Did you hear the one about bendy bananas? How about the one about “Mumbai Mix”?
Everyone loves a sensationalised headline about EU bureaucracy — and the B2B marketing world has its fair share, too.
Maybe you’ve heard that “Email marketing in Germany is impossible”, or “Personalisation is illegal in France”. But how true are these, really?
In the last few years, we at Cognism have gained first-hand experience of making moves into the EU and have learnt a few things along the way.
This blog is for anyone who is interested in winning customers in the EU but has got the heebie-jeebies from stories about strict marketing laws in the EU.
We heard the first-hand experiences of Nicole Peters, Annika Flügge and Liam Bartholomew to learn…
- Their understanding of how marketing compliance differs in the EU
- Their take on why marketing regulation should be embraced
- Their suggestions on how to handle cultural differences
And more!
Let’s get into it 👇
Marketing compliance in the EU: Challenges and solutions
Before we go further, let’s clarify what this blog will not do:
- We’re not here to say everything you’ve heard about EU marketing compliance is a myth. Marketers do have to navigate more data privacy regulations compared to the UK or US.
- We’re also not here to dive deep into legal specifics. We are not lawyers, nor are we purporting to provide any legal advice through this blog. This blog is simply intended to share real experiences and strategies that have worked for us as marketers –for compliance advice, you should consult local experts and seek appropriate legal advice.
Rumour 1: The double opt-in makes email marketing in Germany impossible!
If you’re marketing in DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), you’ve probably come across double opt-in processes.
What’s that?
To receive marketing communications, it’s generally understood that recipients must enter their email address and confirm their interest through a verification email. This helps ensure consent is active and intentional.
Annika told us:
“In Germany, double opt-in laws make it a lot more difficult to do email marketing. And if you mess up, you get fined and your company gets in trouble! The fines can be quite high.”
The difficulties come from having to build up your database of leads the hard way. One way we found to overcome this was to get content in front of them with a sign-up form or banner adverts and win each sign-up one by one that way.
The good news
It’s important to remember that these rules, frustrating as they can seem to those used to the UK or US approach, also present an opportunity.
A double opt-in might be harder to win than choosing leads from a database, but once you have express consent, the prospect will likely engage with your marketing communications at a much higher rate.
Nicole explained:
“The upside is that the prospect is much warmer, and we see higher click-through and open rates.”
It makes sense – they have already decided they are interested in receiving content.
On how that affects companies that rely a lot on email lengthy lists of contacts, Nicole added:
“Double opt-in makes life harder for the email blast approach to email marketing, but it helps companies like Cognism and helps with engagement rates.”
Rather than relying on bulk email strategies, marketers can focus on delivering high-quality content that their audience wants to see.
That’s another reason why Cognism prefers Demand Generation to old-school lead gen tactics. With Demand Generation, sign-ups are less central to sales and marketing.
Because we generally don’t do gated content outside of things like webinars, we don’t have much use for opt-ins and sign-ups. Our clients reach us under their own steam, rather than being shoved down an artificial funnel.
How we handled it
With email outreach less reliable, you also need to think outside the box and find new ways to reach your ICP.
In Germany, we have found success in partnering with a huge sales community active across the DACH region. We collaborate with this partner on webinars, campaigns and podcasts, and they promote our content, too, helping us reach our audience of SDRs in Germany directly.
It’s a tactic we hadn’t tried before and is a great example of how a marketer can find success by truly engaging with a new market. It’s important to remember that there always are interested buyers in your ICP out there — you just might need to adjust your tactics to reach them.
Rumour 2: You can’t advertise on social media in France
Now we turn to France and the rumour that B2B advertising on social media is almost impossible.
On Cognism’s The Loop podcast, marketing expert Archita Fritz told us in conversation with Liam Bartholomew about her experiences marketing hospital beds in France’s tightly regulated social media landscape.
Archita told us,
“A new regulation was passed which said, any marketing materials posted on social media is viewed as a brochure. So if you make a claim you have to prove it. Every word had to be backed up by actual evidence and so our marketing had to be extremely basic, just a simple description of what our product was.”
Archita explained how she approached this dilemma:
“Instead, we asked ourselves, how do we get creative in a space like this? It goes back to the customer. What are the other pain points in that customer ecosystem that needs solving? What are the other pain points we can solve that are tangentially transferable to the actual problem you solve for?”
