The information on your page is our best interpretation of the law. It is not legal advice, and it is up to you to decide the best way to communicate with your customers. We’re a booking platform Jim, not a law firm!
If you operate in the UK or the EU, the GDPR laws govern what you're allowed to send, in terms of online marketing.
Short answer: No - but please read on!
While GDPR is not always super clear, we believe in terms of BookingNinja that you do NOT need to ask permission to send marketing emails, due to something called the "Soft Opt In" exception.
"You can only use the soft opt-in when you're sending marketing emails or texts to offer similar goods or services. For example, if a customer buys a car from you and gives you their contact details, you’d only be able to market to them things that relate to the car eg. offering services or MOTs."
So, as long as you’re not advertising a very different service, you’re allowed to use the email a customer provided on their booking. We call these customers “Soft Opt In” customers, and you can send emails to them directly on the BookingNinja gold plan.
Soft Opt In emails also must include a way to “opt out”, which we now provide as part of our marketing platform, making us fully compatible with this law.
For these reasons we believe the best option for most venues is not to ask, but to use soft opt-in and allow users to unsubscribe. This should maximise your audience while not breaking any laws.
Some people will report any marketing as “spam” or “abuse”, even if it’s legal. When that happens enough, we can face fines or even shutdowns of our email servers, which hundreds of businesses rely on.
For this reason, we have to manually check marketing campaigns to soft-opt customers in to make sure they aren't breaking any rules. This costs us additional staff time, which is why this option is only available on our larger package.
If you don't want to upgrade to gold, keep in mind that you can still enable opt-in and only send to opt-in customers, or you can export your customer data at any time and send emails using another platform.
Unfortunately no, the law is pretty clear here: If you do choose to ask customers to opt-in, we have to keep the box unticked. It has to be "Opt In"
No, all our regular BookingNinja emails like confirmations, cancellations, feedback and visit reminders are all something called "Service Reminders" which you don't need explicit permission for. Marketing emails are different.
