Category: B2B Business

Check out our B2B Marketing Blogs to discover the latest information on b2b marketing and related topics. We are continually updating it with valuable info to give you better insights!

Posted on By Matt Davis

How Email Appending Can Upgrade Your Contacts List

How Email Appending Can Upgrade Your Contacts List | Data Marketers Group

Although email marketing is considered as a traditional approach of marketing, but still it continues as one of the most effective marketing channels when it comes to high return on investment. As an email marketer, it is necessary to have right set of email addresses of your targeted audience to send b2b email marketing campaigns with zero bounce rate.

In recent researches, it was found that an average of over 30% of subscribers changes their email addresses every year due to job changes, security and other reasons. Due to this, most of the emails won’t deliver successfully. Hence, the success of your email marketing campaign completely depends on the contacts list that you’re using currently. And the best way to ensure 100% accuracy in your customers’ database is via email appending.

Before going further, first we should understand the basic concept of Email Appending.

What is Email Appending and Why You Need Email Appending?

Email appending is the process of adding or updating a missing email address into a customer record within your existing contact database. This practice involves retrieving customer data like name and location and matching it with a vendor’s database to collect the missing data.  According to the experts, you can see an average increase of 30% in your ROI when you use email append service to upgrade your contact lists.

In the below mentioned picture, you can check the necessity of email append services.

Let’s See How Email Appending Process Can Upgrade Your Contact Database!

If you discover that your email marketing campaign doesn’t get the desired results, then you can opt Email Appending service to provide a massive boost to the sales figure and also generate higher traffic to the website. With Email appending process, you will get fresh and authentic information about your target audience including their name, contact number, email addresses, and other required data fields. This will ultimately help you engage with your audience in a much more efficient way.

An email append is simply the process of adding a valid email address to a contact in your existing database which falls under the following categories.

  • You can apply email appending to the contacts for which you have no email address but you have their first and last name and physical address.

  • You can apply email appending to the contacts which are having old or outdated email addresses.

  • You can apply email appending to the contacts that have become dormant and you are not sure if their email address is valid.

Here, in this below mentioned picture – you can check the whole process involved in the Email Appending from uploading the database to upgrading the contact list.

Whenever you upload your database that need to be email append, the following process takes place on your contact database.

  • Initially, the whole contact list will match against the proprietary and master datasets.

  • Later, the data experts will identify and remove the incorrect and invalid email addresses which are inactive.

  • Then they will add up-to-date, opt-in, correct email addresses of clients in case of missing, redundant and incorrect b2b e-mail addresses.

  • After adding accurate email addresses to the contact list, they will optimize the database by taking consent from the customers.

  • Later data experts will perform AI and manual verification for quality checks.

  • Finally, a newly appended file will forward to the client in a downloadable format.

How To Choose Best Email Appending Service Provider?

When it comes to choosing the email appending service that address your data needs, here are a few things – you need to make sure before going further.

  • Firstly, you need to shortlist exactly what you need.

  • Later, choose a company that can meet all of the requirements you have defined.

  • Make sure that email append provider supplies the authentic information.

  • Also, check which type of data sources they are using to compile database

  • Check how much time it takes for them to append emails.

  • Check- How often are they upgrading the master file.

  • Ask about the success rate of their email appending services.

  • Also, check will they be able to connect you to the old clients.

Benefits of Choosing Email Appending Service

In order to achieve huge success rate through email marketing, one must have a verified email database of their existing customers as well as the potential customers. Absence of such email database could make it harder for any business to start off an effective email marketing campaign. Email appending is one of the many techniques that could help you boost your sales, generate website traffic and retain your customers through email marketing. Here are some benefits of Email Appending Service:

Boost Response Rate

Undeliverable emails will always lead to a huge waste of time and resources. Thus, reducing the number of such aspects will be an important task for you when it comes to email marketing. The process of email appending will help you in reducing wastage of your resources and provides you with updated emails that will ultimately help you to get a better response from the recipients.

