and detailed audit logs

Remember, while some marketing automation platforms have the data security standards in place to protect your information, they still need to sign a BAA in order to be HIPAA-compliant. Many refuse to do so.

Here at Act-On, we earned HIPAA compliance in 2023. As our Security Program Director Gregg Neveu says, “Our HIPAA compliance assures health companies that if they trust their data with us—which is confidential patient medical information—the patient’s privacy is always protected end to end, even when those companies are doing business with other vendors.”

If you’d like to learn more about HIPAA-compliant marketing automation, contact our team.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Marketing Automation and CRM Sync: Keep Data Clean and Current Across Your Teams

Act-On — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 16:23:53 +0000

More and higher-quality leads are on the wish lists of nearly all sales teams. Marketing works hard to deliver them, which is why it’s so discouraging to hear things like:

We need more leads from marketing…

We’re spending way too much time chasing down leads who aren’t ready to buy…

Our sales targets are unrealistic, given the quality of the leads we’re getting…

And it’s not from a lack of trying. You’re working hard to give sales what they need, but missing data capabilities often hold you back.

Research shows that most high-performing companies use marketing automation. However, some of these tools lack bidirectional sync with your CRM, which creates disjointed sales and marketing collaboration.

When data can sync in “both directions” (from marketing to sales and back again), all teams have the latest information about your prospects. And the result is tighter marketing and sales alignment.

Solves the “guessing game” challenge

It’s no secret that prospects are demanding more personalized experiences. Seventy-one percent say they expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t.

Marketers use automation to provide more customized and meaningful experiences, but sales often doesn’t have access to the marketing data collected along the buyer’s journey.

And when a salesperson calls a prospect, they need all the data they can get.

For example, instead of going into sales calls cold, what if bidirectional sync allowed the reps to see information like:

What web pages did the prospect visit?
What emails did they click?
What forms did they engage with?

With this data, the salesperson can understand buyer interests and identify the best talk tracks before jumping into a call.

Helps sales spot “hot sales leads” faster

Time is a fixed resource.

You never get more of it.

That’s why sales gets so frustrated when they spend their valuable time on a lead that doesn’t pan out. And it’s also why they turn their attention to marketing.

One of the best ways to support marketing and sales alignment is to make sales’ job easier. And that starts with easy lead prioritization. It can transform comments like “Why does marketing send us such terrible leads?” to “Wow, these leads are really awesome!”

A tool that helps sales reps spot the best leads faster is lead scoring. It allows them to quickly see who in their pipeline needs immediate follow-up versus which leads need a little more nurturing before they’re ready to talk.

Lead scoring uses benchmarks and common metrics set by sales and marketing to clarify what constitutes a good lead. For example, once you build your lead scoring model, you enter your rules into the platform. Then, points are automatically accumulated on each of your prospect’s records once you add up those scoring rules. As a result, sales reps are much more likely to get higher-quality leads.

Also, a marketing automation tool that easily integrates with your CRM allows your sales team to see the lead score for every prospect. This visibility allows them to sort, prioritize, and engage quickly.

Measuring ROI and creating a closed-loop system

Are you feeling the squeeze around proving ROI?

You are not imagining it.

Marketing leaders cited proving ROI as their top challenge in a recent survey.

And even if you aren’t facing internal pressure around ROI, the ability to easily show it is always important (especially when those end-of-year budget conversations roll around!).

As you work to attach marketing efforts to results, a marketing automation tool that integrates bidirectionally with your CRM helps you measure results.

Here’s an example:

Closed-loop reporting capabilities link “closed won opportunities” to the appropriate prospects in your marketing automation tool.
Looking at the data, you can tie revenue to specific marketing touchpoints.
With this information in hand, you can demonstrate which campaigns are the most effective in converting leads to customers.
You can then use this data to prove ROI and leverage what’s working into future campaigns to scale results.

Bidirectional CRM Sync: Pulling it all together

A recent survey collected responses from 700+ marketers who were asked about the future of marketing leaders. It found a top challenge cited by respondents was “increase cross-functional partnerships with sales.”

In other words, the need for marketing and sales alignment will only continue to grow.

As departments figure out how marketing and sales work together more effectively, syncing data in both directions is often a missed opportunity. It can help you:

Spot the best sales opportunities faster. Teams can prioritize the leads most likely to convert with tools like lead scoring. And they can avoid wasting time calling leads who aren’t ready to convert and need more nurturing.
Connect to marketing data to create more meaningful sales calls. With bidirectional data sync, sales can see the prospect’s interactions during the nurturing process and can spot interests, make faster connections, and pick appropriate talk tracks before making a call.
Attribute closed deals and revenue to marketing campaigns. You can prove what you’re doing is creating impact.

Want to see how a marketing tool built with this capability works in action? Book a demo to take a sneak peek inside.

Meanwhile, check out this guide for more information about syncing data bidirectionally in Act-On.

The New Rules of Data-Driven Marketing

Act-On — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 23:50:54 +0000

When we talk about data-driven marketing, we typically imagine a blissfully quantitative utopia. We measure and track consumer behavior across the lifecycle, and attribute conversions with precision. Every element of our campaigns are A/B tested and refined in real-time. Our writers and designers optimize every creative asset based on past performance. And over time, our marketing strategies and tactics zero in on the ROI bullseye of low-cost MQLs and sky-high conversion rates.

It’s a nice fantasy. It’s also wildly out of reach for most marketing teams in our current age of consumer privacy and increasingly complex buying journeys. Third-party cookies are crumbling, consumer data is kept within walled gardens, and consumers are learning about products and brands through private or offline channels that even the fanciest attribution software can’t measure.

This means B2B marketers are coming to terms with the idea that marketing attribution just doesn’t work anymore — if it ever did.

And that’s a good thing.

Because obsessing over attribution forces talented marketers to over-index on “proven” channels (usually paid) at the cost of trusting their gut and building long-term relationships with their audience.

So if marketers can be freed from the shackles of tracking every behavior and calculating the precise ROI of every activity, that means they can return to obsessing over their customers instead of performance metrics.

In this new era, data becomes a useful tool that serves our marketing — not the other way around.

The real-life principles of data-driven marketing

For today’s leaders, data-driven marketing centers around using the right data at the right time to inform your strategy and improve your performance — while leaving room for creativity, intuition, and experimentation.

We’ll explore some specific tactics in a moment, but big-picture, here are some core principles of data-driven marketing in 2024.

Prioritize first-party data: Collect your own data whenever you can — like your website, applications, and owned channels.
Connect data sources: Make sure your first-party behavioral data, CRM data, campaign performance data, and any data supplied by a third-party are centralized — ideally, within a single source of truth.
Segment your audience: Use the data you have to develop your ICP and buyer personas, and segment your audience according to industry, role, company size, location, or whatever characteristics matter most to your business.
Personalize content and messaging: When possible, create variations of content and messages tailored to your audience segments to provide a more relevant experience.
Evaluate campaign performance: Look at engagement metrics and conversion rates to get a better understanding of what’s working, and what’s not.
Test, experiment, and refine: Do more of what’s working, and tweak what’s not. Try something new to see how it lands. Measure, adjust, and measure again, with the goal of incremental improvements over time.
Analyze and report: Get the clearest understanding you can of how your marketing activities translate to sales. Define your metrics and your approach, and share them.

The overriding goal here is to use data-driven marketing techniques to figure out who your customers are, and what works to reach them. Do more of those things — but don’t limit your investments to only those things, and keep experimenting to see what innovative and unproven tactics can move the needle.

The challenges of the old data-driven marketing model

Of course, in order to shift your approach to data-driven marketing, you’ll need to convince your C-suite that the notion of data as the end-all, be-all path to good marketing just doesn’t work. So let’s unpack the big picture challenges at play in 2024.

Increased privacy regulations

Since 2018, we’ve seen a seismic shift in the landscape of consumer data privacy. Government regulations like GDPR and CPRA have beefed up the requirements advertisers need to follow around obtaining, using, and sharing consumer data. At the same time, tech companies like Apple and Google have raced to get ahead of additional legislation by introducing their own privacy protections to their web browsers, email clients, and mobile devices. Most notably, Google is in the final stages of eliminating the third-party cookies that allowed advertisers to track and target consumers across the internet.

For marketers, the undeniable end result is less easy access to data — especially third-party data, which probably wasn’t all that reliable in the first place.

You can’t measure what you can’t observe. And an awful lot of your prospects’ buying journey happens on “dark social” — in private spaces like messaging apps, email, or SMS. Or, offline entirely.

