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

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 have three primary concepts you should be familiar with - "Subscription type", "Legal basis" and "Consent".

Subscription types are a modern version of the classic "email lists" used in older email applications. People who have given you consent to a subscription type are your subscribers.

A subscription type describe a certain type of information your organization will be sending out - this could be marketing information, news, opening hours, shareholder information, or basically any type of information that makes sense for your organization.

When your contacts give you consent to communicate with them, the consent is tied to a specific type of information - a specific subscription type. The contact can give you consent for as many or as few subscription types as they like, and can change or revoke them at any time, to inform you about what type of information they want to receive.

By default, every organization in MarketHype will have a single subscription type called "Marketing". Because every organization is unique, you are free to add as many subscription types as you need, to fit your organizations' needs. Setting up subscription types is the topic of a separate article.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), organizations need a lawful reason to communicate with a contact, and must keep records of consent and the legal basis for that consent. When a 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 make sure 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 "freely given" is an explicit consent, where the contact have actively given you a consent - eg. by signing up through a newsletter signup form, or by explicitly accepting marketing as part of a purchase checkout.

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

Consents given on the "legitimate interest" basis are implicit consents where the contact did not actively give you a 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. To fit your organization's needs, you can configure validity time for your legitimate interest consents. When a contact's legitimate interest consent is passed its validity time, 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 communication automatically, unless they have additional valid consents for the given subscription type.

A consent in MarketHype parlance refers to a specific consent to communication, obtained by you from a contact for a specific type of information (subscription type) and on a specific legal basis.

For each consent you receive, we keep a record of when you received it, how it was obtained, and exactly what the consent was for. From these consents we infer who you are allowed to communicate with at any given time, and what type information you can lawfully send them. These records also become a legal trail, where you can show exactly why you were allowed to send a certain type of information to a contact, at any given time.

As important as it is to obtain consent before communicating with your contacts, as important is it to respect when a contact no longer want to receive your information.

At any point in time, a contact can revoke a previously given consent, such as when they unsubscribe from your emails. As soon as a contact revoke a consent for a subscription type, the contact will no longer receive any information of that type, unless they actively opt-in to the subscription type again with a freely given consent.

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