Marketing compliance checklist for 2024
The most effective marketing strategies leverage data on consumer behavior and preferences. However, data privacy laws and customer expectations around the handling of their information mean that as marketers, you need to remain compliant if you want your campaigns to help your business in the long term.
Regulatory requirements are numerous and steadily increasing with each new piece of legislation. Using a marketing compliance checklist can help you ensure that your business stays on the right side of the law and that your marketing efforts build customer trust.
In this article, we break down the basics of marketing compliance and give you a step-by-step process to follow to ensure you’re doing all the right things to achieve compliance.
7-step marketing compliance checklists: Quick overview
- Understand data protection laws
- Follow data collection compliance rules
- Ensure informed and explicit consent
- Avoid copyright infringements
- Respect customer preferences
- Audit your compliance process
- Train your marketing team on an ongoing basis
Marketing compliance process explained
Marketing compliance involves ensuring that all of your business’s promotional activities adhere to relevant laws, standards, guidelines, and ethical practices. Adhering to marketing compliance best practices can help you safeguard your brand’s reputation and long-term financial sustainability.
Besides making sure that you understand which laws apply to your organization and how, it’s essential that you regularly audit and evaluate your marketing practices. This not only helps you identify potential issues but also ensures that your strategies align with the latest legal requirements.
Staying on top of evolving legislation minimizes the risks of noncompliance, makes your marketing efforts more effective, and enables you to uphold an excellent brand reputation.
Why is marketing compliance important?
Understanding the importance of marketing compliance from the user perspective can help you to appreciate its broader impact on your business. Here are several reasons why it’s crucial:
- Protecting consumer rights: Adhering to privacy laws protects consumer rights by ensuring their data is used in accordance with their expectations and consent.
- Giving users control: When you’re compliant, you give users more control over their personal data, including the right to access, correct, and delete their information.
- Building trust through transparency: Being compliant ensures that marketing practices are transparent, fostering trust between consumers and brands.
- Enhancing the user experience: Compliant marketing practices consider the preferences and privacy of users, leading to a more personalized user experience.
- Preventing data breaches: Marketing compliance laws implement security measures that help to prevent data breaches and protect user information.
- Reducing spam and unwanted communications: Opt-in and other consent requirements significantly reduce unwanted communications.
- Simplifying cross-border interactions: Compliance makes it easier for users to engage with brands globally, without worrying that their data will be misused.
- Enforcing legal rights: When users know their rights are protected by law and upheld by businesses, they can be more confident in using digital services.
Compliance checklist: 7 marketing practices for success
We’ve developed a checklist that can help you to ensure your marketing efforts meet the highest standards of compliance. It’s designed to guide you through establishing and maintaining practices that align with privacy regulations to protect both your business and your customers.
1. Understand data protection laws
Thoroughly researching and understanding the data privacy laws applicable to your business is essential for enabling marketing compliance. However, the sheer number of regulations and their ever-evolving nature make this a challenge.
Here are some of the most prominent regulations and who they’re applicable to:
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): Protects data privacy in the European Union and affects any company dealing with EU residents.
- Digital Markets Act (DMA): Regulates digital platforms to ensure fair competition within the EU.
- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA): Grants California residents increased control over the personal information that businesses collect about them.
- Canada Anti-Spam Law (CASL): Governs the sending of commercial electronic messages to Canadian consumers.
- Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA): Provides Virginia residents with rights similar to the CCPA, focusing on data privacy and consumer protection.
- Google Consent Mode: Allows website owners to manage how Google services use cookies and data on sites in line with the GDPR.
- Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) v2.2: Designed by IAB Europe to standardize the management of consent and privacy preferences across the advertising industry in the EU.
2. Follow data collection compliance rules
Following compliance rules when collecting data is necessary to protect your customers’ rights as well as earn and maintain their trust.
Your data collection practices must be fair, lawful, and transparent. You should only collect data that is necessary for the explicit and legitimate reasons that you communicate to your customers. Plus, it should only be used for those limited purposes and retained only for as long as is necessary to fulfill those purposes.
In addition, you should ensure the data you collect is accurate and allow users to access, update, or delete it as they wish. Although access should be easy for your customers, you must implement robust security measures to safeguard user data against unauthorized or unlawful processing, as well as accidental loss, destruction, or damage.
3. Ensure informed and explicit consent
Gathering consent is central to data privacy compliance. For your marketing efforts to be compliant, you need to secure explicit consent from current and potential customers. This requires that individuals interacting with your business clearly and affirmatively agree to the processing of their personal data for specific purposes.
It is essential to provide users with a clear and straightforward opt-in mechanism that leaves no room for ambiguity, so they understand exactly what they are agreeing to. You also need to give them equally straightforward opt-out options so they can withdraw their consent as easily as they gave it.
Keep in mind that different marketing channels and platforms — such as emails, apps and websites—may call for distinct approaches to consent. Therefore, be sure to design the consent mechanisms on each of these channels to meet relevant regulatory requirements.
4. Avoid copyright infringements
You need to verify that all content in your marketing campaigns — including text, images, music, and other elements — is either originally created, licensed, or used with permission.
Avoid using branded elements, logos, or any copyrighted assets without explicit authorization. This will help you to not only avoid legal repercussions but also create a more authentic brand image.