Liam agreed:
“People often sometimes see these regulations as completely limiting, but actually, they’re an opportunity for you to think creatively and outside of the box.”
“The error there is to push through the same playbook or increase ad spend but with drab messaging. Instead, think of ways you could create content that is not talking about the product and therefore doesn’t limit your messaging.”
In Archita’s case, the solution was to run ergonomic training workshops to help caregivers learn about the product.
As for Cognism, we shifted our focus in France from paid ads to SEO. We created a localised French website and built out a French SEO strategy. As well as being pretty cheap and easy to do, it provided us with great data about demand and product messaging, helping to guide sales efforts once the demand was there.
Cookies
France is also among the strictest EU countries regarding cookie policy. It semi-regularly fines leading ad tech players like Meta and Alphabet for infringing on French citizens’ rights to reject cookies.
It repeatedly emphasises the importance of making rejecting cookies as easy as accepting them. This, combined with a generally data privacy-conscious population, makes digital marketing more difficult.
Nicole summed up her view on the cookie landscape in France:
“What makes retargeting more difficult in France is stricter consent requirements, the need for explicit consent for targeted advertising and the fact that many people opt out of cookies.”
“Your retargeting audience is going to be smaller as a result. And the social media providers restrict what they share with advertisers, making targeting and retargeting less granular.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s game over. Some strategies we explored were:
- Focus on first-party data, i.e. data you’ve collected from your audience, be it customers, site visitors or newsletter sign-ups.
- Build direct relationships with a customer.
- Use contextual advertising such as content or location-based strategies instead of relying on behavioural targeting.
- Work with local experts and people who know the regulations.
These are all skills any digital marketer should have in their locker, so while cookie regulations are to be respected, digital marketers should not shy away from them.
Rumour 3: Cultural differences are a minefield
Outside of regulations, there are cultural differences in the EU that form a kind of soft compliance and need to be respected, too.
As you become more familiar with a market, the scope to vary your messaging will increase. But to start off with, there’s no harm at all in sticking to prevailing social norms.
Nicole offered some reliable advice:
“Business culture in DACH, the Netherlands and Scandinavia emphasises direct, concise and factual communication. Our most successful messaging explains the benefits of Cognism and how it works. We try to get to the point. There is not much scope of emotional messaging.”
Case studies and proof of ROI are persuasive to German decision-makers. Always supplement messaging with proof, such as data and testimonies, to back up your claims about results and ROI.
Annika also gave an insight into the general tone you should use:
“When marketing in the UK, you can be much more humorous than in Germany. To give a sense of what I mean, we’re currently experimenting with the informal ‘you’.”
She went on:
“The formal ‘you’ remains the standard in nearly all professional contexts, with the informal ‘you’ sometimes finding use in B2C marketing and marketing that targets younger demographics. It used to be a hard-and-fast rule that you would address someone older with the formal ‘you’, but that’s changing a little bit now.”
You also have to lean into the culture of compliance. Annika explained:
“Customers are very sensitive when it comes to compliance. They want to be safe, [and] don’t want their data out there. The general opinion is people are in favour of these rules and the guidelines around data.”
Vive la France!
In France, the cultural climate has different priorities.
The number one rule of marketing in France is that French people like to buy from French people.
Translation into French of all content is a necessary evil, but that alone is not enough. Nicole explained what’s required:
“The French want to see that you have a presence in France, that you have customers there, logos of French companies on your website and case studies in French.”
“For a French decision-maker, it’s much more powerful having a case study on a small French company than a case study on a big English (or English-speaking) company.”
Compared to DACH, France has more scope for storytelling and emotional appeals and a greater tolerance for ambiguity.
Wrapping up
Expanding into EU markets might seem daunting, but as we’ve learnt first-hand, many of the perceived obstacles are opportunities in disguise. Remember — the EU is the world’s largest trading bloc and it holds incredible opportunities.
The “heebie-jeebies” can be to your advantage — every company that shirks the opportunity is one less competitor to worry about. And the rules are the same for everyone, so the added challenge of navigating a highly regulated environment comes with its own rewards.
Hopefully, this blog has imparted three key takeaways:
- Compliance is something digital B2B marketers in the EU have to take seriously.
- Digital B2B marketing is still very much viable, but requires extra creativity.
- Cultural rules form a kind of compliance in themselves and need to be followed, too.
