Dynamic Marketing Consent Case Study

We worked with a market leader for integrated accounting, payroll, and payment systems,supporting the ambition of the world’s entrepreneurs. Their solutions manage accounting, HR, payroll, payments, assets, construction, real estate, and enterprise systems. With a global presence, maintaining data compliance with new and constantly evolving legislation makes it challenging to maintain a consistent process across all regions and teams. GatedContent.com supported them and their legal team to build a robust, dynamic marketing consent process for GDPR, adherent to the specific rules of the country the web user is located in.

The Challenge: Maintaining Compliance with New and Changing Legislation

New location based compliance legislation is increasingly being interpreted differently. Specific countries have their own rules, with countries like Germany and Poland taking a harder stance on the guidelines, it’s critical that businesses with a global presence are responsive to this challenge depending on where their users are operating. In cases where the country can’t be easily identified on submission, the solution would be to lead with privacy compliance of the strictest country. A part of the challenge is knowing, with confidence, the actual location of web users. The location identified by their IP address may not be reliable if a VPN is in use. They needed the safety net of a manual process for the user to select their country if the automated process had not got it right the first time around. They also needed to be able to dynamically change opt-in messaging, privacy documentation and individual data capture fields based on whether a country is an explicit or implicit GDPR country. It was also critical this information was processed to support accurate segmentation by maintaining records on new; opted in; opted out and customer groups. If they couldn’t find a centralized automated solution they’d either have to have different forms on different country web pages or adopt the strictest opt in everywhere which would affect marketable data.

The GatedContent.com Solution

Prior to project kick off, they grouped countries into explicit, implicit and GDPR opt-in types. GatedContent.com started by mapping out the process for each user type, this would include for example the process for an implicit country like the United States vs. an explicit country like Germany. This process map helped ensure effective implementation of the solution. The GatedContent.com solutions team built out a master form which would pre-populate the country on every form using the IP address identified in browser, with the option for the user to override this if the country information was inaccurate. They then used the built in rules engine to dynamically change:

Opt-in messaging, legal text wording and language

Links out to the relevant privacy policy by adding a hyperlink to match the privacy of the country the user is operating in

Required form fields and additional opt-in check boxes

By defining the process in this way, they would be feeding the right information into the CRM at the start of the user journey and kicking off the right processing steps on entry, improving long term data integrity and compliance

Results

The dynamic process built out eliminated the need to create a form per country, reducing overall form numbers. By using pre-populated forms the business doesn't have to continually request consent. If you’re a known contact whoses consent information is already known, that information won’t be requested again, improving user experience. All live forms can be updated quickly in the master templates without having to edit the pages themselves. The impact of this is twofold. Firstly hugely reducing time and resource spent on in-house form development and secondly making it simple to quickly adapt and deploy messaging as legal frameworks continually evolve. For stricter countries, multiple consent models are now available. Most countries will accept opt-in to ‘marketing communications’ as a catch all, but some countries require you to differentiate between the method of communication requiring individual opt-in for telephone, post and email communication. The business now has assurance that their lead data is actionable and compliant; the number of marketable leads has increased and risks of non-compliance have been mitigated.

Get in Touch

Please contact us to find out how GatedContent.com can help you achieve fully automated, globally applicable dynamic marketing consent.