How Privacy and Data Policies Differ by Country

Working in the marketing or data industry in the global space presents its own challenges. Policies regarding privacy and data will vary country by country, so its best to be familiar with them.

How privacy and data policies differ in europe

Over the last ten years, there’s been much more of a focus on privacy in Europe. In the U.S., CAN-SPAM was the line in the sand and everyone got through that legislation.

But in Europe, there are some really draconian measures that have come out. A lot of companies have corporate data policies driven more out of fear than necessity. These are just some of the current differences in privacy and data handling between the U.S. and the UK. Listen in as Karie Burt, VP International at MeritDirect, explains that and others.

“To my mind there’s become a blurring of business and consumer data.” - Karie Burt

“I’m all for best practices, but I’m also a businessperson and I’m for helping companies grow.” - Karie Burt

B2B Email Marketing Laws by Country: A Guide to Worldwide Laws on B2B Email

Here at EMM we have been deep in research mode to ensure that all our customers are as well informed about worldwide email data legislation as we are. It has been a tough slog through numerous sources but we are confident now that from Afghanistan to Vietnam, and everywhere in between, our knowledge of data legislation is second to none. With the improvements to our B2B International email file, we are now receiving count requests like crazy.

While we are more than happy to run any count requests for our customers or soon to be customers, we receive the following question almost daily: “Is it legal for us to email B2B data in X country?”

Just to clarify here, although we try to be superstars for our customers, we at EMM are not attorneys and we’re definitely not attorneys certified to practice law in 150 countries (not yet anyway!). What we’ve done, through our research, is gather information from various sources around the internet, cited it and made a practical guide by country as it relates to the email prospecting data EMM provides. You will find in this research that South America / Latin America is not yet in our reviewed countries as legislation there is in its infancy. Western Europe and Asia Pacific however are very disparate and this often creates confusion for marketers.

We have tried to ease as much of this confusion as possible by conducting this research. In summary, a handful of countries are expressly “opt in” for B2B email data and should be avoided for B2B prospecting. Really, avoid these countries! Others do not require opt-in if it pertains to the person’s job role and others still resemble the US in terms of requirements.

The European Union has passed a directive recommending opt-in which is not law in member countries. To find out the exact information on the countries we have researched and to download our guide for future reference contact one of our international data experts here for further advice about where your international marketing will find its safest home.

Giving our International Phone Formats a Chance to Follow Their Dreams

Sticking with the international data theme this week, the EMM operations crew have been busy transforming our international phone formats into formats that they dreamed of being back when they first thought about coming to the land of opportunity! Let’s start with a bit of background, US B2B telephone marketing data does not present the same formatting challenge that International B2B marketing data does. This is because the US follows a standard format state to state and county to county, standardizing phone numbers is an easier database task once you know the formatting rules (in which the EMM Operations team are experts of course).

International data however, is very different, and can be a little more difficult when it comes to being used in marketing. International phone data has several different formatting rules for each country so you have to choose the presentation format of the data for the country that it is most consumed in. Our file is built from more than 150 contributing sources, many of which are in separate countries, so we have had to code these rules and convert or append numbers that previously did not meet these requirements.

If this doesn’t make things clear, then take a look at the following example: Original German phone number – 636-48018 If dialed from Germany – (089) 636-48018 If dialed from the US- +49-89-636-48018 If dialed from France- 19-49-89-636-48018 So in an effort to make our international B2B database as accessible as possible, and to allow these records to realize their dream of coming to the US, the team has standardized this database, which includes email, telephone and address information for contacts around the world into “dialed from US” format.

The main benefits, among many, are that the new format changes allow us to match other reference databases with greater frequency and make the phone numbers much more consumable by sales teams.

To find out any more information on the improvements we have made recently to our B2B international file, or to speak with one of our data experts, contact us here.

Or if you would like us to run a free no obligation count for our international database visit us here. But before you do don’t forget to check out our free guide to international data legislation.

Happy Dialing!

Swimming in International B2B Email Data

Have you ever heard the Confucius saying, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”?

Well the Every Market Media CEO, Rick Homes, was trying to do exactly that when he began building our International B2B Email Database. He believed that by developing an International email database he would be able to visit each country we had data in under the guise of “quality control.”

He hasn’t been able to fully execute his plan yet, but if he did, he’d be gone for some time seeing as we currently have an international marketing database of over 24 million records representing over 227 countries!

So, in the mean time, he’s been managing quality control from our headquarters in Chicago and has been doing a great job. Under this management, EMM has been working to take the quality of our International B2B Email Database to the next level.

To make it easier for marketers to reach their international targets we have appended 6 new fields, cleaned up our existing data, and matched our companies, countries and levels. These changes helped us to better round out our international offerings and complete the following updates:

• Appended Revenue, Employees, Company Website, Industry, SIC Code, SIC Code 2, Country and Postal Address where missing
• Created Country Codes for every record with Phone and Fax
• Set individual phones to appropriate minimum and maximum character rules by country
• Filtered out all domestic or invalid countries and contacts
• Standardized Revenue
• Improve the following fields: Job Level, Job Function, Revenue Range, Employee Range, Tier (flag to indicate “Tier 1” records that have all business card data fields available), Threat Level (ImpressionWise threat management ranking for email deliverability)

We are proud to say that out of the over 24 million international B2B Email records we have over 8.5 million international records that contain full business card values. Feel free to contact us to learn more about our International database, receive a quote or a FREE count.