Four things to be aware of when dealing with GDPR

As data privacy regulations continue to evolve, businesses must stay ahead to ensure compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). With enforcement stricter than ever, organizations need to assess how they collect, process, and manage personal data—especially when it comes to their websites and online marketing efforts.

We're taking a look at considerations that every marketer should be aware of in order to effortlessly comply with regulations like GDPR. Remember, it's not just about compliance—it's about building trust.

1. Check your analytics

Website analytics, performance, user profiling, lead scoring—all essential daily tasks for marketers. With regulations like GDPR, there's extra steps that need to be taken to ensure data collection compliance.

Any audience that includes visitors from the European Union needs to first ask for consent to include them in the analytics, profiling, and tracking efforts.

Xperience by Kentico ensures transparency by informing customers about the personal data collected, how it’s processed, and its retention period. It also empowers users to manage and delete personal data in compliance with GDPR’s right to be forgotten.

2. Check your online forms

Online forms may be perfect for gathering additional information from visitors and generating leads, but now it's required to make sure you have permission. Every online form needs to have an option for a visitor to agree with a specific consent regarding the additional use of their submitted data.

A GDPR-compliant consent button should clearly state what data is being collected, how it will be used, and provide a link to the privacy policy. It must require explicit user action (for example, "I agree" or "Accept") and offer an option to decline or manage preferences.

Xperience by Kentico ensures form compliance through the consent agreement form option that can be added and used to track any necessary consent.

3. Check your email marketing

So, now you have a valid consent from your visitors (contacts) and would like to leverage their data to use to personalize your email marketing activities. You need to be 100% sure that you send your marketing emails only to those who agreed to it, with no room for mistakes! According to the GDPR law, if emails are sent without consent, you could owe up to 4% of your company's annual turnover.

The easiest way to manage this is through creating contact groups. By creating a condition-based contact group with specific rules—such as filtering contacts who have explicitly given consent—you ensure compliance and targeted communication, automatically.

These rules can be based on user interactions, form submissions, or preference center selections. When the contact group is updated or rebuilt, you can seamlessly subscribe it to your email campaign, ensuring that marketing emails are sent only to those who have agreed to receive them.

This approach not only helps maintain regulatory compliance but also improves engagement by reaching an audience that is genuinely interested in your content.

4. Check your marketing automation

Time is valuable, so what can be automated should be automated. But even automation has its limits—especially under GDPR. If you don’t have consent to use a visitor’s data in your campaigns, your marketing automation must either exclude the contact entirely or stop if consent is revoked.

One of the most effective ways to manage this is by applying rules that check for valid consent. These can be used in marketing automation triggers to ensure processes only start when the contact has agreed to a specific consent. Similar rules can also verify within automation steps that consent hasn’t been revoked.

This approach seamlessly manages consent within your marketing automation, ensuring processes run only when valid consent is in place.

Get peace of mind with a CMS that simplifies security compliance

Ensuring compliance with GDPR and other data privacy regulations is a critical challenge for businesses managing digital experiences. A modern CMS plays a key role in data protection, handling personal information, user interactions, and marketing data. The right platform offers built-in compliance tools to help businesses meet privacy laws effectively.

Xperience by Kentico simplifies GDPR compliance with features designed to manage user data securely and transparently. With consent management, data protection controls, and advanced security settings, businesses can confidently handle personal data while meeting regulatory requirements. Xperience by Kentico’s flexible integrations support a broader data protection strategy, extending privacy measures beyond the website.

Learn how to navigate data privacy regulations beyond GDPR and ensure your CMS is up to the task with our blog, Building trust through compliance.

Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes only. We recommend consulting a lawyer for legal advice on GDPR compliance.