If you’re an admin for your marketing automation tools, you probably got an email recently letting you know their legal policies have been updated to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), among other things. This means, if you use these platforms, not only do you need to be more responsible about how you acquire, store and use contact data, but getting your contacts to opt-in is now law, so emailing them via mass emails without their opting in will result in fines.
Communicating To Your Channel Partners
Just because you’ve recruited a Partner doesn’t mean they lead with your technology when they meet with their customers. This makes communicating to your Partners and sharing your value incredibly important! But these new regulations make doing so a little more challenging, so be sure to:
Recruitment Just Got More Interesting!
Interesting and challenging! In the past you could simply buy a list or work with a company to source a list, based on the type of Partner you were going after and just start calling or emailing them, begging them to become your Partner. Now you can’t even think about buying a list without swearing on your first-born child that you won’t spam them. In fact if you even try to load the list into a marketing automation tool you have to jump through several hoops to prove you’ve gotten each contact’s consent and they actually want to hear from you. If you make it past all of these hurdles and do send an email to someone who hasn’t consented you’d better hope they don’t live in EMEA or California because the fines are no joke.
Welcome to the New World of Email Regulations.
So how should you recruit? The way we’ve proven time and time again to not just recruit new Partners but also engage your existing Partners is to leverage a channel executives LinkedIn/Twitter/Reddit profiles and get them engaging Partners. We’ve done this on behalf of many executives and the results are astounding. Happy to walk anyone through the process, no obligation!
Demand Generation “Through”
While a huge fine may not terribly affect your business; if your Channel Partners get fined $30/per contact, it could crush theirs. Or at the very least, scare them so much that they stop all email related marketing activity.
My question to you is, if the CCPA is regulating how your Partners’ contacts are acquired, stored, and used, how can a Partner load their contacts into a marketing automation tool that you, the Vendor, pay for and license without breaking CCPA regulations? Even if they’ve gotten those contacts to opt-in, the simple act of loading their list to your TCMA compromises their data.
Some say, “That’s OK, they can just customize and download the content into their own marketing automation tool.” But then how will you track their activity, let alone ROI or leads?
As you can imagine, we’re starting to have interesting conversations, and we’ve got some very illuminating information we’ll be sharing soon. Contact us if you want a sneak peek!
How should you help Partners? Give them more hands on support so they can leverage their own tools, clean opt-in lists, and send your killer content.
Things are heating up in the Channel and we’re excited to help you drive more business. Check out our new podcast and if you’re going to B2B Marketing Exchangeplease come say hi!