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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,... / Forward to a friend - ...
Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
Suggested Answer

Forward to a friend - sender reference for GDPR compliance

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Posted on by TanyaV 39

Hello,

Our organisation needs to comply with GDPR.

We set-up a subscription center to allow for sign-up and management of personal details.

To discourage direct forwarding of our e-mails (that could give unwanted access to our contact's personalised subscription center page via the unsubcribe link), we want to use the 'forward-to-a-friend' feature.

We successfully set-up and tested the feature. However the forwarded mail is sent from the original sender (our organisation) not from the 'friend'.

Issues:

  • The receiving friend does not know that the mail was forwarded by a friend. To them it appears as if our organisation mailed them directly.
  • The receiving friend did not sign-up to receive communication from us and could submit a GDPR complaint.
  • There is no option to add extra text or a call to action to encourage the potential new contacts to also sign-up to our communications. Original recipients are already subcribed, so we cannot add calls to action in the original mails as this would be odd.

I believe I followed the process correctly, or did I miss something?

Thanks for confirmation/feedback/tips.

Best regards,

Tanya

I have the same question (0)
  • Suggested answer
    Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    Hi TanyaV,

    This is by-design.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/create-deploy-marketing-pages#types-of-marketing-pages 

    Messages forwarded using an email client will still contain the web beacon and personalized links of the original recipient, so your email results will show all interactions with these forwarded messages as being done by the original recipient too—but when a contact uses the forward-to-a-friend form, Dynamics 365 Marketing generates a new web beacon and personalized redirect links for each forwarded message.
    Forward-to-a-friend recipients also won't see any personalized information that was intended for the original recipient. For reasons of data privacy, all data entered into a forward-to-a-friend form is deleted after 30 days, so no new contact or lead records are created unless a recipient of the forward chooses to register with your organization using a landing page.

    If you want to change or improve the feature, you can provide your idea in the following forum and invite more people to vote it:

    Categories (dynamics.com)

  • TanyaV Profile Picture
    TanyaV 39 on at

    Thanks Leah for your reply

    I indeed read this, but I'm still not clear if the 'friend' that is receiving the forwarded mail is supposed to receive it: 

    - from 'their friend'?
    or
    - from our organisation (default e-mail address as set-up in our default marketing settings)?


    In tests we conducted the forwarded mail was sent from our organisation - not forwarded via the friend's e-mail address.

    My concern is that we cannot appear to be mailing contacts without their permission.

    Thanks for confirming.

    Tanya

  • Olivija Skvarkovska Profile Picture
    Olivija Skvarkovska 15 on at

    Hi, did you get any reply on that? GDPR compliance is my concern either in case the sender is indeed company and not their "friend"

  • TanyaV Profile Picture
    TanyaV 39 on at

    Hi Olivia,

    I actually logged a ticket with Microsoft to clarify whether the forward-to-a-friend 'sender' could be the "friend" vs our company.

    Their feedback:

    After our internal investigation, we were able to come in touch with the person that created the feature. We got the following feedback from them:

    This feature has been designed for use in or out of the GDPR endorsing counties. We are aware that it might not be compliant with the local laws of every country the product is available in. In a scenario like that, clients are free to not use the feature. There are no future plans for this to be improved and made compliant everywhere. This feature will stay as is until Outbound Marketing is available.

    Unfortunately, we could therefore not use the forward-to-a-friend feature as it could lead to GDPR complaints.

    I hope this helps!

    Best regards,

    Tanya

  • Olivija Skvarkovska Profile Picture
    Olivija Skvarkovska 15 on at

    Thank you! It was really helpful

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