Maybe your prospect heard your brand name-dropped on a podcast, or mentioned in a Slack community. They might have asked their actual human friends for a product recommendation. Or saw your CEO speak at a conference, and then looked up your brand in a direct search when they were in-market months later.

These activities are difficult-to-impossible to monitor, let alone measure — or include in attribution models.

Measurement does not equal attribution

That leads us to the problem of provable attribution — the unfulfilled promise of data-driven marketing. This mindset suggests that marketers can track their leads’ behavior from throughout every step of their buying process, using expensive software and advanced statistical models to weigh and quantify how each touchpoint impacts conversion.

But as Rand Fishkin and other marketing leaders have been emphasizing lately, this kind of attribution modeling usually isn’t the best use of marketers’ time. For one, as we’ve just discussed, consumer data is getting harder to access, and much of the buying journey takes place on channels we can’t monitor. Second, there’s a big difference between measurement and attribution — despite what Google, Facebook, and other advertising platforms (whose number one goal is to take more of your marketing budget) would have you believe.

As we alluded to earlier, this all means an organization that becomes over-reliant on provable attribution can overlook important channels and undervalue brand and marketing activities that don’t have easily quantifiable ROI.

The lack of experimentation

There’s a lot to learn from what kind of messaging and content has performed well with your audience in the past. But if historical data is the guiding force of creative decision-making, you’re leaving very little room for innovation and experimentation.

Both quantitative and qualitative data should help your strategists and creative teams understand your audience and inform a thorough understanding of their needs and pain points. But it shouldn’t be a limiting force that takes an “unproven” idea off the table — a real danger of the most devoted data-driven marketing leaders.

The practical difficulties of applying data

Collecting data is hard enough, but our research shows that marketers’ biggest challenge is figuring out how to actually apply data to marketing.

This can happen for many reasons. Some marketers experience “analysis paralysis” — being so overwhelmed by parsing through large quantities of data that it takes a long time to actually make a decision. Others have to deal with internal silos that restrict access to the data they could use. Some marketing orgs lack a clear understanding of how to interpret specific insights into actionable steps.

And some may be so intimidated by the all-or-nothing mentality of “data-driven marketing” that they don’t believe the data they already have can make a meaningful difference — without investing in five or six-figure software.

Despite all of these challenges, data-driven marketing is a worthwhile endeavor. We just need to define and contextualize it for marketers working in real environments with real constraints.

How to improve data-driven marketing today

Let’s put these principles into practice: how can you start improving your data-driven approach right now?

Optimizing campaigns with engagement data midstream

Keep an eye on campaign performance and look for opportunities to intervene and improve in time to impact results. For example, if you notice that your webinar promotion is disproportionately attracting registrations from the finance sector, you can quickly spin up a segmented invite highlighting the relevance for your other ICP targets.

Using lead scoring to qualify MQLs for sales

Lead scoring is a relatively straightforward way to use data to smooth out the marketing-to-sales handoff. Partner with your sales team to develop a lead scoring model tailored to your ICP — aligning quantitative scores with demographic and firmographic factors that matter most. Next, layer in behavior scoring that prioritizes activities that indicate real buying interest (like webinar attendance or a buying guide download). Then, set an MQL threshold that everyone agrees indicates a lead is most likely ready to meet with sales.

Bonus point: implement an AI-powered predictive lead scoring system that incorporates real-time sales conversion data, meaning your model looks for documented patterns of behavior that lead to actual conversions and closed deals.

Analyze how users interact with your website

Behavioral analysis tools like Hotjar or Lucky Orange create heatmaps to visualize how visitors interact with your website and content, and help you identify opportunities to improve usability and conversions. For example, you notice that prospects who click through a testimonial carousel are more likely to book a demo — but your testimonials are buried deep on the bottom of your homepage. Given this insight, you can relocate your social proof higher up on the page and monitor how (or if) the change impacts conversions.

Look beyond email open and click-through rates

Email open and clickthrough rates are losing credibility with marketing leaders, thanks to artificial inflation from mail provider changes and corporate scanning bots (designed to check email security by opening messages and clicking every link). Instead, look further downstream in your email campaigns — when readers click a link to your website, how long do they engage with that content? Where do they go next? What meaningful outcomes — like webinar registrations, content downloads, or completed video views — are your emails driving? Moving beyond early indicators like opens and clicks will focus your time and attention on the data that actually matters.

Combine data sources to identify content opportunities

Looking at multiple data sources about the same content assets can help surface valuable opportunities. For example, say a certain page gets great campaign engagement — like time-on-page after an email click or number of social shares — but has low organic entrances and pageviews. That indicates that while the subject matter is relevant to your subscribers and followers, you may not be optimizing the post for the related keywords your broader audience could be searching for. Time to do some keyword research and optimize accordingly.

Level up your data-driven marketing efforts by building a data-driven culture across the organization. Your sales reps should know which blog posts are highest-performing, so they can share them with their prospects. And it goes both ways — you should know which questions come up most often during customer success calls, so you can build educational content for customer marketing campaigns.

Use AI to power natural language search

Not all marketers are analytics experts, or have time to go digging for insights within raw data or complex dashboards. But when your analytics layer includes AI-powered search, you can use natural language queries (like “Which email campaign drove the most engagement last month?”) to mine your data for actionable insights, all on your own — no overworked analyst or SQL skills required.

Get the most out of your marketing automation data

Ultimately, knowing when to rely on data is just as important as knowing you need to rely on it in the first place. Don’t get bogged down in data that doesn’t actually matter — focus your time and efforts on data-driven techniques that help you reach new leads, improve conversions, and lower acquisition costs.
And while you don’t need a perfectly optimized mar-tech stack to get started, actionable analytics makes data-driven marketing much easier.

Learn more in our recent webinar about optimizing your marketing automation platform with robust integrations, predictive lead scoring, and impactful analytics that supercharge your marketing — but keep you in the driver’s seat.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 17: Tejas Manohar

Galen Ettlin — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 12:11:00 +0000

^{Tejas Manohar is an engineer, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch. In this episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast, he shares perspective about the future of martech and how companies can better harness data to their marketing advantage.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I’m your host, Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software. Today is all about data and empowering marketers, and our guest today is Tejas Manohar, her co-founder and CEO of Hightouch. He’s got a background in software engineering and his company helps businesses better harness their customer data. Notable brands that have taken advantage of this are Spotify, GameStop, the NBA, Autotrader and many more. Looking forward to our conversation today, TASS, thank you so much for being here.

Tejas Manohar:
Thanks for having me on the show. Really appreciate it, Galen.

Galen Ettlin:
Yeah, no, of course. I mean, you’ve got some really interesting perspective and I want to know all about your career journey up till now since it sounds kind of like a whirlwind adventure. But first, let’s talk about your company Hightouch. You’ve earned top marks in G2 as a leader in the reverse ETL space. And for those unfamiliar, what does that mean about the service you provide?

Tejas Manohar:
There’s a process in data technology, data engineering. Data analytics called ETL basically means putting data into the warehouse into a data warehouse. So data warehouses are databases that companies like to put all their information into from marketing, sales, finance, product data, put all the data into it so that you can analyze all your data in one place and tools like Tableau, Looker, Power BI, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And ETL is just the process of extracting data from sources, transforming it into something that makes sense for the warehouse and loading it into the warehouse. And it’s just a 20, 30 year old term ETL data into your warehouse, reverse ETL. It’s the opposite of that. So it’s this new idea that we brought to the market, which is like you have all this data you’re using in reporting tools and BI tools and the data warehouse, but there’s people who want that data outside of BI tools and analytics tools and reporting tools.

They want to use that data to personalize a marketing campaign or they want to use it to adjust ad targeting, or they want to use that data to power conversion events inside of an advertising network like Facebook or Google so that your ads can be optimized. And all of those processes I mentioned happen outside of BI tools and the typical tools you use a data warehouse for. So reverse ETL, pretty simple concept we brought to the market. You don’t even need to know why it’s called that, but really all it is is taking data from the warehouse and putting it into all the systems of action and systems of engagement that are used around the company like Salesforce or Marketo or Facebook ads or Google Ads. So you can actually act on the data and operationalize it and use it for personalization versus just stare at it in a report or a dashboard.

Galen Ettlin:
So let’s dive into that a little bit more. I know the theme in this economy now more than ever is for marketers to do more with less. And that data is, as you’ve mentioned, critically valuable in reaching those goals. How can companies turn that existing data warehouse that you mentioned into a more potent marketing engine?

