Starting from May 2018, organisations that collect personal data of EU citizens must become compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As an SDR, I asked myself: “Will GDPR affect cold emailing?”.

After reviewing dozens of blog posts and articles, I believe that GDPR will affect cold emailing, so it’s better to ask how GDPR will change it? Here are a few things that we might need to know:

1. You should have a good enough reason to email a prospect, target and segment your campaigns, customize and personalize your email. Source.

2. Another answer on Quora tells that it’s better to decrease the number of follow-ups to personal addresses of employees (e.g. firstName.lastName@companyName.com) and think about a stronger use of general addresses (e.g info@companyName.com)

3. According to this source, it is recommended to decrease the number of data elements collected for lead generation  like call recordings; email open tracking; link click tracking.

4. It is also important to add an unsubscribe link in your emails.

5. Stopusing tricky subject lines and selling in the initial email outreach.

6. Make sure that you send emails to carefully chosen people/companies and they fit your Ideal Company Profile.

7. Make sure that email with a request for consent does not directly promote your commercial content and that it is targeted at the person you are sending it to.