Data Cleansing

The process of email appending will not only help you to add missing information about your target audience but also enable you to correct errors like miss-spelt localities, names, invalid email ids, inauthentic identities, and other crucial data fields.

Database integrity

An email appending service can allow you to access a full and detailed database. The process will also help you to get your target audience’s demographic data including their age, name, salary, and other demographic details. In the process of research, email appending will help you to build successful marketing strategies that match with your business needs.

Affordable Pricing

Email Appending will help you deliver your messages to the right inboxes and at the right time. The cost of buying a database consisting of a list of potential customers is much higher than updating your current one and retaining it. Thus through email appending, explore the potential of your existing contacts at affordable pricing.

Wrapping Up

If your leads lists or CRM data comprises missing email addresses of your prospects, then you are losing on the best engagement channel which generates the highest ROI for your marketing efforts. We at Data Marketers Group, provide best-in-class Email Appending services which completely focus on maximizing online and offline customer engagement for your products and services.

Posted on By Matt Davis

Everything You Need To Know About B2B Data Cleansing

Everything You Need To Know About B2B Data Cleansing | Data Marketers Group

Source: Only B2B

In today’s data-driven world, data is a valuable asset for most of the businesses, especially when they are rolling out multi-channel marketing campaigns. But, have you ever wondered what happens when you leave your entire customer database idle for longer run? As most of the people continue to change their phone numbers, postal, and email addresses quite often, the customers’ data you have become old and redundant.

Keeping data records of potential leads for future reference and immediate use is top priority for most of the organizations.  However, what happens if the collected data isn’t accurate? Just collecting a huge stacks of data isn’t going to be of much help to your business. Instead, businesses need accurate data for successful CRM initiatives and this is where Data Cleansing comes into the spotlight!

What is Data Cleansing?

Simply put, data cleansing is the process of eliminating, upgrading, and editing information within a database in order to maintain top-notch data quality. This approach gives access to the segmented and accurate data, which you can leverage for your multi-channel marketing initiatives and business operations.

By availing data cleansing services, businesses can address many challenges they face on a daily basis like manual data correction, troubleshooting, error rectification, and incorrect invoice data. All these add up to high costs – which can be reduced if businesses keep their database clean and competent.

“The True Potential Of Customer Data Can Be Explored And Leveraged In A Meaningful Manner Only When The Data Is Correct, Complete, And Relevant.”

Why is it Important to Cleanse Customers Data?

According to researches, over the span of one year, 30% of B2B data is projected to be out of date. That means you might waste a significant amount of your direct marketing budget because the data is no longer up-to – date.  Having accurate customers’ data is more crucial for most of the businesses. By using irrelevant and outdated customers’ data, you’ll not only lose existing clients but also fail in implementing effective marketing strategies. There are several reasons that support the need for getting data cleansed. Here are few:

  • Cleansed customer data helps reach the right people for maximum responses.
  • With clean data, your database remains accurate and GDPR & CAN-SPAM compliant.
  • Saves resources and time incurred in campaigning with irrelevant data.
  • Helps identify unresponsive and inactive contacts in the existing customers’ database.

With most industries relying on data for their business growth – it is important to manage error-free data particularly in data-intensive industries such as banking, insurance, retail, telecoms, and more. What if you leave your data for longer-run? Here are some adverse effects which can occur when you ignore cleansing your customers’ data:

What Happens With Out Data Cleansing | Data Marketers Group

Source: Cloudlead

Why Should B2B Businesses Leverage Data Cleansing Services?

At the heart of all b2b marketing and lead-generation activities, data is notably the most important resource to increase the likelihood of ongoing campaign success. Hence, every modern business needs accurate data to drive offline and online customer engagement for their products and services. However, cleansing your entire database can be a massive project. While many businesses opt for the various data cleansing tools available, it can still take up precious time and resources.

