If you receive a question from a customer about the compliance of your direct marketing consent collection practices, don’t worry Dataships have you covered. Every time a customer interacts with a Dataships consent collection mechanism, Dataships creates a compliance log of the interaction to keep a record of what information the customer was presented with, what choice they made and the justification for their eventual status of marketable or non-marketable. These compliance logs contain all the necessary information including:
- Customer name and email address
- Time and date stamp
- The consent mechanism presented to the customer (opt-in, opt-out etc)
- The customer’s choice of interaction with the consent mechanism
- The privacy policy presented at the time
- The marketing information text presented at the time
- Their eventual marketable status and the justification for this.
The compliance logs are updated anytime an existing verified contact’s status changes, for e.g. if they unsubscribe or if they buy something from your store again and are presented with a Dataships consent collection mechanism again. These audit ready logs are available in the Dataships Control Panel should you ever need to respond to a query from a customer or data protection authority. You can log in to your Dataship Control Panel on the Dataships website. This video also goes through the information presented in the Compliance logs.
So how to respond to your customer?
- Share the compliance log with the customer including the marketing information presented to them at the time informing them of their right to object and the contact email address.
- Again inform customer of their right to object to the processing of their data for direct marketing purposes – all they have to do is one of the below:
- tick the opt-out box presented in the course of the sale (if they were presented with an opt-out checkbox)
- click the unsubscribe link in any marketing email
- or send an email to the contact email address highlighted in the marketing information presented to them at the time of the sale and in the privacy policy.
And inform them that once they have opted out their data will no longer be processed for direct marketing purposes.