If you never put much thought into marketing best practices while growing your list (shame!), GDPR means there's really no two ways about it - consent is absolutely required! As you still haven't got it for your list, the only surefire way to be GDPR-compliant is asking everyone to confirm they want to keep hearing from you.
Beware though! This will whittle your list down to those people really keen on your mailings, but you'll probably lose most of your contacts (people with cursory interest won't usually bother confirming).
I've always grown my list as per marketing best practices. Should I reconfirm it?
No, no, don't even think about it! You're in the clear. This is why.I've never followed best practices, so I really need to reconfirm my list. How to do it?
1) Let's start by setting up your list for a re-permission form. Go to your list options and create a field of the "list of entries" type. Name it "Yes, I agree with your terms" and add an entry to it named "You've got my consent". Save your changes.
2) If you segment your mailings by audience type (eg. sports, politics, financial or if you set apart special offers from tips and tricks), create another field of the "list of entries" type, but name it "Yes, you can also send me news and special offers" and add an entry to it for each type of mailing you send. Save your changes.
3) Let's crack onto the re-permission form!. Go to the "Collect" menu and create a "Sign-up page" or a "Form".
4) Customise the form at will, ensuring you add a link to your site's terms under "Terms and Conditions". Also make sure to assign the form's "Yes, I agree with your terms" field to the list's field with the same name you created in step 1. If you created a field in your list named "Yes, you can also send me news and special offers" as well (as described in step 2), assign it to the form field with the same name. Deploy the form and copy its sharing link.
5) Almost there! Now let's simply get your re-permission email up and running. Create an email off our templates and choose the "GDPR" design. Customise it at will, making sure to change the button's "Edit subscription" text into "I consent" and adding the form's sharing link to it (you grabbed it in step 4 above).
And you're all set! Anyone in your list who clicks the email's "I consent" button will be taken to the re-permission form pre-populated with their own subscription info - they'll just need to confirm or update it. Before getting the email out the door to the whole list though, run a couple of tests on a handful of your addresses first to be sure you haven't missed anything.
Once you've sent everyone your re-permission campaign, wait for a couple days and create a segment for those contacts who consented. Just go to the "Lists" menu and hit "Contacts" of the list you're reconfirming. Under "What do you want to search for?", click "All fields", choose "Yes, I agree with your terms", select "equal to" and then "You've got my consent". Lastly hit "Apply" to see all your consenters. Save this segment as "Consenters".
Now let's fetch everyone who didn't consent. Easy-peasy! Simply invert the segment you've just created in the previous step. Keep the exact same segmentation criteria but make sure to switch "equal to" into "not equal to" and hit "Apply". Save this segment as "Non-consenters".
That's all there is to it! Wait for 30 days after sending the re-permission campaign and you can then remove all contacts in your "Non consenters" segment. Your list will be squeaky-clean, fully updated, GDPR-ready and pre-segmented to your subscribers' preferences (in case you do multiple-audience sends, as explained in step 2).