Instead of facing the problems pertaining to DIY data cleansing operations or spend countless man-hours, you can procure professional b2b data hygiene services for fresh and updated information. Such services can take away the burden of database management completely, which in turn allows you to concentrate on key business operations.

Benefits of Data Cleansing Services

The following are some of the benefits B2B business can get by leveraging CRM data cleansing services:

  • Enhanced Sales Performance

One of the primary benefits of data cleansing is improved sales performance. As a B2B marketer, having access to quality data will allow you to generate high-quality leads and minimize the costs incurred on inaccurate data. In addition to that, cleansed customer data helps in identifying the most valuable clients and also provide personalized communication to maximize conversion and engagement.

  • Improved Decision Making

Having accurate and correct data allows better business intelligence and analytics, which helps in facilitating better decision making as well as campaign execution. This leads to an increase in the overall productivity of the company – in terms of sales and revenue.

  • Optimize Costs

Since maintaining data servers, data centres, or databases is expensive, you will be able to cut storage costs when you have access to appropriate, reliable, and modified data. Consequently, it would enable the company in reducing costs.

Can We Outsource Data Cleansing Services?

Of Course Yes! There are many companies that offer data cleansing services based on business requirements. They provide Professional data cleansing service -which results in higher-quality lead information and a higher return on your marketing investment. So, whatever field your company operates in, it is important to maintain reliable, compliant and up-to – date information on your current and potential leads to ensure a profitable campaign after a profitable campaign.

As a data-driven marketing agency, we are specialized in providing various database services including data appending, email appending, phone appending, custom data and more. Here are few benefits of outsourcing data cleansing services to us:
  • Expertise That Matter

When you outsource your data cleansing job to us, the results will be much more rewarding. It’s not that your in-house data management team is incompetent or incapable. But the experience and knowledge possessed by our team of data professionals while working across various industries are unmatchable. Hence, taking the help from qualified data experts will definitely pump up the quality of your B2B marketing list.

  • Outsourcing is Cost-effective

Investing in offshore data cleansing for your customers database is no longer expensive and also beyond the budgets. Outsourcing is cost effective and also saves you the resources incurred in hiring and training an in-house data team. 

  • Saves Time

The process of manually validating, verifying, and updating every record in your customers database can be a tedious and time-consuming too. Instead of that, outsourcing data cleansing help you to focus on core business activities while maintaining data hygiene.

With our b2b data cleansing services, you can enhance quality of your b2b mailing lists related to technology, international, healthcare and retail.

Final Thoughts

Every B2B organization is unique in its own way. Regardless of business type, you may have experienced issues pertaining to the inaccurate data. Hence, it is time to convert your data into more actionable.

At Data Marketers Group, our goal is to grow and prosper as a company, while fulfilling the data requirements of other businesses. Being experts in data hygiene best practices, our team of skilled professionals will facilitate you with more actionable data insights that can maximize your revenue opportunities.

Posted on By Matt Davis

Guide to choose a right B2B Data Provider

Data is the new oil. Data is one of the important assets for any organization as it helps them to effectively analyze & bring a solution for problems. The data provide a higher level of visualization to understand what is happening across different location & departments within the organization. Generally, B2B data are an enterprise-focused model which comprises of information to improve sales & marketing campaigns. B2B marketers can make the best use of such data to target audience meticulously & promote their products.

There are different types of B2B data providers. As a pioneer in B2B database service providers, we would like to share our thoughts on the same. So here are a few points to be taken into account while going to do b2b data purchase for your B2B marketing campaigns.

  • You should be more inclined towards a data-oriented solution.

  • Make sure your B2B providers give other Data enrichment services including data appending, cleansing & integration.

  • Make sure you pay only for details you take

As per the survey conducted by Salesforce in 2018-2019, more than 50% of the sales representatives spend more time in finding the right information for initiating business conversation. Hence at Data Marketers Group, we believe that data is the backbone of any b2b campaign, including offline & online activities. Ideally, a business partner should be able to work with you comfortably rather than just being the contact information provided.

