New email privacy laws, such as GDPR, are changing the way we should be collecting and using email addresses.

One of the main focuses of such legislation is that email consent must be intentionally given (ie. expressed consent).

This means that you should not bundle a contact's "consent to email" within your business's general terms of services or conditions.

Email consent should be handled separately which is why we have introduced the 'Email Consent' feature that you can enable under your admin settings.

By default, this setting is disabled in all accounts and must be enabled if you wish to start using it.

When you enable this feature, you will now have two checkboxes visible on your MV product opt-in/purchase forms:

We know this may introduce some complexity (and perhaps, overwhelm) for you but rest assured that we have tried very hard to make it easy for you to adopt these standards and features without much headache.

In short, all you need to do is:

Below are the specific steps for enabling this feature in your MV account.

Now you'll be able to collect expressed email consent from each user who joins your product directly through your MV Site.

To adjust the wording for the email consent checkbox:

By default, the message will read "Yes, I'd like to receive your emails. Please add me to your email list." You can revise this message to be more on-brand for your business but we highly recommend keeping this message clear and short. Do not try and hide the fact that you are asking for expressed email consent.

Once you have enabled the email consent feature, MV will start tracking each person's consent choice within a Consent Log.

You can view the Consent Log for your account by logging into your account and going to Users > Consent Log.

From here, you will be able to see:

The final step for using MV's email consent feature is to communicate appropriate tags to your email service using Actions.

This will allow you to monitor consent within your email service so that you are accurately honoring the wishes of your contacts.

To set up your email consent tags:

Within your email service, your MV users will now be tagged with the appropriate consent tag and you can use this data to segment your contacts based on whether or not you have received their expressed consent to send them emails.

Note: If someone declines email consent, under various legislation like GDPR, you are able to send them an initial welcome/confirmation from your email service to ensure they have the information needed for the specific product they've just joined (ie. login details, etc.)

After a user has joined their first product via your MV Site, their consent preferences are logged in the consent log so MV is aware of their initial choice.

The next time the user opts into or purchases another product from your MV Site, they will see whether or not they have either previously given consent or not.

If the user originally declined consent by not checking the email consent checkbox, they will see the email consent box again and have the ability to give consent.

If the user gave consent previously, MV will replace the email consent checkbox with a message telling them that consent has already been received but that they can update their preference via their profile.

If the user wishes to update their consent (either to give or decline), they can do so by going to their Profile area under their user menu.

There they will see a 'Consent to Email' setting that they can set to either 'Yes' or 'No' based on their preference.

When the user updates their email consent preference under their User Profile, the Consent Log will record the update. This update by the user will also trigger the corresponding tag that you've set up under your Action settings.

Note: MV does not have the ability to remove tags from a contact's profile in your email service if/when they update their consent preference at the time of joining a new product or making the change directly from within their User Profile. This means that contact in your email service could potentially end up with both a consent is given & a consent declined tag. Please consider this when setting up your processes for managing email consent within your email service.

As with ANY new addition to your workflow, we recommend testing this with a test email/user account you have to ensure you have a strong understanding and comfort for how everything will work once set up.

It is up to you to manage the consent preferences of your users/contacts - so please also make sure that you test the processes you put in place in your email service to ensure they function as intended and you are honoring the wishes of your people.

Do you use an email service that MV does not currently integrate with?

We understand that a fair number of our users rely on our Zapier App to connect to their email service if they use a service other than the ones we integrate with.

You now have the ability pass tags to your email service using Zapier, which allows you to make full use of our email consent feature AND be able to track user engagement via tags.

***disclaimer***None of the above constitutes legal advice. If you are unsure what legislation and policies apply to your business and what practices you need to employ to be compliant, please contact your legal counsel.

Questions? Reach out to us at hello@membervault.co, via chat support within your Admin account (available to paid users), or connect with other users within our FB Group, The MV Collaborative.

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