Personalization is the bread and butter of most companies’ marketing strategies. Personalization, according to BCG research, contributes up to 30% in marketing cost reduction and 20% to revenue increases. Effective personalization relies on access to consumer data, which is becoming more difficult for companies to source.
Likewise, consumers expect relevant and targeted – but unintrusive – personalized offers and are willing to provide some data to facilitate this. Trust between business and consumer is the missing link here, but it does not have to be. Reaching consumers with customer-centric marketing requires building trust by collecting and using consumer data responsibly and giving consumers more insight into and control over the data they share.
The front door to trust is through consent management, which we will explore as a key to unlocking customer-centric marketing in an era of rapidly changing data privacy and protection regulations.
Consumers’ data privacy concerns
Privacy has become a major consumer concern, and anyone working in marketing knows about the proliferation of regulations supporting this push. As of 2021, only one-third of consumers believed that companies were using their personal data responsibly, according to a McKinsey survey. These figures have not improved in subsequent years. More recent Pew Research shows that 79% of consumers are very concerned about how their data is used, and six-in-ten Americans believe that data collection poses more risks than benefits and that it is not possible to live a full day without being tracked online. Consumers are concerned because they feel as though they are blind to how their personal data is collected and managed and have little to no control over their personal data collection.
Consumers nevertheless report wanting personalization, and data collection and use enables this. Despite a reported willingness to share their information – up to 73% of US consumers would share if they felt they had greater visibility and control, according to the Deloitte 2024 Navigating Trust guide – HubSpot data from 2024 shows a different reality: roughly half of all consumers decline to consent to sharing their data. How to break this stalemate?
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Build trust through transparency, control, and choice
A number of studies, including a 2022 survey from PwC and the 2024 Cisco Data Privacy Benchmark Study, claim that consumers are likeliest to share their data with companies they trust. They just want to be asked in a clear and transparent way. They want to have a choice and understand what they are being asked for and how the collected data will be used and secured.
With this in mind, creating trust and loyalty as a part of investment in the customer experience leads to more effective marketing and better business practices. Companies then need not only collect and use data responsibly but also make their compliance efforts transparent and visible to consumers and let them control what they share and consent to.
Tackle consent management worry
While it sounds simple enough, marketing teams continue to struggle, even several years into GDPR and other similar data protection regulations and major changes in cookie use, with knowing whether or not they are using consumers’ personal data with the appropriate consent. Research from customer engagement platform Braze and Wakefield Research highlight that nearly half of all UK-based marketers fear that they may not have the right consent to use consumers’ personal data. The same fears are echoed globally, as striking a balance among compliance, consent, and consumer connections remains delicate, challenging, and not entirely clear.
The lack of confidence in compliance with the range of local and global regulations on data protection and cookie consent should not be surprising. Many data-use decisions are grey areas, making it difficult for marketing teams to determine what constitutes ethical and compliant use.
Underbaked cookie consent
Making this more difficult, evidence shows that companies have a reason to worry. The Electronic Communications Office of Iceland (Fjarskiptastofa) recently undertook research examining cookie use and the obligation to get informed consent from users. Examining several web service providers, the Authority’s review found that most offered the option to accept cookies in a cookie banner but found issues of concern in three areas: information provided to user about the use of cookies, informed consent, and the use of cookies in practice. Across all sites reviewed, the research found that:
- Consent is either not respected in practice or is not considered ”informed” or ”unforced”
- Discrepancies exist between the information provided to consumers by web service providers about cookie use and their use in practice
- All web service providers reviewed placed cookies on users’ terminal devices that went undisclosed in the information and consent process – some of which had been served despite users’ explicit rejection
Despite the small sample size of the study, the results were alarming, particularly if they could be extrapolated and applied generally on a more global scale.
Cookie compliance can be difficult, but there are easy-to-use software solutions for compliance and consent management to help ensure that cookie banners serve their legal and regulatory purpose rather than being a cosmetic afterthought.
Bake trust-building into consent and customer-centric marketing
Broadly speaking, companies and marketing teams need to focus on the basics and get them right as a starting place. One key step here is ensuring compliance with cookie and consent management tools. Another key step is understanding exactly what constitutes informed consent and ensuring that this is baked into the consent management platform of choice. Making opt-out options clear and providing information to consumers transparently will keep companies from running afoul of regulatory agencies while continuing to build on consumer trust.
Customer-centric consent does not have to be a challenge. If consumers feel a company is dealing honestly with them and communicating the ways in which their data will be used and stored – and the potential benefits of that – marketing teams can continue to serve tailored, personalized content to consumers with whom they have invested in trust-building.
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