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, great question. So honestly, for the average marketer, data warehouse often wasn’t looked at as a tool for them before high touch and before reverse ETL. It’s a tool that you would use just for reporting, but it’s never a tool that people thought of when it actually came to running marketing campaigns except for one use case, which is a lot of marketers would download CSPs from the warehouse, upload them into different systems, and effectively the whole theme of doing more with less is a big part of what we think about at Hightouch. And I would say that in a couple aspects. One, it’s like doing more with the data you have. I have a belief personally sales hat off, which is that there is tremendous value that companies can do in their marketing and execute on that can be driven from data that they already have and reports they already have.

I’ll give you an example pretty regularly walk into large enterprises. I’m not going to name any names here, but you mentioned some of our customers from our website earlier. We find that at some of these really large companies, they’re spending tens of millions or hundreds of millions on advertising campaigns, but they’re showing a lot of those ads to customers. They already have customers that have already purchased their product in the last few months, are seeing an ad on Facebook or Google, and you don’t have to be a performance marketer to know that that can be a waste of money if you’re allocating budget evenly to customers who’ve already purchased the product and customers you should purchase it. So one of the simplest use cases when you think of doing more with what you have is everyone has a list of their customers in a data warehouse, people who purchased something from their brand recently.

And we have this philosophy at Hightouch, which is like just start with a suppression campaign. If you’re not propagating that list of customers that have recently bought your product to all the different ad networks, like all of them like Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat line, whatever it is already in a real time way, then that’s a first use case that you can do with your existing data through a platform like Hightouch. And it can be set up in about five to 10 minutes. It’s really that easy. So when I think about doing more with what we have, yeah, I really have this philosophy that everyone has some sort of operational uplift that they can provide to their company that meaningfully moves metrics by just using data better or activating their data better in quite a straightforward way.

Galen Ettlin:
I think that real world example really does hit home. I’ve definitely bought something and then seen the advertisement for it later where I’m like, am I really the target audience?

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, I saw an ad for our own product at some point. I was like, we’ve got to fix that. We’re in this space. So contacted our dimension team to adjust our suppression list and get that corrected. But yeah, that’s an example of clear business impact from just using data you already have.

Galen Ettlin:
Moving along to the next topic here, but kind of in that same vein of how we’re seeing everything trend now in this economy. Curious for your perspective as MarTech stacks get consolidated and reduced in a lot of companies. How do you feel about the future of the industry and what changes do you anticipate ahead of us to adapt to this landscape?

Tejas Manohar:
I do expect MarTech stacks to have a significant amount of both consolidation, so not needing to buy as many tools in the future as well as simplification. I think a lot of MarTech vendors today, we’re probably at fault to this somewhere in our marketing too, talk about really big promises and how they’re going to totally change your marketing or the name of the game from personalization customer experiences. But then you look at what the actual products do and how people actually use them. And a lot of them are pretty similar, even though the claims are quite different or the product is actually quite simple from a surface area perspective, but people are paying a lot of big money for these products due to the promises and stuff like that that they expose online. So personally, I believe that over the next few years we’re going to see a lot more clarity brought to the MarTech market where vendors need to stop, we’ll have to be forced by the economy to actually stop just promising huge things and being able to charge a lot of money for that and lots to get down to the details of what do you actually offer and how does that impact my business and how do you do that in a way that’s best for me from a cost perspective as a company versus alternative solutions I could use.

And I think we’re seeing that in the CDP space, customer data platforms space. I’m very familiar with, I was one of the first 10 engineers and product folks at Segment, the leader of that category now acquired by Twilio, before founding Hightouch. And that gave me a lot of inspiration to produce high touch. And I see so many companies that are buying a CDP and spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and going through all this implementation work, but at the end of the day, their use cases could be accomplished in a much simpler way, like activating data they already have inside of their data warehouse and using a tool like Hightouch that can do a little bit of identity stitching and do a little bit of audience building and then start activating that data you have right away versus a huge platform like a CDP that takes six to 12 months to set up.

And I think a few years ago when the mindset of companies is growth, growth, growth, buy as much as I can to produce growth, maybe you didn’t care, just bought a CDP anyways and you maybe bought a reverse CTL on top of that and buy whatever comes out next the ultimate data platform. But in this day and age, I think people are putting their thinking caps on and then saying, what am I actually buying and is there a simpler approach to solution? And I think that’ll just change how MarTech companies bring themselves to market. And even before that fully changes, that’s our approach at Hightouch. That’s been my approach from the beginning, like, no, no, no, we’re keeping things simple. We’re bringing clarity to this market. And you can see that on the website, the title is Sync Customer Data to Your Tools versus something crazy. And I think that’ll be a differentiator in the longterm in this market and the new standard,

Galen Ettlin:
Having a really well-defined specific role that is easy to grasp and creates that actionable content for people who use your product.

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then just on the homepage itself, clarity on what your product solves and what it looks like to solve that. What does the actual product do versus just stuff like, I think I looked at the Salesforce website recently. I’ll pull it up and read something like ‘calling trailblazers like data plus AI plus customer equals outcomes’ or something like that. I don’t really think that’s the future of software. I think that’s probably still the future of Salesforce, but I don’t think it’s the future of software and MarTech personally,

Galen Ettlin:
That is a big conversation at Act-On Software. We’re marketing automation solution. And when we’re looking at our product and our competitors just in the grand scheme of things, it is that same conversation of how can we not make this too complicated? How can we be something that adds value to marketers lives? How can we make this not just another all-in-one going to try to do too much for you and be overwhelming for any person who dives into it. So that conversation is definitely one that’s top of mind for all of us in the industry right now.

Tejas Manohar:
No, I mean you guys are doing it right. You have a feature section on the homepage, you have actual product screenshots, this is marketing that will work. We’re good.

Galen Ettlin:
Glad to hear that. Haha!

Tejas Manohar:
You tell me, but I personally think so. That’s been a big part of how we got where we are as a business.

Galen Ettlin:
Let’s take a step back now and dive into how you got here. Co-founding a tech company in San Francisco is no small feat. I know you’re also joining us right now from your new office in New York City, also very exciting. What led you on this journey to where you are now?

Tejas Manohar:
I really started my journey when it comes to both MarTech and the startup space. Worked at a couple of smaller startups before that, but real introduction to Silicon Valley and the startup space and MarTech at Segment. So I was an early engineer at Segment, one of the first 10 at the company and a couple years before that, I had actually used the Segment product at an internship of mine. So I was so and excited by both the product and the blog posts they were putting out and the product direction and the funding that I reached out to the founders cold emailed them and said, I want to join the team in any role I could. And when I joined Segment, the CDP space was not called the CDP space. That term hadn’t really come about. I think anyone who’s been in MarTech in data for a while knows that the ideas of single source of truth activating your data, audience building, all these things have existed forever, decades actually at this point.

But the term CDP really only caught traction in the last five, six years. And our growth at Segment was phenomenal, super phenomenal. We really became the hottest tool amongst the tech stacks of budding startups and stuff like that. But I realized that that later became big companies, DoorDash, famous example of it, Instacart, all these things. But one thing I realized is that we were having trouble as these small companies became large enterprises and also having trouble for just more complex businesses and enterprise businesses in general at Segment. And what was that trouble? It was what Gartner’s written a lot about actually. Yeah, Gartner is sometimes easy to read, sometimes not easy to read, but they’ve written a lot about CDPs and it’s actually pretty good. One of the things they talked about is that how 60% of people who bought a CDP in the enterprise can’t actually get value from it.

They’ve literally are not using it for their marketing use cases. And the reason for that is because they sound great in theory. Get all your data in one place, have a single source truth and be able to activate across all your channels. Great in theory, but it’s really hard to actually execute on that when you’re in a complicated company. That one already has a ton of data across the business coming from every which angle, from product, from sales, from your store, et cetera. There’s two reasons why it’s really, really hard to implement a CDP. And one of them is that you have to get all your data into the CDP to be able to activate it. And two is that you have to make your data fit the CDPs format. So companies like Segment, while they’re great, have an idea of what your user should be represented as or what a product added to cart event should look like or a checkout event should look like, et cetera.

And this is okay for a small company that’s a Shopify store or a 500 person startup with very specific focused products. But when you’re a large enterprise like the NBA or PetSmart or GameStop and you have all these different facets of your business and decades of data, it’s a huge process to go set up something like at traditional customer data platform. So with Hightouch, we have a different approach, which is that we allow companies to use the data they already have that’s sitting in these data warehouses today and do more with less and then also have a new level of flexibility when it comes to being used all types of data in your business. So companies like PetSmart use us so that they can tap into their loyalty system which tracks pets and not just use users or checkout data like they would in a typical CDP. And that’s possible with our architecture of using all the tables in your data warehouse. So overall, I had an amazing entryway into technology and customer data and the MarTech space at Segment, but my time there showed me some of the problems that we were seeing as we were scaling up market that eventually led me to found high touch and realized that there was a different approach that can be brought to the market

Galen Ettlin:
That’s really cool, that inspired you to make your own solutions from the problems that you were seeing that were not necessarily being met.
Now we haven’t had a whole lot of people on this podcast with roots on the engineering side of things within MarTech. I’m really curious, how has that experience contributed to your approach now as co-CEO?

