What NOT to do with your emails
So today we received an email from Experian of all people – who should know better I think we’d all agree!
They managed to copy in our address and 512 other peoples into the CC field! Meaning that 511 people now have our email address that we didn’t voluntarily give out!
Equally we now have access to 511 company director’s emails!
This breaks so many data protection rules it isn’t even funny! We would guess that someone at Experian will very soon be being called into an office for a very stern conversation!
There is a lesson to be learned here
So taking this unfortunate Experian lesson on board, what should you do?
Well there are many services that allow you to create custom, good-looking, well-designed emails that will NEVER make this mistake as they send each email individually therefore meaning that NO ONE will ever see who else was copied in.
There are services out there like MailChimp which a lot of people use and like, yes it costs you a bit of money to send an email but you will NEVER have a data protection issue – each and every company on this list of 512 who have now had their data illegally shared can pursue legal action against Experian!
We personally prefer to use Campaign Monitor which is excellent and allows you a lot of freedom with customising your emails and setting up specific subscriber lists. So, if you run a newsletter or want to send out regular updates to your clients then we cannot recommend a better system.
We would also encourage you, if you are a business that collects data and sends out emails, to construct or find a halfway decent privacy policy on your website so anyone visiting can read it and know what rules you adhere to.
If you would like any help or advice on marketing emails, design, data collect or email list management, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help!
