Maintaining Your Consumer Data Privacy Amidst the Challenges of Modern Marketing
Understanding your customers is crucial in every business. As the market gets bigger, consumers become more diverse and particular at the same time. With the booming of online retail comes different consumer groups for every product and service offered, and each consumer within those groups has unique demands and requirements for every purchase.
One main consumer demand is for personalization and a great customer experience, CX. Consumers purchase from brands to which they relate the most. Your customers have this essential need to feel understood like your products and services specifically cater to their needs. To do so, you must collect sufficient data from your customers using as many channels as possible.
Are you putting your business at risk?
Internet cookies are efficient means to gather consumer data from your online channels, especially if you can strategically process these data to develop unique customer IDs to align your marketing efforts.
But then there is the issue of privacy.
There is a fine line between a personalized customer experience and an invasion of privacy. You must provide a customized experience and make them feel understood without making them feel stalked or watched. Once a customer's privacy has been breached, they may stay away and go to the following alternative instead.
The paradox between privacy and personalization remains one of the biggest challenges in modern marketing. And by failing to understand your customers and make sense of the fine line between personalization and privacy, you are unknowingly putting your business at risk.
Here are some tips to make sure personalization pursuits don't end up hit with privacy.
1. Pursue relevance in marketing
Relevance drives sales. Most successful brands work on relevance as their primary marketing goal, and it defines your business and your business' rank in the market.
Relevance is why only a few brands survive among thousands of others that offer the same product. Staying relevant in the market is a continuous challenge company owners face. Brands must outlive the ever-changing consumer demand and defend their purpose to continue to exist in the market. There are some excellent guesses like climate and families.
But to stay up, what is relevant to the consumer is to get constant feedback from them. Whether in little pieces at a time or as a part of a larger communications strategy, you will never have an accurate view of your customer without asking them what is more relevant. Relevance is what makes your brand better than the rest, and it is your core message that strengthens your products' selling points. Here are a few other reasons why you must focus on your brand's relevance to survive.
2. Solve specific challenges but meet the Consumers’ ever-changing demands
Consumers buy online for a specific reason. Either they need a particular product to use, or they need to feel some emotional satisfaction or a sense of security in being able to, well, spend. As their reasons and requirements vary, they search for the closest solution to their concerns. Your brand must be an answer to a problem. And it would be best if you continuously endeavored to discover your customers' concerns and be smart enough to highlight your brand as the answer.
Building on the first point, if you don't have a lot of brand capital, you solve a specific problem. Customers may not care if you can get them out of a pinch or make them so confident they nail the job interview. Lots of evangelists talk about the problem, so let’s continue.
3. Strengthen your customer experience
Showing how easily you can adjust your products and customer service based on your customers' demands shows that you care enough to hear them out and get to know them. Strong consumer trust increases customer retention. To create an excellent and personalized customer experience, you must collect data and efficiently turn them into dynamic marketing campaigns. Your consumers need to feel engaged instead of being bombarded with random products that they don't need.
Healthy engagement requires fast and continuous analysis of data across all channels. Big brands usually define the trend, not just ride by it. To do that, you would need to keep as many steps ahead in the game as possible. Data-driven processes sound difficult but can be relatively easy with the help of customer data platforms and machine learning.
4. Have an integral point of differentiation
Relevance positions your brand ahead of the competition. It is the reason why consumers choose your brand over others. Relevance is an important point of differentiation and can easily define your company's success. Engaging with your customers means that you help get them through whatever stage in the purchasing process, and you efficiently provide solutions and appropriate recommendations along the way. The customers themselves cannot outright say or completely describe what they are looking for in specific moments. That's why every marketer's job is to study and understand their consumers' behavior to provide them with what they need.
5. Build brand-consumer connections
Developing a strong connection with your customers is a foolproof strategy for customer retention and substantial revenue. The goal is to have the finish-each-other’s-sentences kind of relationship without giving off an I-know-what-you-did-last-night sort of vibe. You need your customers to reach a certain level of trust in your brand. They willingly give you the information you need to continue providing a good customer experience and predicting what they would need in the future. This kind of brand connection will make the whole data gathering stage a breeze, and the rest of the process will surely come easy. Brand loyalty, just like all the other kinds, is slowly and steadily built over time.
6. Empower the customer amongst a myriad of choices
Every purchase is empowering to customers when they are given different options from which to choose. Imagine having all available resources lined up before you and having the freedom to decide which ones to pick and utilize ultimately. The bigger pool of options they have, the stronger consumers feel their purchasing power gets. Relevance includes you in that pool of options and can even guarantee front-row seats given the right marketing campaigns.
CPO Magazine enumerated a few key points on how businesses can power through constant changes in online retail. It includes:
1. Establishing ethical consumer data programs that address consumer demands
2. Utilizing customer data platforms that value data privacy and security
3. Using first-party data to create strong and unique customer profiles
4. Delivering personalized experiences by understanding your customers and building loyal relations with them
Relevance and personalization are strong survival tools during this economic whirlwind. But data privacy remains a non-negotiable factor in the booming industry of online retail. Whatever marketing campaign or strategy you come up with, its success will depend on how you protect your consumers' data privacy. Easily cope with constant changes in the market and consumers using advanced tools, such as machine learning and customer data platform.
VIEWN solves the challenges marketers face today by tapping into customer data and leveraging customer data platform technology and artificial intelligence-driven personas to help brands provide personalized customer experiences.
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