GDPR Statement
How do we source our data?
Martec’s business data is pooled from a variety of sources including Companies House data; LinkedIn, other companies web sites, data publicly accessible on our software providers' systems, publically available large language models, together with desk, telephone and web research.
What Personal Information do we collect?
The amount of personal information we hold is limited to:
- Named contacts in corporate entities with job titles and major responsibility area.
- Business email, addresses in corporate entities and work telephone numbers.
- Private email addresses when published in LinkedIn or company press releases.
- Copies of communications between Martec and the individuals concerned.
Business-to-business email communications
Emails to the employees of corporate entities – limited companies, public limited companies, limited liability partnerships and government departments can be emailed without consent, where there is a “legitimate interest” case. We give individuals a clear and easy means of opting-out from future communications.
What restrictions are there on the use of a database for marketing?
The following broad principles apply:
- All communications must be relevant and proportionate.
- All communications should clearly identify the end-user of the data and must contain a clear opportunity to opt-out from future correspondence.
- Keep data up to date through periodic – but not intrusive – contact, and record any changes.
- All requests to opt out must be honoured as promptly as possible.
- All requests from individuals to be provided with a copy of the information held on them must be provided free of charge in a reasonable time period.
- Individuals can exercise "a right to be forgotten" which means that we must delete them from our systems except in special circumstances. The main one is that we can't delete data on individuals who purchased classes before the HMRC statutory 5 year period expires, as the financial transactions have to be legally available for audit.
How is the data cleaned?
Ad hoc updates are made as they arise, mainly through press appointment announcements.or individuals supplying the information to our web site pages. We periodically use third party data enrichment services to improve our data accuracy and we also check the data ourselves against the LinkedIn database.
After each mailing, unsubscribes are updated first and all contacts where our email service says they bounced, are updated accordingly in our database. Bounces may be hard or soft. We cannot always tell from our mailing results. We just know that it is one or the other. Hence for most of our mailings we do not select records marked as bounced. Once or twice a year we do select bounced records so that we can remove those that are undeliverable.
Martec respect the rights of individuals to have their details removed from our active file at any time.
Although the UK has left the European Union, UK data protection law still mirrors the EU GDPR legislation. Martec applies these regulations across all the countries where we have customers, many of which are not in the EU.
A large part of our marketing database covers US based companies. The US Federal Goverment has enacted some data protrection laws and many individual states have enacted their own. We do not have the resources to track all the potential changes across the states and Federal Government, so we periodically benchmark ourselves against the State of California, which us generally regarded as strict on data protection.
We do a small number of online shop transactions paid by customers' credit cards. We authorise and process these online using a payment services provider and we never retain card numbers in our systems.