Tejas Manohar:
My background is in engineering. I’ve never been the MarTech person or the marketer myself, I guess until founding Hightouch. That was my introduction into marketing, sales, partnerships, finance, all the other parts of the business that me and my co-founders had to learn in starting this business. As a founder, I’ve always still gravitated towards the product side of things. Where is the market heading? What can we do as a company that provides outsized value to our customers, whereas differentiation possible at a product level. I have a belief that in the long term these products we’re putting on the market have to be differentiated to provide outsized impact to our customers to be sustained in the short term. We can get away with sales and marketing and all those things, but the long-term product does shine and ultimately will matter. So that’s something I brought to every aspect of the business here at Hightouch.

But being from the engineering side of things, I think it’s never easy to start a startup. You always going to learn, it’s a few more skills whether you come from the business side, you’ll have to learn product skills that you come from the product side, you’ll have to learn business skills. It’s been a fantastic learning experience on learning how to do category creation from a marketing perspective with reverse CTL and this new idea of composable CDPs or how to build out a marketing and sales and partnerships teams and these teams we’d never built before. And it’s just honestly been continuous learning. I can say the only thing the job changes every six months. We’ve been scaling pretty rapidly over the last few years. We’ve gone to now over 500 enterprise customers and some of the biggest brands in the world and Fortune 100 and 500, but it wasn’t like that from the beginning. So I’d say every six months the role of a co-CEO has been changing dramatically. And the only thing that the same is continuous learning and iteration.

Galen Ettlin:
Jumping off of that, do you have an approach to when things are kind of cascading like that? I mean in a good way for you, it sounds like the ball just keeps rolling and maybe is snowballing bigger and bigger. How do you handle that added trajectory as you go?

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, great question. So there’s two things to balance as a startup founder. One is just keeping up an immense pace of execution. They say this in every matter startup incubator or investor blog post or post about founding a startup. Talk about founding a startup online that ideas are great, but execution is everything and it’s really true. And a lot of execution comes down to speed, speed of iteration. That’s what differentiates the great startup from an okay startup or from a failed startup in a lot of ways. How quickly do you take new things to market? How quickly do you make changes based on what you’re seeing? How quickly and efficiently can you act like a big company when in reality you’re only 10, 20, 50 now a hundred around a hundred employee company? And that’s been a core strength of ours from the beginning. As a founding team, we built the product just the three of us initially, and we onboard our first enterprise customers when we just had a dozen people at the company.

But one thing I’ve had to always remind myself that been a bit harder for me is that speed isn’t everything. Speed is a lot. It needs to be continued, but reflecting and making sure you’re going down the right path strategically is also really important. And you in the seat of the founder role or the c e o role in the company are the only person who’s really responsible for taking that step back and making sure that we’re guiding the ship in the right direction. So I guess a tip or a trick that I would say that’s really helped me and I continuously have to push myself to do this, is just making sure there’s space and time to reflect on what’s going well, what needs to continue, what needs to stop.

Galen Ettlin:
Well, I think we’ve heard how you are a rebel in your work life in terms of thinking outside the box, really creative, creating your own solutions and finding that guiding light, if you will. Since this is the Rebel Instinct Podcast though, we want to know how you’re a rebel in your non-work life and you can interpret that any way you like.

Tejas Manohar:
Great question. Interesting one. I’ve never gotten this before. The most rebellious thing I can say about myself is probably that very impromptu person. I find joy in not having plans. Ironically, I have so much plans all the time with work nine to five every day. That’s just the core business hours is always completely planned. So when the weekend comes about, I want to have no plans, just let it go with the flow and try something new, which is sometimes you see and sometimes hard when you’re coordinating with other people as anyone would know. And then the other thing I would say is that I bring the intensity that I have from a business perspective to my very jack of all trades hobby, lifestyle perspective. So I love being really intense about things, but as you know, a startup founder. But I like doing those in short stints of like, okay, I’m going to play a lot of table tennis and get a table tennis coach for the next three months. Okay, I’m going to go really into power lifting for the next few months. Okay, I’m going to get really into music and I’m going to buy a harmonica for the next few months. So trying to keep the intensity that brings me joy, but obviously I can’t actually get insanely good at anything with the startup job taking up so much time. So I’ll have to jump for how to try different things at the same time.

Galen Ettlin:
But hey, I mean at least you’re jumping in and trying everything feet first. That’s pretty cool. Most people would never even want to start.

Tejas Manohar:
That’s fair.

Galen Ettlin:
Alright, so in that vein as well, maybe who’s a rebel that inspires you, one that you think needs to be celebrated and why?

Tejas Manohar:
One thing that I think is pretty common advice in the startup space, and sorry to keep this somewhat work centric, but I think one thing that’s pretty common advice is founders don’t need to obsess over every little product detail. You need to be directionally correct and then you need to work really fast, move fast, ship things left and right, et cetera. But then there are some companies where I think that that’s just pure obsession that they have in product details and every little detail of everything is their differentiator in a way. I’ve always been fascinated by Steve Jobs – Apple in this way. I read his biography back when I was in school and I was super, super inspired by it. And I mean he’s definitely a rebel in multiple walks of life from his Rotarian behavior too to the way he breaks his energy to work.
But I think another person that really inspires me, who brings the same level of like, I have conviction, this is the future. I am going to just be obsessive about the details and make the differentiation that everything about our company and product is going to be the right way is Guillermo Rash at Versal, the CEO of Versal. And I really look up to him as well. He has this maniacal focus on the product and the customer and every little detail when it comes to the marketing and design and product and everything, which is somewhat against the typical service advice of move fast break things. But it’s great and I really respect that and it’s something that I aspire to be able to do still at a really high pace. And I’m continuously pushing myself to work on and harness my inner Steve Jobs or Guillermo.

Galen Ettlin:
There’s no right or wrong answer to that one. We’ve had so many great answers to it and it sounds like that one’s really fitting to your personality and your goals. The fact that you’re able to juggle so much, you’re taking that step back, looking at the high level of everything that’s going on in your company, the minute details makes sense for that to be your inspiration.

Now it is time for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment looking at something that maybe is annoying you lately and that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. I’m going to give you 60 seconds, so whenever you’re ready, just let me know and I’ll time you down.

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that annoys me in the MarTech space that I’ve already brought up multiple times is products need to tell you what they actually do. It’s only getting worse with AI in my opinion. I go to the segment website, the company I used to work at, I used to love their website, I used to love it as a customer. And now it’s the tagline is saying, power your AI with our best data infrastructure. What do you do to actually help me power my AI with the best data infrastructure? I go to mParticle website and now it’s amplify your customer data with ai. I think there’s been radical shift in these company’s websites over the last six months with questionable amounts of changes in the company’s products over the last six months. And that discrepancy just bothers me deeply as a product person. So tell us what you do.

Galen Ettlin:
Alright, so Tejas, where can people find you?

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, so I’m actually quite easy to find. Our company’s domain is high touch.com, so it’s like hi, like high five, and then touch like the word touch.com. And my email address is my first name, so tejas (at) hightouch (dot) com. And then my username on every platform is just my full name. But you can probably just Google ‘Tejas Hightouch Twitter’, or Tejas Hightouch LinkedIn, and that might be easier than to spell out my last name here.

Galen Ettlin:
We’ll be sure to link to your LinkedIn as well on this episode. So for people watching on YouTube, you’ll be able to see it in the description and people listening, go ahead and click on that description and you’ll see ’em. But in the meantime, again, Tejas, thank you so much for being here. We’ll see you next time.

Tejas Manohar:
Thanks for having me.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Use Marketing Automation to Ensure FINRA Compliant Email Marketing

Act-On — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Delivering timely and personalized communications is extremely difficult, especially in highly-regulated industries — a pain that wealth management marketers know too well. Financial advisors and marketers working for wealth management firms have to deal with compliance regulations (such as FINRA) that often limit what they can and cannot say and require them to implement communication archiving for audit compliances. And let’s not forget that, if they’re doing their job right, these individuals also have their hands full with trying to adhere to other common marketing best practices. Can marketing automation help produce FINRA compliant email marketing?

