Privacy Complaints Email Marketing: Trust Lessons for Marketers

I attended the Privacy Awareness Week panel, “Building Trust and Loyalty through Better Privacy Complaint Handling” (Wednesday 6 May 2026), featuring Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind and guests Anna Campbell (AFCA), Melanie Lawrie (SOCAP) and moderator Melanie Marks (ctrl:cyber).

Even though the session focused on complaint handling, the takeaways land squarely in the world of email marketing and marketing automation. If you run Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud or HubSpot, you’re already operating in a high-trust environment with consent, preference centres, access requests, suppression lists, retention rules, and “why am I getting this?” queries. 

In practice, privacy complaints are often just the sharp end of a broader customer experience problem.