So, here are certain easy steps to choose the right B2B data provider while you are opting to do b2b data purchase for your company.

Analyze & define your Lead Generation Process

The first & foremost step is to brainstorm within internal stakeholders, sales & marketing team to set up your own lead generation process for your business. Build a lead generation process to capture all relevant information about new leads & prospects are captured. This gives a clear idea of the most preferred communication channel of prospects. Hence finalizing lead generation process will give a board picture about how your B2B data partner should align with your business process based on a niche.

KPI’s to measure your Return on Investment

Defining KPI metrics for any process will let you know measure & understand the number of efforts required to build a cost-effective contact database. It helps in evaluating how your goals are understood by B2B data providers & how effectively prospect’s information are available & consumed by you. Based on your business goals procure details & monitoring their KPI’s will help increase your performance indicators.

Cost Calculation

The Cost comparison is one of the main attributes to determine if B2B data providers to be built in house or outsourced. There are several parameters including requirement per day, tools used, number of calls to be taken per day, monthly/weekly budget, email bounce rate, average deal size closed & more. Based on these use cases we can decide how effectively B2B data are required for the business.

Fit & Opportunity Data

Your B2B data providers must categorize list based on key attributes which create new business opportunities when a marketer intends to develop a business relationship with prospects. As the name suggests scoring activities can be carried out marketers to segment prospects well suited to be in your customer base. Thus, you can get perfect data that fit into your B2B campaign & improve revenue.

Brokers or Resellers

This is one of the important categories of B2B data provider who act as a middleman between actual buyers & data sources. Generally, brokers collate data from different sources & resell to customers. They try to make an ample amount of profit through this. If you look for niche-based marketing, then brokers or resellers would be the perfect choice as they provide the most relevant contact aligned to your business goals.

Factors to Be Considered While Choosing B2B Data Buyers

Accreditations & Customer service

Look for data providers who registered with the Data Protection Act & direct marketing association. Please have a close look at how various data is collated from trusted sources in an ethical manner. The second most important thing is customer service after your purchase list. B2B data needs to be refreshed or data appending services should be given over the regular span of time to make B2B data is most recent & reliable for the campaign. This guarantees your business data providers have proper information intended to reach prospects via direct mails or phone calls.

B2B statistics you need to know while choosing a data partner

Business data is crucial for any B2B marketing success. To refine your search to select a perfect data partner. We understand B2B data purchase is one of the costly investment for marketing. Hence, do better research to ensure your whole sales team is clear about your business goal as is it directly impacts organization investment & sales target.

Posted on By Matt Davis

How B2B Marketers Can Proactively Manage Their Businesses During Covid-19 Crisis?

Due to the spread of Covid-19 in mid-March, most of the countries around the world declared a state of emergency and every business in the country has worked to adjust strategy to prepare for both the economic and social challenges brought by the virus.

For b2b marketers who rely heavily on consumer experiences to generate new leads and develop brand recognition, the implications of the outbreak of COVID-19 have generated uncharted territory. Large trade shows and conferences in almost every sector have been canceled on a global scale, and even though some event promoters are turning to ‘virtual’ events, the relative effect of these types of activities on a company’s brand-building and lead generation efforts is greatly diminished.

Most of the B2B businesses have several particular problems to cope with the impact of COVID-19. Here are some tips on how to manage this changing environment to ensure that your brand continues to offer value to your consumers while building a potential sales pipeline for the future.

Understand The Challenges You’re Facing

As a first step, you should think in the long term about how your company could be impacted by short-term market losses, and then a longer-term recession or depression. There are some possible impacts that should be taken into consideration.