Producing FINRA compliant marketing initiatives takes a great amount of time and effort and often leaves little room for wealth management marketers to think big. In an effort to keep up with the tasks required and reduce the risk of violating any compliance regulations, many wealth management marketers choose to limit the scope of their email communications and keep their efforts as generic as possible. The problem with this approach, however, is that bland and boring marketing is just as bad as not having any marketing at all — if not worse.

In today’s fiercely competitive market, customers are well aware that they have options and are accustomed to conducting their due diligence when it comes to performing research and thoroughly weighing their options. If you want your firm to stand out from the crowd, your marketing team has to be able to produce targeted communications that demonstrate that you understand your potential investors’ pain points and have what it takes to help them maximize their investment.

Thankfully, despite many obstacles, innovative and personalized marketing is not out of reach for wealth management firms that have the proper tools. Today, we’re going to outline some of the most common FINRA marketing compliance challenges faced by wealth managers and how marketing automation can help overcome them.

Common FINRA Compliance Marketing Challenges Faced by Wealth Managers

Producing innovative and targeted marketing in today’s competitive environment is no easy feat, regardless of what industry you’re in. Marketers working in the wealth management industry, however, face a unique set of challenges due to operating within a highly-regulated industry and saturated market.

Building Brand Awareness: As more and more wealth management clients turn to search engines to research and evaluate their wealth management options, it’s becoming increasingly more important for wealth management firms to stand out from the crowd. To do this, wealth managers have to be very targeted with their messaging to reassure clients that they have their best interests in mind.
Maintaining Compliance (Finra): Compliance regulations often dictate what wealth management firms can and cannot say. Having to ensure marketing compliance often creates an extra step for marketing teams and makes it difficult to enhance and update their marketing efforts on the fly.
Antiquated and Disconnected Technology Limits Growth and Prevents Efficiency: Despite having many great ideas, many marketing teams lack the tools they need to execute them. Adding to that, many of them are using antiquated and disconnected technology that requires their team to spend their time on tedious manual tasks rather than tackling more impactful marketing efforts.
Keeping Up With the Demand for Targeted Marketing: Today’s consumers expect companies to provide them with content and messaging that will help them make informed decisions. However, delivering personalized marketing can be quite the undertaking for wealth management firms, especially for those that have small teams and lack the proper marketing tools.

These challenges, although common, are not insurmountable with the right tools. In the next section, we’ll walk you through how the right technology stack can help you eliminate these obstacles and implement best practices that will drastically enhance your marketing.

The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors

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Best Practices to Help You Stay Ahead of the Game

Having to adhere to compliance regulations shouldn’t limit your marketing team’s creativity or prevent them from delivering timely and targeted communications. Following these best practices will help you remain compliant while delivering targeted campaigns that make a lasting impression with your customers.

Implement Pre-Approved Marketing Efforts: Providing each of your audience segments with personalized marketing doesn’t mean having to take on more work than your team can handle. Developing FINRA compliant email marketing campaigns prepares you to strike when the time is right.
Automate Your Marketing Efforts: Automating your marketing efforts allows your team to step away from tedious tasks and focus their time and resources where they’re likely to make the biggest impact. A marketing automation platform (such as Act-On) allows you to set up rules so these efforts automatically launch when a customer completes a form or meets a certain threshold or criteria. This enables you to continuously deliver relevant messaging and content so you can stay top-of-mind and establish brand recognition while reducing time and resources.
Segment Your Contacts to Deliver More Relevant Content and Messaging: A mistake that many wealth management firms make is launching marketing efforts that are one-size-fits-all. Segmenting your contacts into lists as you uncover more information about them allows you to deliver personalized messaging to stand out in their inbox and improve engagement.

Leverage a BCC Archiving Solution: Implementing a FINRA compliant email marketing tool that syncs with a BCC archiving solution helps you easily store emails in one centralized location as you send out communications. This allows your company to prepare for any future audits while eliminating the tedious task of having to manually archive emails.

Leverage Marketing Automation to Streamline Processes and Improve ROI

Up until now we’ve talked about how marketing automation makes it easy for you to produce FINRA compliant email marketing campaigns, but the right tool can help you do so much more. With Act-On, you have the features to improve alignment between marketing and sales, launch cohesive multi-channel campaigns, and measure your impact for continued improvement and proof of ROI.

If you’d like to learn more about how Act-On can help your wealth management firm to tackle common marketing challenges, we invite you to download our eBook, The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors.

The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors

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4 Ways to Implement Marketing Automation Data

Act-On — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 14:20:00 +0000

Collecting first-party customer data is a top priority for most B2B marketers, especially as third-party cookies and other data sources are regulated or blocked by leading tech platforms. But collecting data is only the first step. The data you gather actually needs to be applied to marketing programs to make an impact on customer experience and conversion.

And as our recent webinar poll shows, putting data to use can be a real pain point, even for marketers who are already running programs and collecting data on marketing automation platforms. Nearly 37% of our “Drive More Demand with Data-Backed Strategies” attendees said applying data to marketing was their number one challenge.

While the concept of building a data-driven marketing program can sound intimidating, it doesn’t need to be overly complicated. There are many ways to layer in data at different points along the customer journey to refine messaging, improve conversion rates, and segment customers in more sophisticated ways.

At the simplest level, applying marketing data simply means learning from how your customers are responding to your current campaigns, and using those insights to improve in the future. And it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s a journey that every team takes one step at a time.

With that in mind, let’s explore a few specific ways your team can get started.

Types of Marketing Data You Can Use to Optimize Campaigns

First, consider the types of marketing data you can put to use in your campaigns. Some data will be more complex and may require help from your data team to access and analyze, and some data will be readily available within your existing mar-tech stack.

We’ll be sharing some specific how-tos for certain kinds of marketing data in the following section, but the general principles apply across channels and sources. So keep in mind how you can apply these data-driven practices to the types of data you’re already collecting and feel comfortable working with, such as:

Website engagement data (form fills, clicks, traffic sources)
Social media engagement metrics
Email engagement data
SMS engagement data
NPS/CSAT survey scores
PPC and paid social performance data
Purchase history and product use

Now let’s dive into a few of these data types, and how you can put your insights to use.

1. Apply Email Engagement Data to Improve Campaigns

Email engagement data is usually straightforward and easy to access, which makes it a solid starting point for applying data to your campaigns. Here are a few specific ways to apply this data:

At a high level, you can use email engagement data to evaluate campaigns in aggregate across major segments to see which audiences are most fruitful for your company. For example, you may find that manufacturers engage with your content at a significantly higher rate than businesses in the automotive industry. This may mean it’s worth taking a step back to look at your industry-specific value propositions, or even whether automotive is an audience worth targeting.

Look at engagement data across content types to see what’s resonating with your audiences. If you notice that checklists tend to produce great clickthrough rates and lead to more qualified opportunities for your sales team, make sure checklists are a regular part of your content creation calendar.

Notice when specific pieces of content get positive engagement with certain customer segments, and see if that high-performing content can be tweaked or repurposed for other audiences with similar needs. Change the stock photo or update the headline to ensure the content is relevant, and see how it performs with a new segment.

Monitor your opt-out rates, and if you notice an uptick, make sure you aren’t over-messaging or sending irrelevant content to your audience (unsubscribe rates tend to average around .5%, but that can vary by industry, so use your historic data as a benchmark). Evaluate your email frequency and content mix to make sure you aren’t over-indexing on hard sales or marketing fluff instead of useful, valuable information. And make sure your welcome email sets clear expectations—and that you’re sticking to them in your campaigns.

Ready for more? Check out some other email metrics that you can use to diagnose opportunities in your campaigns.

Paid social and PPC data has the advantage of being very clear and relatively quick to accumulate, making it a fruitful source for testing content and messaging. Get started by:

A/B test headlines in paid social ads, and repurpose the winners in your organic social posts, email subject lines, email headers, or even blog post titles

Test landing page templates in PPC campaigns, then ensure the winning template is used for your campaign pages and across your automation programs

Test visual content or videos in paid social campaigns, then apply the winning infographic/photography/illustration to your landing pages, website, or email campaigns

Test campaign messaging and value props in PPC or paid social before applying to direct mail, display ads, or other (more costly) paid channels

Explore more ways to use paid social and search data in our beginner’s guide to analyzing Google Ads metrics or with these tips on building PPC landing pages that drive conversions.

