GDPR

Your lawful basis is yours

To contact someone for business purposes you need a lawful basis. For B2B outreach to a corporate address that is usually legitimate interests, which requires you to balance your interest against the recipient's rights and to be able to show you did.

No software can establish that basis for you, and any vendor claiming their product makes you compliant is overstating it. What a product can do is make the balancing easier to argue: contacting people you are already connected to, at a moment when the message is relevant, in low volume, is a considerably better position than bulk messaging strangers.

What the product does to help

• Opt-outs are honoured automatically. When a reply is classified as an opt-out, that person is suppressed on every channel immediately, without waiting for review.
• Suppression records are never deleted, because deleting them would risk contacting somebody who has already objected.
• Every automated action is recorded in an audit log, which is what you need if you ever have to demonstrate what happened and when.
• Contact data comes from your own connections rather than a purchased list, so there is a real relationship behind the processing.
• Volume is capped by design, which supports a proportionality argument in a way that unlimited sending does not.

PECR, which is separate from GDPR

The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations govern electronic marketing in the UK and apply in addition to UK GDPR.

For email, marketing to a corporate subscriber is permitted without prior consent, but every message needs a working opt-out and you must honour it. For messages to a sole trader or a partnership, consent rules are stricter.

For WhatsApp, Meta requires prior opt-in before a business may start a conversation. The product therefore restricts WhatsApp to people who have already replied, rather than using it for prospecting.

Data subject requests

If one of your contacts asks what data you hold, you are the controller and the request is yours to answer. The product holds everything about that person in one place, so producing it is straightforward.

If a request reaches us directly, we pass it to you and help you answer it. Email hello@outreachconvert.com.

What we would not claim

Using this product does not make you GDPR compliant, and we will not say that it does. It is a tool that makes several of the obligations easier to meet and makes the record-keeping automatic. The lawful basis, the targeting decisions and the content of what you send remain yours.