Best Practices for global lead forms that are CASL compliant

[Anonymous]

Our organization has decided to try to market to Canadian leads after completely removing them from all our marketing activities in order to be CASL compliant a couple years ago. I understand what permission/opt-in requirements we need to follow to be in compliance, they are pretty clear.

My question is about trying to understand what best practices there are for integrating our marketing to Canada with our marketing to US leads which have less-stringent opt-in requirements. We don't want to turn away US leads with the more complicated opt-in processes tailored for Canada, but we also want to make sure we get opt-in permission.

If we modify our global forms to be compliant for CASL, does that affect form completions/opt-ins for US leads? Has anybody done a study on this or have results they would like to share?

Now that these regulations have been around for a couple years I am wondering how others have incorporated these regulations into their marketing efforts and what results have you seen? Any suggestions/examples/best practices/case studies are welcome and very much appreciated!

[Michelle_Miles3]

Perhaps you could use visibility rules in your form to only show the more complicated opt-in process based on your country/state fields equaling Canada or Canadian provinces.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

I agree with Michelle Miles that Visibility Rules should get you most of the way toward keeping a single form to manage in Marketo, while altering the functionality per-country.

I don't think you can use only VRs if you want to keep things the same for US leads.  But with a little help from the Forms 2.0 API:

• have an opt-in checkbox, defaulted to False to be CASL-compliant, visible only to users who identify themselves as Canadian
• in the form's onSubmit event, check the country to see if the user said they were Canadian; if they are not Canadian then flip the checkbox back to True as you are allowed to do for US leads

[Josh_Hill13]

Sanford is correct. You can do this with javascript as well. We do this with our forms based on the selected Country and/or Inferred Country.

The best practice, however, is that all of your leads should be opted in, not opt out. So I would go with the most restrictive country's procedures to improve list quality.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yeah, if only though...

Do you find that the more you try to be serious about this area, the less seriously your clients take you?  It's like if I laughingly say, "Don't wanna get fined, though" as we're walking out of a meeting, it has a better chance of working than if I go, "Point of order, everyone..."

[Anonymous]

This is great feedback! Thank you everyone!

[Anonymous]

Bree Deters​ Looks like the group solved your problem. If appropriate, though, can you mark one as correct. If not, I understand.

[Anonymous]

Besides the explicit opt in examples here, I'm curious if anyone has a process defined for the implied opt ins? As in, if a lead converts on a "Schedule a Demo" Form, or the sales rep creates their record manually, that consent could be considered implied. Do you have some logic that watches for this sort of behavior, and then does the Opt In box checking for them? Do you have any timers set up to renew opt ins after a specified period?

[Justin_Norris1]

Jeff Shearer​

At the last company where I did a CASL implementation, we relied on implied opt-in gained as a result of the lead creating a free account in the app. Our interpretation was that this was a form of implied consent that gave us two years to market to that lead under the "business card" rule.

Whenever an action occurred that we defined as a "consent event", I had some trigger flows set up that would set values in custom fields for the consent status, consent event, consent event details, date/time stamp, and IP address and mapped this all to fields on the SFDC lead/contact record for audit-ability.

I also set up a wait flow that would flip the consent status to "expired" automatically after two years.

This whole thing would run repeatedly for every consent event -- for example if they made a purchase, it would change the consent event and re-set the two year clock.

The last piece of the puzzle that I never built was going to be some automated campaigns at around the 18 month mark to try to request explicit consent. But realistically for that company, the sales cycle was short and after two years the lead had low likelihood of ever purchasing if they hadn't already.

Here's what it looks like on the SFDC side:

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing--this rocks, and is along the lines of what I was thinking.

Thanks again,

-Jeff