3. Implement Lead Scoring to Segment Your Audience

Lead scoring is an objective system that helps your marketing and sales teams automatically rank and prioritize leads based on their behavior. Actions such as visiting your pricing page or watching a product demo video would net a high lead score and indicate a prospect is likely to buy, while behaviors like downloading an ebook or registering for a webinar are still in the earlier stages of the buyer’s journey.

Generally, lead scoring is used to help route the best leads to sales. Using an objective scoring system that your sales and marketing teams develop in partnership allows your sales team to focus their time and efforts on the warmest leads, and avoids jumping the gun on a sales conversation with prospects who are still learning about your services or products. If you haven’t implemented this system into your marketing automation platform yet, creating a lead scoring program is one of the most impactful ways to use data to help structure your marketing-to-sales handoffs.

And if you’re already using a lead scoring system to help route prospects to sales, you can also leverage that data to optimize your marketing campaigns. The same behaviors that impact lead scoring can inform your customer segmentation and engagement campaigns. For example, you can segment your audience by low-scoring leads that haven’t moved forward in their journey. Those lagging leads could have a negative impact on your overall reporting or even email deliverability, so you could try enrolling them in a long-term nurture sequence or re-engagement campaign to spur their interest, or choose to remove them from your database altogether.

Learn much more about this best practice in our five-step guide to building a lead scoring program or by checking out our on-demand webinar in lead scoring best practices.

4. Apply Organic Traffic Data to Optimize Your Content Strategy and Your Conversion Rates

The organic traffic data you can access in Google Analytics is a treasure trove of information about your wider audience’s appetite for content. While you may not be able to tie these data points to specific customer segments like you can with marketing automation data, you can glean valuable insights to inform your overall content strategy.

Look for your pages and blog posts that show high pageviews and organic entrances (metrics that tell you about traffic—the higher the better) coupled with low exit and bounce rates (metrics that evaluate engagement—the lower the better). These pages are your high performers—they attract traffic and retain your audience’s attention. As long as these pages are ranking well for relevant keywords that relate your product or area of expertise, they’re likely great candidates to promote in your engagement campaigns.

On the other hand, if you see pages that have low pageviews and organic entrances along with low exit and bounce rates, you may find that you have hidden gems. These posts may not be ranking well on search, but the people who do find them seem to stay engaged and want to explore more of your content. These may also be great candidates for campaign promotion, and could probably use a little attention regarding on-page optimization (so make sure you have internal links pointing to this page and see if the meta tags need an improvement).

If you have pages that are performing relatively well but have high exit rates, that means your readers aren’t sure where else to go on your site once they’ve reached the end of your page. Make sure you have good internal links to other relevant content on your site or other clear CTAs that help your visitors go deeper with your brand, like a newsletter signup or ebook download.

Conversely, if you have pages that see great engagement in your campaigns, like high email clickthrough rates, PPC traffic, or social shares, but have low organic entrances and pageviews, it’s time to look at your keyword optimization for those posts. You know the subject matter is solid, so evaluate what topics these posts could be ranking for and do a little keyword research to find relevant terms with decent volume (long-tail keywords may be a great fit for content performing well in the lower part of your funnel). Then, set about optimizing your page for the new terms. You may need to update title tags, headers, and meta descriptions, and don’t forget to internally link to the page from other related pages on your site.

Ready to dive a little deeper? Learn what it takes to optimize your brand’s organic search visibility or check out our SEO 101 series.

The Final Step: Get Your Whole Team On Board

Bottom line: applying data to your marketing programs happens step by step, layer by layer, one data source at a time. If you’re just getting started, begin with the types of data you can most easily access, work with and understand.

As you find success, don’t forget to share your wins with the rest of your marketing organization. Data application throughout the customer journey requires collaboration across channels and teams, from strategists to SEO specialists to analysts. So trumpet your wins, brainstorm with your colleagues, and get your marketing org on board to build a data-driven culture!

Act-On’s Cloud Infrastructure Expansion Strengthens Commitment to Canadian Clients

Act-On — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:00:00 +0000

As an international leader in growth marketing automation solutions, we understand the responsibilities that we have to our partners, our customers, and our clients’ end-users. Chief among these responsibilities is ensuring that we are compliant with all national data protection laws and regulations — and that we provide a marketing automation platform that systematically protects our clients and their customers while remaining as effective and efficient as ever.

In support of our mission to provide dynamic, effective, and secure marketing automation support and solutions, we’re proud to announce that we are expanding our cloud infrastructure in Canada to ensure data compliance for all of our Canadian customers and end-users.

Keep reading to learn all about this exciting news!

Why Act-On’s Canadian Cloud Infrastructure Expansion Is So Important

As we wade further into the digital revolution, more and more people are researching and purchasing online, which means more and more people are sharing their personal data and digital engagement footprint when browsing for goods, services, and products. Naturally, this information-sharing makes a lot of consumers uncomfortable, especially in the wake of several recent high-profile international data breaches.

As a result, at both a national and provincial level, Canada has implemented rigid standards for data protection and privacy. Some implement conditions on how to collect, manage, and transmit personal information — while others, such as British Columbia’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, requires all entities operating within the public sector to use cloud technologies that are entirely hosted in Canada.

Act-On’s cloud infrastructure expansion effectively routes local customer data, guaranteeing that all applications and databases can meet local data residency requirements within Canada. It also gives Canadian companies the freedom to choose where they host their data, along with the knowledge that their data (and that of their customers) will remain protected and secure. So whether or not your organization is subject to regional data privacy laws, you can rest assured that your data and that of your customers will remain safely within Canada.

Growth Marketing Automation: The Next Wave

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Investing in Digital Security Is Paramount at Act-On

Over the last decade, the digital revolution has caused online consumerism to explode across nearly every industry. And since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, online purchases have increased by as much as 30% (1). As businesses of all shapes and sizes begin catering to their digital buyers, they must take the appropriate steps to ensure their customers’ data is secure, private, and protected.

By investing in this significant cloud infrastructure expansion, Act-On is stressing to our prospective and current customers that we want to be a cornerstone of their unique digital transformations. We’re listening to what the market has to say and are dedicated to providing our Canadian clients with the tools they need to provide their customers with the safety and security they rightfully expect.

Said Aaron Johnson, Chief Product Officer at Act-On:

“We are committed to our growing base of Canadian companies and end-users long-term, and we know data privacy and compliance are top concerns for them. Modern marketers are managing more data than ever and they must do it while complying with specific geographic regulations. With this cloud expansion, we are exceeding our industry peers and equipping Canadian marketers to create exceptional, compliant customer experiences with us every time.”

Better Compliance Breeds Greater Trust

IBM recently released the Cost of a Data Breach Report (2). Their research found that the average global data breach costs organizations nearly $4 million and takes nearly 300 days to contain. So it’s no surprise that companies are doing everything in their power to prioritize compliance and safety.

When consumers can trust that their personal information and online behaviors are secure, they’re more likely to do business with an organization promising that security. In fact, according to PWC, 86% of consumers state that their willingness to share their personal information is based on how much they trust a given company. Further, 85% of consumers say they will not buy from a company if they are concerned about their data security practices (3).

At Act-On, we believe that our cloud infrastructure expansion will improve our customers’ marketing efforts and help them promote and secure greater trust with their consumer base. Michael Turcsanyi, CEO at Goose Digital (an Act-On partner with offices Toronto and Edmonton, Canada), agrees:

“Organizations across Canada continue to invest heavily in digital marketing solutions to power next-generation experiences for their audiences. Ensuring these investments meet Canadian data and privacy standards is a unique differentiator. This expansion demonstrates Act-On’s growing Canadian presence and commitment to providing best-of-breed marketing technology for Canadian businesses.”

Act-On Is Dedicated to Innovation, Satisfaction, and Security

Today’s cloud infrastructure expansion announcement adds to our existing infrastructure in the United States and Europe, placing Act-On in a true leadership position within the marketing automation space. Our new cloud offerings will go into effect in mid-August and will be available for all Canadian Act-On customers and end-users at that time.

If you would like to learn more about how Act-On uses innovative technologies and proven processes to ensure data compliance and security in accordance with national and regional laws and guidelines, please reach out to our support staff today.

Or, if you’re considering adopting a new marketing automation platform for your organization, please click here to book a demo.

Not ready to have that conversation just yet? Download this free eBook to learn more about how you can use Act-On to implement, execute, measure, and improve growth marketing strategies for immediate and sustained success.

Growth Marketing Automation: The Next Wave

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Best Practices for Digital Marketing Compliance

Act-On — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 07:00:00 +0000

In the last few years, new legislation such as GDPR and CCPA has come into effect. Unfortunately, many companies have had to rush to shift their marketing strategy and implement new practices to comply. Companies failing to adhere to these new rules are experiencing significant consequences (such as fines and unhappy customers). All this has put the topic of marketing compliance at the forefront and made marketers think about how they can stay ahead of the game to avoid any future fiascos.

