Loyalty glossary · 11. Legal and compliance (15)
Marketing Consent
Marketing consent is the explicit, informed permission a member gives a loyalty programme to send marketing communications, and the legal basis that restricts those communications to specified channels and purposes.
Consent is not automatic. Membership creates an accrual relationship, not a marketing one. A member who joins to earn points has not agreed to receive a daily offer email. Programmes that bundle consent into enrolment as a pre-ticked box are holding a defective permission, and the defect becomes a compliance liability on the first complaint.
The legal standard is opt-in for electronic marketing in most regulated markets. GDPR requires a clear affirmative act, and the programme must keep proof. Soft opt-in rules cover existing customers in some places, but loyalty membership alone is not enough. A single global consent setting fails in at least one jurisdiction, so the operator is running a compliance debt it cannot measure.
Consent distorts active-member-rate, and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. A programme may report 20 percent active-member-rate while 25 percent of members would transact if they received offers, because they never opted in. The true engagement base is closer to 45 percent, but the programme cannot reach two fifths of it. Consent is a filter that removes potential actives before the metric is calculated.
Activity-based-qualification makes consent an operational gate. A member must perform a qualifying action, such as a stay or a purchase, but the prompt to perform it usually arrives by email or push. No consent means no prompt, which means no qualifying action, which means the member never advances a tier. The programme then misreads the silence as low engagement rather than missing permission.