You have all probably been receiving a lot of emails lately with this EU ‘GDPR’ business and wondering what that might be? Well, allow me to explain in my limited capacity of what this whole debacle is all about.
As the world of the internet is growing and at a rapid pace at that, you have probably started to see that we are constantly bombarded by the offering of things, like ads really. A huge example of that is Facebook ads and random emails from companies you have never heard of. What has been increasingly annoying is that a lot of what you are seeing or are getting emails for are probably things that you did not ask to see, nor wish to receive an email from and chances are that you would like it to stop. But even if you unsubscribe sometimes they just keep emailing you anyway. Sound familiar?
So the EU put a law together, this GDPR thing, stating that for all businesses operating in the EU, you now have to send out an email to all of your supposed EU supporters and have them manually ‘opt-in’ to continue receiving emails from your company. And the cutoff date to do this by is May 25th. Therefore, you have probably seen an influx of emails asking for this. Now what does this mean to ‘opt-in’ or to ‘opt-out’ or do nothing? Let’s see.
–‘Opting-in’ — This means that you manually choose to continue receiving emails from the company that you are opting in to.
–‘Opting-out’ — This means that you no longer wish to receive anything from the company that you are opting out of and if you opt out, they cannot legally write you again unless you were to subscribe yourself at a later point in time.
— Doing nothing — this is exactly like opting out. You HAVE TO OPT IN if you want to hear again from the company.
Why opt in or opt out?
Pretty sure this is self-explanatory but I will spell it out just in case. If you are receiving emails from a company that you neither like nor asked to receive emails from then chances are you should either opt out or do nothing. But opting out is probably better as I am sure that there will be ways around the doing nothing bit.
If you are receiving emails from a company that you like to hear from, then you should ‘opt-in’ as doing nothing will make it so that they cannot email you further after this Friday. I know that it is easy to get an email and then just disregard it but remember what it means if you do nothing.
Who does this effect?
For the moment this only applies to people living in the EU. If you live outside of the EU, then companies can continue to write you as they please. But it is rumored that this will soon be a worldwide law so other countries to come soon.
Why is opting-in good?
Well if you like the company, chances are that by accepting to receive emails you will be the first to know of exclusives, new collections, sales, events etc. A company loves their likes on IG, or Facebook but really shows their power by how big their newsletter recipient list is. And most of them like to reward that for those that subscribe. As a company owner, I can say that I always reward the people that subscribe via email more so then I would an IG or FB ‘liker’.
That being don’t disregard these emails from the companies that you wish to hear from as doing nothing only means you won’t hear from them again.
If you are a subscriber of J.FitzPatrick Footwear or The Shoe Snob Shop (the blog is not apart of this so not to worry) and or wish to be (or don’t), you can either opt-in or out at the link below
https://mailchi.mp/jfitzpatrickfootwear/still-wishing-to-hear-the-latest-from-us
I hope that this has helped many of you
Sincerely,
Justin, ‘The Shoe Snob’
Random shoe photos for you:
