Keeping track of marketing consent is an important part of your marketing communication. Respecting your customers' wishes in terms of marketing is important, not only for legal reasons but also to maintain a healthy and long-lasting relationship with them.

To keep track of what type of information you can send to which contacts and what legal reason you have to send that type of information, MarketHype has three primary concepts you should be familiar with: "Consent," "Legal basis," and "Subscription type."

In MarketHype language, "consent" refers to the specific permission to communicate that you obtained from a contact for a particular type of information and based on a specific legal basis.

For each consent you receive, we keep a record of when you received it, how it was obtained, and the specific purpose of the consent. From these records, we can determine who you are permitted to communicate with at any given time and what kind of information you are legally allowed to send them. These records also serve as a legal trail, demonstrating exactly why you were permitted to send a certain type of information to a contact at any given time.

It's crucial to obtain consent before communicating with your contacts, and it's equally important to respect their decision if they no longer want to receive your information.

A contact can withdraw their consent at any time, for instance, by unsubscribing from your emails. Once consent is withdrawn for a specific subscription, the contact will no longer receive any information related to that subscription unless they choose to opt in again with their consent.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), organizations must have a lawful reason to communicate with a contact and must keep records of consent and the legal basis for that consent. When consent is recorded in MarketHype, it is always recorded on one of two legal bases—"freely given" or "legitimate interest."

By storing both the subscription type and the legal basis for each consent, MarketHype can help you ensure that your contacts receive the right type of information for as long as they want it and for as long as you have the lawful right to send it to them.

A consent given with the legal basis of "freely given" is an explicit consent. This means that the contact has actively given consent, for example, by signing up through a newsletter form or explicitly accepting marketing during a purchase checkout.

In Markethype, consents given on the "freely given" basis are valid until further notice. The contact can revoke the consent at any time if they no longer wish to receive certain types of information from you.

Consents given on the "legitimate interest" basis are implicit consents where the contact did not actively give you consent but showed an interest in you or your organization by buying a product from you, for instance.

In MarketHype, consents given on the "legitimate interest" basis are valid for a limited amount of time. For how long you can consider having consent to communicate on a "legitimate interest" basis depends on many different things, and is unique to your organization.

You can configure the validity time for your legitimate interest consent to fit your organization's needs. Once a contact's legitimate interest consent has expired, you will no longer be allowed to communicate with them on the basis of that consent, and the contact will be filtered out of future marketing communication automatically unless they have additional valid consent for the given subscription type.