Your marketing needs to be consensual now (Thanks, GDPR!)

In our team, we have regularly looked at the GDPR and felt confused or frustrated in recent months. To lighten the mood though one of engineers (Joao) made a typo and renamed our Slack channel to #grpd. Adam, one of our designers, also suggested that GDPR is really short for “Giving Data Privacy Rights”.

A little trolling has never been a bad thing.

If you have felt anything like this in recent months, we’re hoping that we can lighten your load a little. You have a business to run and you need to wrap up your GDPR compliance without fuss.

We have already updated CM Commerce with new features and tools to help you with your GDPR compliance. And we leveraged our email receipt superpowers to give you an exclusive tool to ensure you get consent from customers to send them post-purchase emails.

tl;dr We’ve got your back on the email front.

Now the elephant in room is on-site tracking

In addition to email marketing, the GDPR has wide-reaching implications for other forms of marketing, especially where any personal information is involved and stored or used in subsequent marketing campaigns. If your website visitor or customer does not consent to this, then you should not track them or store any of their details.

What does this mean in human terms? You can’t add browser cookies for the user or do things like retargeting if your customer has not explicitly consented to this.

We’re not legal experts, but believe it’s safe to say that this potentially has far-reaching implications to any of your online marketing tools that has previously relied on tracking visitor/customer behaviour and/or used cookies to do so.

When CM Commerce first noticed the elephant in our room, we realised that our software too leveraged an on-site tracking script to track your conversions and improve your product recommendation algorithm.

We couldn’t do that without proper consent anymore. So we built something to make you a better (and more consensual) marketer.

Introducing Cooki. Our new, free app to help you get proper consent (before you do something that can get you in trouble).

Cooki is not unlike the “EU Cookie Banner” apps that you have seen in the last year or two. It’s a simple banner notification app that notifies your visitors and customers that they are being tracked and cookie’d.

There are two major differences with Cooki though:

1. We will actually log the consent for you. So if you ever had to prove someone’s consent, you can do so. (“Better safe, than sorry”, my mom always said.)
2. When a visitor or customer declines the consent, we will actually switch off any on-site tracking (i.e. the tracking script CM Commerce uses for conversions & the recommendation algorithm).

Let’s see Cooki in action:

On top of the sweetness in that video, we have included simple text snippets in the app to help you update your Privacy Policy to explain which data you are storing and using for them via CM Commerce. Simply copy+paste that and we can assure that at least one part of your Privacy Policy is GDPR-compliant (and CM Commerce’ified).

Oh, did I emphasise that Cooki is free for anyone to use today?

How about your other apps though? What are they doing about tracking, cookies and consent?

We have also built Cooki in the most open way possible and we would love to see other apps within the ecosystem stand on our shoulders. To do this, we have built a super-simple (yet powerful) API which any app provider can use to check whether the visitor / customer has declined consent. If they have done so, those other apps too can be GDPR-compliant by switching off their on-site tracking and cookie’ing.

If you are using an app on your store that does any kind of on-site tracking, you will want them to leverage Cooki ASAP. The best way to get them to do that, is to send them a link to this article and ask them to contact us on [email protected].

We want you to be GDPR compliant, stay out of trouble and build a huge, successful business. So we will work with any partners that wants to tap into some Cooki awesomeness. You just need to convince them that it’s in their best interest to do the same that we have done. It is, after all, about you and your business. 🙂

Cooki is available immediately. Go here to get your free account today.

Video music: https://www.bensound.com