The best practices that people should be adhering to GDPR - with Sean Rogers of My Legal Club

You decide to get any form of advice or outsource anything to anyone. I think it doesn't matter what service or sector it's in, I think it's good. Do some free research. The ICO website, whatever you think of this government, I suppose, as well, the government website has plenty of information on it and that gives you a real good starting point, like say, under no circumstances, product information. Go to some of the real big websites, go to some of your competitors, have a look at what they're doing, what they're not doing. We offer, we'll be launching, I think, a brilliant GDPR product very shortly. We want to try and offer people the ability to do a quick sort of online assessment, which will be free, so that people can use a sort of traffic light system, see where they're up to on compliance, and then we'll have a range of different products to support them if they want to outsource. We're going to make sure there's plenty of free information on there for people who just want to digest that and do it themselves. Absolutely no issues with that whatsoever. People want to do the free assessments, they can then with us, purchase Data Audit Report as an example, which will give them a list of things that they need to put in place to make sure that it's operational. And it would be easy for them, I think, to do that themselves if they then want to. And that's. I'm not doing that myself. It's a top law firm that I'm using, but I've convinced them to actually charge reasonable prices for once. So you'll be getting absolutely top quality service from leading GDPR lawyers, but at unbelievable prices. And then if you want the law firm to do the work for you again, I've crunched the numbers with them and it is really affordable. I'm just putting the final pieces to it before we launch. So we've got links to insurers, directors and officers, cover all sorts of stuff where if you want to go belts and braces on it from a GDPR point of view, we're literally talking about a couple of emails and a lot less than £1,000. We're talking in the hundreds here for a full solution provided by a law firm. Alternatively, people will be able to use our site and the free assessments as a bit of a resource kit for those that would prefer to do it themselves.

Your website in the past book directly in thepastbooking.com Airbnb, XBD, however you get them. That doesn't mean that you can then add them to your email list and start sending them emails. Now. What are the best common practices that people should be adhering to with this? Sean, moving forward, in a post GDPR.

World, if you're using someone big, let's say you use mailchimp or something equivalent to mailchimp, for example, they're really good at having like the unsubscribe or opt out options in there. But I'm still seeing stuff from other companies that don't use that kind of product who are not including an obvious opt out. The other mistake that people make is that it doesn't matter what service you're using really, but you might have an existing client, for example, and then actually you're perfectly entitled to email them about whatever that product is. Perfect example. I'm sat on a train station right now, so I booked some train tickets with Virgin and they're perfectly entitled to text me to say reminder about your train tomorrow, reminder that train is here, your train has been delayed as per usual with Virgin or whatever. What they can't then do unless I've opted in is start sending me text messages or emails two days later to say that they're offering a discount on services to London or they've got a new line going to Leeds or whatever it be. That's where people are making big mistakes on gdpr. Adding people into their list where they've been a client or a former client and then things are gained. The problem with this without scaring anybody is you only have to type GDPR into Google and all you are going to see at the top is lawyers. Now it's happened over the last eight weeks. Look, we value gdpr. Seriously. We want to make sure that you've all opted in, you've got the ability to opt out. We want to keep sending you all these great offers and services. If you're not happy, please hit the unsubscribe button and then you've got a cleanse sorted straight away.

I think this is the cool thing about mailchimp. Free to get signed up. It's super transparent. So as soon as you're on the signup form of Mailchimp, it gives you that very visible tick box. And Mailchimp has drastically changed in the last 12 months. And I speak as somebody who not only uses it, but I show the people how to use it. You know, you know what, you're on our email list. Can we still email you? If not, here's an unsubscribe button click that you won't hear from us again.

I was going to say the other thing, of course is that if you're providing value, if you're providing people on your email list with great value and you're not pestering them so they're not getting an email every two hours, then weirdly you're not going to have any problems. Are you in essence at the time.

Of the year now where all of those emails that you, all those channels that you subscribe to maybe a year ago are going to start bombarding you with sales email. You were coming up to Black Friday sales Cyber Monday. We've got all the Christmas ones. It's that time of the year that I love to do a spring clean of who's going to pepper my inbox with sales emails. But you're 100% spot on. If you take a different light to email marketing and you instead of just sending email to your guests or potential guests with sell, sell, sell and maybe start to talk about the local area.