With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect for all businesses who process the data of EU citizens on 25th May 2018, there’s a rush for businesses to quickly get their lead capture forms and landing pages compliant with the new policy.
We’ve made some changes to the Squeeze Page Toolkit software to make it much easier to ensure that you’re compliant with collecting your leads. The changes have been made to our Form Builder (click the link to find out more about how the Form Builder works).
GDPR Template Pack and Guidance
If you’d like help with your GDPR policy templates, then UK small business lawyer Suzanne Dibble has created some excellent resources to help you become compliant. You can purchase her GDPR templates and guides*, which includes suitable privacy policies AND video training to help you ensure that your business is compliant.
GDPR and Explicit Consent when collecting leads
A big part of the GDPR policy is about getting informed explicit and granular consent from your prospects, so that they know what you’re going to do with their personal data (definition on ICO website is here).
For landing pages and popups, the personal data we collect will usually include name, email address and telephone number. Since we’re then collecting email addresses to add someone to our email list, then we also need to get the prospect’s permission to allow us to continue emailing them.
When GDPR talks about informed explicit consent, this fundamentally means that we need to make it really clear to a prospect that they are choosing how we can process their data. Or, when it comes to landing pages, they have to choose to receive emails from us. This means we cannot have pre-ticked boxes nor rely on implied consent for them to receive emails.
There’s a lot more to GDPR than just an updated privacy policy, there’s a big shift in how businesses are now allowed to process data. We’ve not got the expertise to advise you on this, but we can show you how to make the changes to your landing pages and popups to ensure they comply with what’s needed for GDPR. (This is why we recommend you take a look at Suzanne Dibble’s free 2 hour training and template pack* to properly understand all of this).
An example form using the Form Builder
Using the Squeeze Page Toolkit Form Builder, you can add the following elements that helps a landing page become compliant.
- A tickbox so that a prospect can give their consent
- An area to link to the privacy policy for your business
Here’s an example signup box that we have for the Squeeze Page Toolkit trial account signup:
You’ll see a tickbox (that’s not pre-ticked), and a statement underneath the Signup Button linking to the privacy policy. Yes, there’s a lot of text there, and yes, it might put prospects off. However, it’s what we need to be compliant.
The exact wording you use will be up to you and your business. Typically you wouldn’t make the tickbox a required field as consent needs to be ‘freely given’, however, we have as we specifically need to send a few emails to a new trial account user so that they can use their account. This is why you need to investigate what you need to do for YOUR business that’s compliant with GDPR.
How to use the Squeeze Page Toolkit Form Builder for your forms
Step 1 – Create your form
Create your form in the usual way following the Form Builder instructions
Step 2 – Customise the privacy message underneath the form button
When editing a form, you can see the ‘Privacy Message Text‘ in the form settings. Change this text to suit your needs and update the link to refer your GDPR-compliant privacy policy on your website.
Step 3 – Add a checkbox to your form, and customise the message
This is where you start breaking down what consent you want to request from your prospects, which means you might have more than one checkbox.
Step 4 – Update the rules and mapping as needed
Ideally, we need to store details of permission being given. This is really easy with tools such as Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign. You can store permission in one of two ways (you can do both if you wish)
- On Field Mappings (this means you can create a Custom Field in your CRM for the data to be stored)
- Or apply a tag (this is our preferred approach as you can do further processing in your CRM more easily). This is the version we’re showing below.
Need help?
Whilst we’ve made things as easy as possible, please feel free to contact the support team if you’re stuck. Unfortunately we’re not able to offer any advice on GDPR, but we can help with your landing pages and forms.
*Affiliate Links
We’ve linked to Suzanne Dibble’s free 2 hour training and template pack above using an affiliate link. If you choose to purchase the template pack from her, then we do earn a small commission. We strongly recommend Suzanne’s GDPR pack, as it’s comprehensive, informed and high quality. We’ve used her pack for our own businesses because it offers so much value.