While GDPR and CCPA affect a select group of marketers and organizations, that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear if you don’t do business in the UK or California. These new laws signify the beginning of a change in the way companies are expected to collect and use customer information and, as a result, how they market to their audience.

These regulations have also shown us that many companies could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had simply implemented a few best practices. That’s why, today, we’re sharing a few tips that will help you prepare for any upcoming compliance requirements and improve your marketing results and engagement across the board.

So, let’s get started!

Let Your Contacts Choose How They Want You to Use Their Information

Compliance regulations are designed to protect the privacy rights of individuals and require companies to change how they collect, store, and use information. Companies that don’t have a system in place to address requests or manage user preferences often struggle to adapt to these requirements once they are in place.

Instead of waiting until the last minute to collect contact preferences and update your database, be proactive and use forms to ask your audience what their preferences are ahead of time. For example, if your contact downloads a gated asset from your website, they should have the option to opt-in to receive messages from you in the future. Or, if they are signing up for an email newsletter or other email communication, you can follow up with an email that asks them to double opt-in to confirm that they want to receive your emails.

Collecting this information right off the bat will help you in many ways. To start, it establishes a good system so you’re ready when the time comes to deal with any compliance requirements. Additionally, knowing your contacts’ preferences will empower you to deliver more targeted communication, resulting in improved engagement and results down the road.

Use Quality Data and Maintain Good Email Hygiene

Purchasing lists is a common practice that is, unfortunately, still used by many companies. The thing is that buying your contacts instead of building your lists organically is not only expensive, but it can prevent you from achieving your marketing goals and remaining compliant.

If the emails you are sending to are not valid or the recipients have never indicated that they want to hear from you in the first place, you run the risk of driving up your bounce and SPAM rates. In contrast, if your contacts have willingly given you their information and indicated that they do want to hear from you, you’ll likely see an increase in engagement and conversions that will lead to tremendous growth for your organization.

To continue improving your email engagement rates, you should routinely clean your lists and ensure all contacts have submitted their consent to receive communication from you before clicking SEND. If you’ve purchased lists in the past, there’s still hope, but you will have to take a few measures to ensure that the lists you are using are in good shape.

To start, send an email to your lists to give your contacts the chance to opt-in to continue receiving emails and other marketing communications. Any contacts who opt-out or do not respond to your request should be eliminated from your database. If you want to take even more precaution, there are third-party vendors that can ensure that all the email addresses you are sending to are valid. Act-On, for example, integrates with NeverBounce, which allows users to easily review their lists, helping them reduce the number of hard bouncebacks.

Make Sure You Have an Integrated MarTech Stack

Disconnected technology solutions not only create inefficiencies but also open the door for compliance issues down the road. Tedious tasks such as having to download and upload lists from one system to another and manually updating user preferences leave a lot of room for error when it comes to executing your marketing efforts and being compliant.

When you add the possibility of being fined thousands of dollars, the last thing that you want is to accidentally email a contact or misuse their information when they’ve requested otherwise. Thankfully, these instances can be avoided if all your systems are talking to each other and automatically updating any requests and information.

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A marketing automation solution that has an open ecosystem (as Act-On does) will ensure all your technology tools are connected and give you the flexibility to pick the best solutions for your team and organization. Taking the steps to invest in systems that are integrated will also improve efficiencies, results, and your team’s readiness for future changes and regulations.

Deliver Targeted Messaging

A huge consequence of new privacy regulations is that organizations can expect the size of their contact lists to decrease. These regulations remind customers that they have the right to choose who they want to hear from, when, and how. Any businesses inundating their inboxes with unwanted messages will likely catch their attention and motivate them to unsubscribe.

Businesses can avoid falling victim to this trap by ditching their one-size-fits-all email strategy for more targeted marketing and messaging that speaks to their consumers’ interests and pain points. The time and work required to transition from a batch-and-blast email marketing approach to one that is more strategic might seem like more trouble than it’s worth, but it can be a quick and extremely effective process if your organization has the proper tools.

A marketing automation platform that allows you to perform lead scoring and automatic list segmentation can significantly streamline the process of delivering personalized marketing and communications. You can use lead scoring to evaluate where your leads are in the sales funnel and determine the type of content you need to send their way to keep them moving along. As you uncover new information about your contacts, you can automatically segment them into lists and enter them into email nurture campaigns that pertain to their interests and stage in the sales funnel.

That’s not saying you won’t have to put some work into creating personalized email campaigns and content. But once everything is up and running, you can focus your time and resources on A/B testing and optimizing your efforts to improve results.

Invest in a Solution That Can Help You Do It All

You’ve probably noticed an underlying theme in this blog — the right solution can make it easy for your organization to implement and maintain best practices for digital marketing compliance. Act-On empowers marketers of all experience levels and skillsets to execute successful digital marketing strategies, connect their MarTech stack to save time and money, and access the data they need to improve the customer journey.

If you’d like to see our platform in action and learn more about how it can help you comply with both industry and marketing requirements, please go ahead and schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They’d be more than happy to walk you through how Act-On can help you streamline processes, launch compliant marketing efforts, and innovate your marketing.

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Examining the Impact of GDPR One Year In

Act-On — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

On May 25, 2018, the highly anticipated European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect. Now that digital marketers have had ample time to adjust to this new legislation, we’re going to take a closer look at how GDPR is impacting consumers and businesses alike — as well as how and why to implement several best practices for GDPR compliance.

What Is GDPR and Why Was It Created?

The European General Data Protection Regulation legislation was passed to create greater, more uniform data privacy protection for all residents of the European Union. The law stipulates harsh penalties for non-compliance for any business marketing to and collecting behavioral data of individuals in the EU. Fines for non-compliance can be as high as 4% of global revenue, so companies are highly incentivized to follow GDPR regulations.

To summarize, the goals of GDPR include:

Providing citizens greater insight into how their data is collected and more control over how their data is used.
Clarifying and simplifying the legal expectations for businesses of all sizes.
Consolidating disjointed regional data privacy regulations into one cohesive and codified set.
Improving regulatory compliance of all digital transactions — both visible and hidden from consumers.

To achieve these goals, GDPR requires different protocols for businesses to gain and maintain consent throughout their marketing activities and channels.

Gaining User Consent

GDPR has significantly narrowed the concept of user consent and now requires users to take “clear affirmative action” before a company can begin marketing to them. This consent must be “freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous.” For instance, pre-checked consent boxes on submission forms are no longer allowed, as they require no real action on the user’s part and don’t necessarily imply they’ve given consent to receive marketing material.

Further, GDPR stipulates that businesses must receive a “double opt-in” from their users before they can market to them, which means providing consent on at least two separate instances. For example, you should create forms with clear, unchecked consent boxes and then also send a confirmation email where the user can confirm their consent by clicking on a link. GDPR also requires all organizations to provide proof of consent for each of their contacts, and failing to do so could lead to severe penalties and fines.

Lastly, consumers can leverage GDPR to submit a “subject access request” that allows them to access the personal data that each organization has on them, why that organization has the information, and how they’re using it. Nearly half of the 18,000 data protection-related complaints that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) received in 2016 were related to mishandled subject access requests (1). This personal information is extremely important to users, and GDPR is attempting to make it easier for them to collect.

Providing Clear and Simple Opportunities to Opt Out

GDPR is also committed to making it easier for users to opt-out of receiving communications from businesses. Like CASL in Canada and CAN-SPAM in the United States, organizations are now required to make it easy for users to update their preferences, withdraw their consent, or be removed from a company’s database.

By “easy,” we mean:

Users shouldn’t have to visit more than one page to opt-out
Users shouldn’t have to log in to opt-out
Users should only be required to provide their email address to opt-out
Users should not be charged a fee to opt-out

Again, failing to follow these statutes could lead to severe punishment.

GDPR and Privacy Policies

One of the principal goals of GDPR is to encourage transparency, which means companies are now required to disclose how they’re using their subscribers’ and website visitors’ information — and they must do so in a way that is clear and simple. According to one infamous study, it would take roughly 76 workdays to read all the privacy policies we encounter in a year (2), so the goal is to reduce that number drastically.

Under GDPR, each organization’s privacy policy must be easily accessible, concise, transparent, intelligible, and free of charge to access. It must be written in clear language that is easy to understand, so you should also clearly define any ambiguous or confusing terminology you’ll be using and avoid legalese wherever possible. Further, each online form must also include a clear link to the company’s privacy policy.