5. Respect customer preferences
Respecting customer preferences, such as honoring do-not-call lists and only contacting customers as frequently as they ask you to, will help you to build and maintain customer trust while achieving compliance.
A preference manager is key here, as it can help you to maintain accurate and up-to-date records of customer preferences. This allows customers to easily adjust their settings and ensure that their choices are respected, which helps your business meet their expectations.
In cases where customers have opted-in but contact you to express that they no longer want to receive communications, it’s important to respond politely and remove them from the distribution lists promptly.
6. Audit your compliance process for legal requirements, technology updates, and purpose changes
A comprehensive review and approval process can help you to mitigate compliance risks. Regularly auditing your marketing practices gives you the chance to assess your business’s alignment with evolving legal, operational, and technological standards — and quickly remedy any issues.
Consider the example of the CCPA and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). When the CPRA was introduced, it expanded consumer rights and introduced new data protection requirements, such as the need to provide opt-out options for data sharing. Many businesses had to update their data handling practices and privacy policies to remain compliant with the new regulations.
By continuously monitoring and adjusting your strategies to accommodate these changes, you can maintain the integrity of your marketing activities and ensure they meet current regulatory requirements and user expectations.
7. Train your marketing team on an ongoing basis
Marketing teams need training and resources to understand and apply compliance principles throughout every stage of the marketing process. Keep in mind that marketing compliance isn’t a one-time task, but an ongoing commitment. Regular training sessions help embed data privacy principles into your team’s culture, making compliance a natural part of their daily activities.
Risks of not complying with privacy laws
Noncompliant marketing practices can expose your business to significant risks, including hefty fines, legal battles, severe damage to your brand’s reputation, and loss of consumer trust. Not complying with privacy laws can negatively impact customer loyalty and damage your business’s long-term financial sustainability.
Loss of customer loyalty
Customers have high expectations around data privacy and protection, and failing to meet these expectations can erode consumer trust.
If you don’t incorporate data privacy best practices into your marketing strategy, customers may see your business as negligent or even deceptive. This perception can negatively affect customer loyalty, which will likely decrease a customer’s lifetime value and increase acquisition costs.
For example, a survey conducted by cloud security platform Vercara indicated that 75 percent of consumers would stop doing business with a brand in the wake of a cybersecurity incident.
Damage to reputation
Reputational damage, which is closely linked to customer loyalty, can lead to public distrust, diminished brand value, and reduced revenue. This damage happens when breaches or violations that occur as a result of noncompliance become public scandals—leading to an erosion of customer confidence and deterring potential business.
A well-known example of just how much noncompliance can damage business reputations is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In this incident, the data of millions of Facebook users was improperly used to target political advertisements. This breach of trust not only led to global outrage and increased regulation of Big Tech businesses, but also a significant loss of user confidence.
Fines and legal penalties
Fines and other financial penalties are usually the noncompliance consequences that businesses are most concerned about. Failing to adhere to the requirements of data protection laws such as the GDPR or CCPA can result in fines that reach into the millions, which could potentially debilitate a company.
Beyond monetary penalties, failing to comply with data protection regulations can have severe legal consequences. Plus, legal actions could escalate to criminal penalties, including jail time for executives or those responsible for compliance failures.
Whether civil or criminal, ongoing legal action can put a drain on business resources and lead to long-term damage to a company’s stability and growth.
Disruption to business processes
In some cases, your business might be required to halt certain business functions when it is found to have violated a data privacy law.
Authorities might require a temporary cessation while you resolve compliance issues, or they could put a permanent stop to the affected activities. In either case, there will be an indirect effect on your business’s finances as the resulting downtime leads to revenue loss.
There may be other instances where a regulatory body requires you to delete noncompliant data. This can hinder businesses processes that rely on this information, potentially crippling entire teams and impacting everything from marketing to customer service and, ultimately, business growth.
Loss of access to essential marketing tools
Noncompliance with regulatory frameworks like the DMA or Google Consent Mode can result in losing access to crucial marketing tools.
While the DMA only applies to “gatekeepers” (which includes Google, Meta, and Amazon), the requirements of the Act are often handed down to businesses using their services, such as Google or Facebook ads.
Failing to meet compliance standards could lead to restrictions or even the loss of access to these platforms, which could severely impact marketing efforts and your business’s ability to attract new customers. For instance, without access to tools for personalized ads or retargeting, you may struggle to optimize campaigns, leading to reduced engagement and revenue.
How Usercentrics helps you keep your marketing efforts compliant
Data is an indispensable resource for marketers, as it drives personalization, engagement, and growth. However, handling data responsibly and in compliance with evolving privacy laws is critical to maintaining customer trust and avoiding severe penalties.
Whether you’re implementing cookie banners on your website or figuring out how best to obtain mobile app consent, you need to understand the applicable legal requirements, regularly audit your practices, and obtain informed consent from users before processing their data.
Usercentrics CMP simplifies this process by providing an all-in-one solution for consent management, ensuring your business stays compliant with major regulations like the GDPR, CCPA, and beyond. With Usercentrics, you can confidently manage user data, protect your reputation, and focus on what matters: growing your business.