  • Client Cancellations:Think deeply about your client base and how they are impacted by COVID-19 closures. If you sell exclusively to SMBs, you will definitely find that many of them are unable to function and thus unable to pay for you. In this situation, you can prepare for a significant number of clients to opt out of your services or not to pay invoices, which would result in decreased cash flow as long as there is no bill.
  • Changed sales pipeline:Due to the sudden advent of shelter restrictions in the US, several businesses rapidly shifted their outlook in just a few weeks in March. A number of options that you planned to close in April might have fallen out of the pipeline.
  • Variable close rates: Considering the volatile epidemiological and economic situation, some businesses are holding back on new investment decisions, while others are trying to move quickly. Hence, it is essential for your sales team to be adaptable with respect to the needs of any prospect.

Focus on Branding

While COVID-19 continues to grow and most of the people opt not to leave their homes, while they are turning to their smartphones to get news about the outside world. All these customers provide advertisers with a unique opportunity. Through concentrating on the delivery of high-quality branded content, you will turn your business into an expert in your field and make it right. By focusing on delivering high-quality branded content, you will turn your businesses into an expert in your field and put yourself in a good position to develop new business in the future. Although you’re not likely to see a major boost in short-term revenue, investing in your brand now lets you rebound faster as the economy improves.

 

Consider the Roadblocks against Tele –Marketing

The odds stacked against telemarketing have escalated in 2020 with the outbreak of the Corona virus pandemic. On 7 March 2020, the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, declared a state of emergency banning unsolicited telemarketing calls during that period.

Banning telemarketing during the emergency phase of the COVID-19 outbreak is however, not an unprecedented act. This has been done before as a responsive measure when the weather is severe. The governor said that telemarketing during emergency situations could impede the ability of the state’s citizens to access safety information. Hence, tele-marketing is widely regarded as obstructive to communications. Any marketer found to be in violation of the prohibition can face political, legal and reputational risks.

Gear up Your Email Marketing Efforts

The roadblocks against telemarketing open the door wide for email marketing. Stock markets and the global economy are experiencing major losses as a consequence of the epidemic, and this has a direct effect on ad spending.

Email marketing is going to take centre place as advertisers and marketers begin to review their ad spending budgets. This advertising format has many advantages, and the current environment only serves to strengthen it. Some of the benefits to email marketing include;

  • Targeted and personalized emails have 74% chances of customer engagement.
  • In addition to that, data shows customers respond more positively to personalized emails than telemarketing.

Hence, b2b marketers should consider email marketing is the best than other forms of marketing to enhance customer loyalty and engagement during these pandemic outbreaks.

Consider Product Updates

If your current product does not serve an industry that is experiencing increased demand, is it possible to create one that does? Take a look at your SEM search query report or input from incoming leads and consider how you should update your core product to meet current demand. If you are able to upgrade your product, make sure that potential customers who may not think of you as a solution are proactively promoted. By keeping all these in mind, build a target prospect list for outbound sales and assist them with targeted display ads.

Adjust Your Sales & Promo Program

If you service an industry that is experiencing growth as a result of COVID-19 (i.e. healthcare, transport and logistics), then you are likely to see prospects looking to transition quickly to new on boarding programs that will enable them to work more effectively. Work with your sales team to push these prospects into the pipeline quickly. Also, consider offering a promo to encourage new customers to on board, but only pay for the first few months, by which time the business will hopefully be back to normal.

Posted on By Matt Davis

How Can You Make the Most Out of a Purchased Email List?

A lot many organisations even today continue to purchase email lists, with a hope that a well written email blasts can lead with a good amount of return of investment. No matter how you cut it buying a list and sending a mass email is still considered to be a spam. So, if you are still willing to buy an email list especially by using HubSpot, then it is important that you read the rest of the article. The person you are trying to send an email, has never ever given you the permission to market your products and services to them. You are interrupting and hoping that you will be able to put some interest in them, and they turn out to react in some or the other way.

So, a purchased email list can benefit your business in many ways. Despite of the various factors that you might have come across or heard, buying an email lists is still a valid and a cost-effective way of scaling your products and services. The problem arises with the way the marketers turn out to handle the entire process and not the idea of an unsolicited email itself. Through the blog post today we would be discussing the various benefits of a purchased email lists and how it will turn out to maximize the ROI. This post will also clear the air on the subject of cold email lists giving you a clear understanding on this highly controversial subject. Having an email lists purchased is not always a bad idea and here are the reasons why.

Scaleability: This one is believed to be an eye opener and this is why it has been mentioned first. Inbound marketing is not just fun but is even effective as it helps you generate some of the warmest B2B leads that you could ever imagine. A purchased email lists creates an opportunity for you to reach hundreds and thousands of new leads in just one night.  Of course, these contacts will have to be nurtured in the right way before being used but the future lead generation potential is massive. And when the funnel runs dry, all you need to do here is purchase more and more industry leads in order to keep your pipeline topped up.

Targeting Industry Related Contacts: A really good database can let you targets the industry-based contacts at ease. So, this turns out to become a crucial aspect that should not be overlooked no matter what. The marketers at times get caught with the email addresses and are left with nothing more than this. Having a list of 5000 customers in your industry is something that is much more powerful to your business rather than the 50000 random email contacts.

Speed and Time Savings: Perhaps one of the major reasons of why you should be purchasing an email is the speed and scalability of the strategy. Even if you have a healthy amount of organic traffic that has been coming into your website, inbound marketing to this can take an absurd amount of time just generate some amount of traffic for your website.

Reaching brand new audience: Not every one keeps up with the latest trends in their industry. And it seems like your perfect customers are aware of all the various other options, and have done all the research about you and your competitors. But let me tell you some of your customers might not even be aware of the fact that you are even existing. A purchased email lists can show your business to all those customers who are not aware about it. And through the purchased lists you suddenly become a part of the conversations discussing the various solutions for their business. And when you know the biggest challenge your target personas face the outbound marketing efforts and you will be able to generate quality leads from your cold list.

If the email marketing contacts are not working out well for you, I would suggest you to email services that allow you to have a purchased list. Through this you can ensure that the deliverability happens in the right manner. After this its just talking to your target buyers in such a way that would inspire him in taking some action.

Posted on By Matt Davis

Buy a list or create one? Which is more profitable

Nothing is much more important than the success of your email list than the list of your subscribers. The success of your campaign depends on the on having an integrated and engaged lists. Like all the others I am sure that you might be tempted to accelerate your building efforts by buying an email an email list, but buying an email list will actually lead you with poor results and possibly even damage your reputation for a long time. Buying an email list leads is something like breaking the golden rule. And I am sure that you hate it when an isolated email comes into your box, as this just leads to clutter and distracts you from the other emails that you wish to read. In short when you don’t like it how can you expect the subscribers to do so. Given here are some reasons why purchasing an email lists are a big no to email marketing. Let’s have a look at them in detail.

Invading the inboxes of the strangers: Remember that you are sending email campaign to people. And you design your campaigns in such a way that the person is able to read, and adds a call to action button encouraging your readers to click and convert. If you have someone who wishes not to hear from you and still receive an email from your side into their inbox, they will then just delete it and mark it as a spam especially when they don’t know who you are. Forcing your way into someone inbox without their permission is like showing up to a dinner part that is hosted by someone else and your uninvited. This is in no manner the best way of beginning any relationship with your customer.

Too many bounces: Since most of the email addresses on the purchased lists are old, many of these contacts will not be active and anything that is sent to them will bounce back as undeliverable. Typically, a bounce rate between 2% is optimal but if over goes more than 5% then there is definetly some problem with the list that you have been using. Even if there are any active emails on the list, they are very likely to delete the emails without even having a look at them. Even worse they will just mark your email as a spam and you will be on your way to bad reputation.

Email Service Providers Won’t allow Purchased Lists: First of all, as long as you are a reputable email service provider, let me tell you that you will not be able to purchase an email list. Most email service providers even do ask whether or not your email list has been opted in, in short, the ones who are on the list have opted into specifically receive emails from your company. Some of the Email Service providers will ask their list members to opt in as well as doubt in.

