The launch of ESco Connect

On Friday 9^th March, we had the pleasure of holding the first ESco Connect Event, our GDPR and Update Day, where over fifty of our partners attended.

In the morning we heard Simon from our third-party consultant Opt-4 talk on the new data laws coming into play on 25th May this year and how these will specifically affect publishers.

We then all chatted over a delicious spread of sandwiches and cakes, with our publishers, ESco team members and ESco’s partnering third parties.

In the afternoon, the ESco team presented on how we’re dealing with GDPR and how we’re working with Opt-4 to provide standard templates and guidance for all of our clients. We talked about how we can build a preference centre to align marketing preferences across our clients’ data integrating with 3^rd parties to ensure synchronisation across all data pools.

We also talked though data breaches, the importance of following the rules and how we can help to ensure our clients and their teams are always complying to GDPR rules when undertaking new developments and changes. We summarised the ESco GDPR section by presenting the different ways that ESco could help our clients become GDPR client:

• ESco will provide clients with signed off and standardised:
  • Consent statements
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookie Policy
• ESco will help our clients by:
  • Keeping a log of consent & privacy policy
  • Handing ‘Individual rights’ actions
  • Agree business rules
  • Suggesting an addendum to the contract
  • Building preference centre with integration with 3^rd parties
  • Handling postal mailings

We provided really useful handouts in the ESco goody bag, a GDPR booklet from Royal Mail and the benefits of using postal marketing to help with GDPR – plus a handy 20% discount on a Direct Marketing campaign through our Production Team (not to mention discounts for data cleansing and E-Commerce set up)

After the GDPR info, we provided an informative update on some of our recent and upcoming developments going through recent changes in the industry, our new clients and awards won by some of our clients for their great achievements in 2017.

Laura Perry, one of Senior Account Managers, provided an update on our Content Workflow development for Riviera which streamlines the process of articles being written by a contributor, through sign off, edits, proof reading and publishing. Laura then presented a case study on a Single Customer View we’ve built for Caspian and how this helped them to carry out more targeted and relevant marketing, giving a better overview of customer engagement AND helping with GDPR compliance to boot.

The day ended with a sneak preview of our Reporting and Dashboard portal, presented by ESco developer, Greg Viney giving a fantastic snapshot overview of figures for publishers, helping them to quickly and easily analyse the success of promotional campaigns – Greg whizzed us through a video to show where he’s at and where we’re going with it.

Next, we moved onto our Round Table Discussions, four topics on “E-Commerce”, “Dashboards and KPI’s”, “Renewals” & “Single Customer View” for which we received great feedback allowing our partners to share ideas with each other with great feedback to the ESco team.

Finally, at 3.30pm on Friday afternoon, we rewarded ourselves with some icy prosecco and a well-earned beer.

We’re delighted to report that our first partner event was a real success, and it seems our guests thought so too…

Found the GDPR day very informative and to the point. It was nice meeting the whole team for a change and enabled me to know the people I have been speaking to. Came out with lot of ideas and new friends. You guys do a fabulous job. Keep it up.

Irene Johnson, Hawker Publications

Great event! So well organised – thanks to everyone that made it happen.

Anonymous, via feedback form

I found the day really engaging. It was really helpful that the speakers related the topics discussed back to our day to day, this improved my understanding vastly and I am able to apply the knowledge I gained during the day.

Anonymous, via feedback form

VERY informative. GREAT catering. Very useful and lots of ideas to take back to the office 🙂

Anonymous, via feedback form

Thank you for putting on the event last Friday. We both found it extremely useful and clarified some of the confusion that is GDPR!

Anonymous, via feedback form