Lastly, if the organization will be collecting data from third-party sources, they are required to provide additional information about the data and its source.

Using Act-On to Manage Constent for the GDPR

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Is GDPR Working?

Initially, business leaders and experts from different fields were extremely excited about GDPR. Speaking with Verdict of the potential impact of GDPR, Giles Pratt (IP and technology partner at Freshfields) said:

“The EU regulators have introduced a pioneering piece of legislation that looks likely to set the bar for data privacy standards around the world, and offers opportunities for closer working practices among international privacy professionals in business and the regulators they engage with.”

Yet while the road to GDPR compliance is slowly being paved with good intentions, early returns suggest many companies still have a long journey ahead of them on their path to compliance. Since the legislation took effect in May of 2018, there have been more than 200,000 reports of minor and major GDPR breaches in over 30 countries according to a report published by the European Data Protection Board — which consists of numerous regulators from across the region. In all, roughly $56 million in fines have been doled out by various watchdog groups, but $50 million of that came from a single fine for Google (3).

According to Mathias Moulin, a panel member of the CNIL (the French watchdog group that handed down the fine to Google), the fine was based on a “massive and highly intrusive” breach and was based on several different factors — including the “scale… and the size of the company.” While the fine was merely a drop in the bucket for a company like Google, which boasted $137 billion in revenue in 2018, Moulin suggests that the past year “should be considered a transition year.”

That statement suggests that we can expect there to be stronger monitoring and enforcement of GDPR, which serves as a warning to organizations that have not yet prioritized GDPR compliance in their marketing efforts. It seems fair to give businesses (especially small- to mid-sized businesses) more time to implement better procedures for GDPR compliance before handing out major fines, but that time could be quickly running out as GDPR moves into its second year. Therefore, it’s important that you do your best to become GDPR compliant as soon as possible — for both the health of your business and the confidence and security of your customers.

GDPR Compliance Best Practices

Public perception is that many companies are deliberately making it more difficult for web subscribers to opt-out of their subscriptions, and based on the number of infractions reported above, it’s hard to argue that point. And that’s why GDPR was created in the first place: to increase data privacy and security and allow consumers to browse the internet more freely and with more confidence.

So far, GDPR has yet to achieve that goal, but with the so-called “transition year” behind us, the time for excuses has come to an end. Now, it’s time to learn and follow basic GDPR best practices to enter compliance, improve consumer confidence, and increase your company’s revenue.

Update Legacy Contacts

GDPR allows organizations to communicate with existing users, but only if you have previously received active consent. If, however, your sending lists include users who we automatically opted in, you need to reach out requesting their explicit consent to continue marketing to them.

Review your lists to determine which contacts have actively opted in and which contacts have not. Then, email your list of contacts that still need to actively opt-in asking their permission to continue messaging them. Make sure the language of your email is honest, friendly, and direct with a prominent CTA button inviting them to opt-in. If a subscriber does not respond within 10 days of your email, send a final follow-up email letting them know they’ll be removed from your list if they fail to opt-in. If they still haven’t taken action after five days, you should remove them from your list entirely.

Require Additional Consent Boxes

Previously, when a user would sign up for a trial, download an eBook, or complete any action that gave businesses their contact information, those businesses could continue to follow up with subsequent email campaigns, newsletters, blogs, etc. without receiving additional consent. Today, GDPR disallows companies from doing this without adding an additional opt-in checkbox below the digital form.

For instance, if a user on your site completes a form to view an on-demand webinar but doesn’t complete the checkbox on the form giving you explicit consent to market to them in additional ways, you are prohibited from doing so. Make sure all your forms have clear language requesting explicit consent to provide additional marketing materials, and make sure you’re only sending to users who have checked that box.

Make It Easy for Users to Opt-Out

Failing to provide clear and simple opt-out options is one of the most common GDPR no-nos. It can also lead to frustrated users, which often results in those individuals filing GDPR complaints.

Your subscribers don’t owe you their loyalty and should reserve “the right to be forgotten” whenever they want. If they don’t want to hear from you anymore (maybe they went with another insurance provider or decided to purchase concert tickets through another vendor), then they should be able to unsubscribe from your list easily.

So you need to make sure all of your communications have a prominent “unsubscribe” link in the footer that recipients can click to be removed from your list permanently or until they decide to re-opt in.

Further, you should offer your users the option to manage their subscription. Create a “Manage Your Subscriptions” link in your footer or offer the option as a link within the copy of your emails, confirmation pages, and other digital marketing communications. This link should lead to a separate page that gives the user multiple options about which types of communications they want to receive — such as newsletters, blogs, special deals, or event invites.

Act-On Software Assists Businesses to Comply with GDPR

At Act-On, our marketing automation software is designed to help marketers from companies of all shapes and sizes improve their email deliverability, protect their customers’ data, and generate more revenue through an all-in-one omnichannel platform. Our world-class Professional Services team is here to assist our clients to take additional compliance measures and align their strategy with our software.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can solve your GDPR concerns with Act-On’s powerful marketing automation platform, please download our free eBook below or contact us directly to speak with an experienced sales professional.

Using Act-On to Manage Constent for the GDPR

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Data Management and Reporting Archives - Act-On

HIPAA-Compliant Marketing in 5 Easy Steps

Keep Track of Your Website Trackers

Don’t Confuse Cookie Consent with HIPAA Authorization

Maintain Audit Trails — for Your Team and Your Vendors

Choose a HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Automation Platform

Mind Your Reviews

Staying HIPAA-Compliant Means Staying Up-to-Date

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Automation: Keeping Data Secure

What HIPAA compliance means for marketers

HIPAA-compliant marketing automation

New developments in HIPAA digital marketing

The risks of non-compliant HIPAA marketing

The best HIPAA-compliant marketing automation platforms

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Marketing Automation and CRM Sync: Keep Data Clean and Current Across Your Teams

Solves the “guessing game” challenge

Helps sales spot “hot sales leads” faster

Measuring ROI and creating a closed-loop system

Bidirectional CRM Sync: Pulling it all together

The New Rules of Data-Driven Marketing

The real-life principles of data-driven marketing

The challenges of the old data-driven marketing model

Increased privacy regulations

Whatever’s happening on “dark social”

Measurement does not equal attribution

The lack of experimentation

The practical difficulties of applying data

How to improve data-driven marketing today

Optimizing campaigns with engagement data midstream

Using lead scoring to qualify MQLs for sales

Analyze how users interact with your website

Look beyond email open and click-through rates

Combine data sources to identify content opportunities

Share data across teams

Use AI to power natural language search

Get the most out of your marketing automation data

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 17: Tejas Manohar

Use Marketing Automation to Ensure FINRA Compliant Email Marketing

Common FINRA Compliance Marketing Challenges Faced by Wealth Managers

The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors

Best Practices to Help You Stay Ahead of the Game

Leverage Marketing Automation to Streamline Processes and Improve ROI

The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors

4 Ways to Implement Marketing Automation Data

Types of Marketing Data You Can Use to Optimize Campaigns

1. Apply Email Engagement Data to Improve Campaigns

2. Use Paid Social and PPC Data to Identify Winning Messages

3. Implement Lead Scoring to Segment Your Audience

4. Apply Organic Traffic Data to Optimize Your Content Strategy and Your Conversion Rates

The Final Step: Get Your Whole Team On Board

Act-On’s Cloud Infrastructure Expansion Strengthens Commitment to Canadian Clients

Why Act-On’s Canadian Cloud Infrastructure Expansion Is So Important

Growth Marketing Automation: The Next Wave

Investing in Digital Security Is Paramount at Act-On

Better Compliance Breeds Greater Trust

Act-On Is Dedicated to Innovation, Satisfaction, and Security

Growth Marketing Automation: The Next Wave

Best Practices for Digital Marketing Compliance

Let Your Contacts Choose How They Want You to Use Their Information

Use Quality Data and Maintain Good Email Hygiene

Make Sure You Have an Integrated MarTech Stack

Using Act-On to Manage Consent for the GDPR

Deliver Targeted Messaging

Invest in a Solution That Can Help You Do It All

Using Act-On to Manage Consent for the GDPR

Examining the Impact of GDPR One Year In

What Is GDPR and Why Was It Created?

Gaining User Consent

Providing Clear and Simple Opportunities to Opt Out

GDPR and Privacy Policies

Using Act-On to Manage Constent for the GDPR

Is GDPR Working?

GDPR Compliance Best Practices

Update Legacy Contacts

Require Additional Consent Boxes

Make It Easy for Users to Opt-Out