Bad Addresses Bad Delivery Date: A purchased list is likely to have contacts that have poor quality. And of all the addresses that are still active, most turn out to be on hold as its unlikely that they are being used much if at all. When you send an email from the purchased list having full of unused contacts, you will see high bounce rates and the over all campaign statistics will turn out to be underwhelming since the majority of the list is undeliverable. Also, one of the things that can turn out to happen with the old addresses is that they turn out to become spam traps or honey spots. And these are email addresses used specifically to find people who are using questionable lists and cause a serious damage to your sending reputation.

There are many other reasons as to why you should never ever buy an email list. Instead you can always invest time and grow your email list rather than buying one. Though buying a list may seem to be a quick fix but in long run you may lose money and damage your entire reputation. If you wish that your email should be read then make sure that your lists are opted in and have been growing in the right away. Remember the time spent in creating an email list will pay you off when a high performing list of people who actually can’t wait to read your emails.

Posted on By Matt Davis

Are you taking care of your customer Data?

In the data driven world, the data of the customers has turned out to become the most important for businesses who wish to rapidly evolve around the expectations of their clients and customers. We do have studies that have shown us how businesses have failed to safeguard the data of their clients and customers, leading to an epidemic of the data theft. In one of the studies conducted researchers showed that more than 21 major data breaches by the global enterprise companies turned out to affect hundreds and millions of their customers.

It is of no surprise that there has been an increase focus of the government when it comes to the corporate data security. Different countries will have different frame works. Say for example in a country like Canada you will get to see PIPEDA and CASL and GDPR in EU. The provisions in these regulations turn out to vary from one and another, though they have some common themes like in the following:

  • The organizations need to obtain a clear and informed consent before they go ahead and collect and use their personal information.
  • Organizations that have been collecting the data of their customers and have been using them for their business purpose, need to have well designed policies on how the employees are permitted to utilize and handle the data of the customers and how it has to be stored.
  • All the methods being used in data collection should adhere to the pertinent regulations.
  • The companies will have to disclose when there is a breach of customer data.

While these are regulations that currently turn out to exist as an inconsistent patch of work, and the companies should only expect more of consistent data regulations and stronger penalties. But apart from the mere compliance of the law it is important to understand why the companies need to protect their customer data.

Why do you need to care about protecting your customer data?

We all know that actions speak louder than words. And taking measures to have your data protected will ensure if there is a future data breach, then the damage to your data will be mitigated. Even when the customer data base breaches are caused by the third-party vendors then your customers will hold you accountable.

It is always better to take steps in order to be more compliant with the regulations of data usage, rather than further down the road when you might actually turn out to face harsh penalties for failing to safeguard the customer information. Data breaches even today come with a host of anticipated costs. And beyond the costs of the low business and the lost customers there are a few varieties of expenses that you often fail to consider.

Say for example then additional costs incurred by the data breach response, the promotional costs in order to improve the customer relations, hiring investigators outside along with the data security experts in order to ensure that the breach does not turn out to happen again.

What has to be done to protect your customer data?

  1. Researching new vendors thoroughly: If your data breach turns out to happen as a result of the bad practices, the onus here is still on you because your customers trusted that you have kept their information safe. In short having a background check done, getting references, and then investigatingwhat are the data safety practices a potential vendor has in place.
  2. Doing a data audit: In order to have your plan really very effective, it is important for you to do a complete audit of your data collection practices along with the data storage, along with the inventory of data that you have in file. It is also important for you to understand what types of data you need to collect, where is it stored and what protections do you actually need to have around that data.

To conclude:

It is important enough to understand that using the collected data base of your customers increases the risks of exposure, especially when the data is being transmitted from one individual to the other or within the other parts of the organization. While making a data security plan it is important that you examine the various levels of your organization in order to understand and know how the information gets exchanged within your organization.

