Our Email Marketing Promise
Here at Bel UK, owners of Port Salut, we always want to engage with our fans and consumers in an honest and transparent manner, and we always seek to put their interests at the heart of what we do.
If you choose to trust us with your data, then as well as sharing competitions, coupons and other offers with you we also promise the following:
1. We will always be completely clear about how we use your data.
To this end we have outlined below the key points below. If anything makes you uncomfortable – then you can either unsubscribe, or contact us about anything specific you would like to object to.
2. We will not bombard you with emails.
There is no regular newsletter which we send for the sake of it, and we won’t repeatedly email you the same information. Instead, we will send emails when we actually have something of interest to tell you. It may be (for example) new products, special events, or of course, competitions, coupons and other offers.
3. Your feedback matters
If you have any feedback on the emails we send – we’d love to hear it (good and bad). Whether its the frequency, the content, the offers or anything else, any comments are welcome. Please contact us via any of the available channels and ask for your comments to be passed onto the marketing team.
How do we use your data?
We have summarised the common uses of your data below. If we were to use your data for any other reasons, it would be either with your explicit consent, or as a result of a legal requirement.
1. We will send you emails we think you’ll be interested in!
It goes without saying really doesn’t it… but it is worth highlighting that the more you engage with certain types of content – you should find that over time you see more relevant content. All that is going on here when this happens, is that we are segmenting our email lists into groups of people who have shown certain preferences.
It’s all done by applying generic rules to the data we have in our email marketing systems (e.g. all people who clicked on recipe content may go in a “recipe lovers” segment). No one is analysing what *you* specifically as an individual has been looking at.
2. Trusted 3rd parties may be given access to your data
When we do this it is generally in order to provide the service you have signed up for, and / or to help us improve the services. These suppliers are vetted by us, and have contractual agreements in place ensuring that they only use the data for the specific purposes we have directed. Examples include:
Technology providers providing a service to Bel and / or yourself – e.g. a provider of coupons like Shopmium, or an email marketing tool like Mailchimp
Externally sourced Customer service and social media community management teams (typically the first point of contact when you contact us)
Marketing / PR agencies managing our email marketing and / or associated promotions.
There is one notable exception to the rule that the sharing is to provide or enhance the service we provide to you – which is detailed in point 3 below….
3. We use data to improve our paid digital advertising
When you join our mailing list you indicate to us that you are interested in our brands or products, and quite obviously, we would like to find more people like you!
Partners such as Facebook & Google enable us to build “lookalike audiences”. This involves passing our email data to those companies, who in turn build a profile of traits common to our subscribers. We can then use these profiles to target people with similar traits.
What does this mean for you?
You are one among many: the minimum amount of data we would use to build a lookalike audience is about 5,000. emails, but typically it’s a lot more than this.
Your data is secure: Data is “hashed” before being transferred to e.g. Google or Facebook – allowing for anonymous matching of your data to the data already held by those companies.
No one else can use the data: Data passed to third parties in this way may only be used for the purpose of building lookalike audiences, for use by Bel, and not for any other purpose, or by any other party (including e.g. Facebook / Google).
You are excluded from the “lookalike audiences”: Because you were part of the original audience – you are specifically excluded from the lookalike audience – so you won’t even suddenly see lots more ads from us.
Do you need to provide your consent?
We believe that you do not need to provide explicit consent, but that we do need to tell you about it and enable you to object to the usage.
This is in line with the new EU legislation on privacy (GDPR) which states that we may rely on a “Legitimate interest” in using your data where there is limited / no impact on the individual, and a tangible benefit for the company.
We believe this applies as you will not see any additional advertising, and your data will be “hashed” before being transferred.
However we are making this information available to you so that you may either inform us you do not wish your data to be used in this way, or simply unsubscribe from the mailing list at any time.