Posted on By Matt Davis

What is GDPR? And How Does It Protect Your Data

What is GDPR? And How Does It Protect Your Data!

In this modern era, the internet has dramatically changed the way we communicate with each other and how we handle our daily tasks. We send emails, we share documents, we pay bills and we purchase goods by entering all our personal details in online without giving a second thought. Have you ever wondered how much personal data you have shared till date? Or what happens to that personal information? This is the question that has been raised and answered by the EU and from there a new European Privacy Regulation called GDPR came into enforce and permanently changed the way business collect, store and process customer data!

So, what is GDPR?

GDPR stands for Global Data Protection Regulation – which has been implemented in all local privacy laws across the entire EU region. This law applies to all the companiesthat sell and store personal information about citizens in Europe. Hence, companies that collect data on citizens in European Union (EU) countries need to comply with strict new rules drafted by GDPR law geared towards customer data protection.

What Is ConsideredAs A Personal Data Under GDPR?

Under GDPR directive, personal data is any piece of information that relates to an identifiable person including:

  • Name
  • Photo,
  • Email address,
  • Bank details
  • Location details,
  • Computer IP address.
  • Health and genetic data
  • Social media profiles
  • Biometric data
  • Racial or ethnic data
  • Cookie data and RFID tags

Why GDPR has been Drafted?

The EU wanted to give users more power over the use of their personal data, considering the fact that companies such as Facebook and Google have transferred access to people’s data to use their products and services. This law was enactedbefore the internet and technology had generated numerous and different ways to exploit the data. The European Union aims to boost trust in the evolving digital economy by implementing and improving data protection regulations, along with stronger compliance measures.

Secondly, the EU would like to give businesses and companies an easier, clearer and more legal framework in which to operate, making the regulations on database security across the single market. For instance, the EU estimates that it will help organizations save their business by EUR 2.3 billion a year.

What are the basic rights of an individual under GDPR?

Under the GDPR, individuals can exercise:

  • The Right To Be Informed

Under GDPR, the individuals have the right to be informed about the collection and use of their personal data.

  • The Right Of Access

Under GDPR, the individuals have the right to know whether data pertaining to him or her are being processed.

  • The Right To Rectification

Under GDPR, the individuals can ask data controllers or companies to erase or rectify inaccurate or incomplete data.

  • The Right To Erasure

Under GDPR, the individuals have right to ask you to delete their personal data if the data has been processed unlawfully.

  • The Right To Restrict Processing

Under GDPR, the Individuals can ask you to restrict processing their personal data if they believe that their data is not accurate.

  • The Right To Data Portability

Under GDPR, the individuals have the right to request data controller to transmit their data directly to another controller.

  • The Right To Object To Processing

Under GDPR, the individuals have the right to object processing their data when they use it for direct marketing, including profiling.

  • The Rights to Not Evaluate Based on Automated Decision Making And Profiling

Under GDPR, the individuals have the right not to subject to a decision that totally depend on automated processing and which significantly affects them.

What happens if companies and businesses don’t comply with the GDPR?

The EU regulation imposes heavy fines on entities in the public and private sectors that violate its terms and conditions. For example, authorities may fine companies up to EUR 20 million for non-compliance or up to 4% of their annual global turnover (revenue), whichever is greater.

What Impact Does GDPR Have on Customer Engagement?

GDPR has changed a lot many things especially when it comes to companies. Say for example your sales team prospect or the way the marketing activities have been managed. The companies will have to review the various business processes, applications and the forms to be the compliment with double opt in rules and emails marketing best practices.

The organizations will have to prove that the consent was given in a case where the individual objects to receiving the communication. In short, any database that has been held must actually turn out to have a trial that is time stamped and reported information of what exactly the contacted opted and how. If you are purchasing marketing lists you and your organization are still responsible for getting the right information even when the vendor or the outsourced data has been responsible for gathering the data.