Jodi Daniels is a privacy consultant and Founder/CEO of Red Clover Advisors, one of the few Women’s Business Enterprises focused on privacy.
Today, consumers have endless options for spending their hard-earned money. The internet has flooded markets that used to be relatively restricted to geographic locations.
That’s old news.
However, one thing that still surprises me is how many businesses leave privacy at the door when building a standout marketing strategy.
Consumers care more about their data privacy than ever before, but they also trust companies less when it comes to protecting it. So why not use data privacy best practices to stand out from the crowd?
Here’s how your data privacy efforts can increase sales and customer retention.
The Value Of Privacy In Marketing
Consumer trust is one of the most essential currencies in the digital age. People want to spend their money with businesses they trust and give their information (which is critical to future sales) to companies they trust. This is not conjecture.
• “68% of consumers throughout the world said they are either somewhat or very concerned about their online privacy.”
• “94% of organizations say their customers won’t buy from them if data is not properly protected.”
• “93% of business executives agree that building and maintaining trust improves the bottom line.”
Building trust isn’t just a nice-to-have feature; it’s a must-have to grow profitability and your business.
Key Challenges To Integrating Data Privacy In Your Marketing
Let’s go ahead and say the quiet part out loud: To use data privacy in your marketing, you can’t just make performative statements about how you love your customers and work to protect their data. You must protect and uphold their data privacy rights per industry best practices and regulations.
But this doesn’t mean you have to go to the other end of the spectrum and abandon all your previous marketing tactics. There’s a widespread misconception that privacy hinders effective marketing, but that’s not the case.
To create an agile privacy program that aligns with your marketing needs, you need to:
• Use privacy-by-design principles to integrate privacy considerations into existing martech stacks and to preempt potential conflicts between marketing tools and privacy requirements.
• Add a preference center to your website to allow customers to dictate how you can use or share their data (and how often they want to receive marketing emails).
• Stay up-to-date on state, federal and international laws to give your business plenty of time to adapt to changing regulations. In addition to the federal CAN-SPAM Act and Canada’s CASL, you may need to consider the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and various state regulations, which may apply regardless of your geographic headquarters.
Strategies For Privacy-Centric Marketing
Want to win hearts and minds (and customer loyalty)? Here are my favorite ways to integrate privacy-centric marketing into your overall sales strategy:
Transparent Data Collection And Usage
Implement clear and accessible privacy notices. Most companies use dense legalese in their privacy notices. When privacy-related communications are poorly written or difficult to understand, it can feel like you’re hiding something.
Instead, use clear, simple language to educate consumers about your data practices and their rights. Visual elements—think callout boxes, large text, summaries and bulleted key points—can make privacy notices even more user-friendly.
Heck, make it branded so it sounds like your company is talking to them. Make your privacy notice another touchpoint for customers to understand who you are as a business.
Privacy-Focused Data Analysis And Segmentation
Use high-quality, consent-based data for personalization (again, a preference control center on your website is one of the best ways to go here). This allows you to enhance customer segmentation while still respecting privacy boundaries.
Consent-Driven Email Marketing
To prevent relegation to the dreaded spam folder and improve your email marketing results, double down on consent and opt-ins. A preference control center can help customers dictate what types of emails they want to receive, and a double opt-in (where the user confirms their subscription following an initial sign-up) can improve consumer trust and your data analytics.
Privacy As A Marketing Differentiator
Don’t be afraid to showcase your privacy efforts. Show them off. Show customers why they should trust you and your product. In addition to a preference control center, incorporate privacy features into your product descriptions and marketing collateral.
For example, privacy is a major concern for smart toys and other products geared toward minors. Parents will be much more likely to trust a product when the company acknowledges and highlights privacy as a core feature, so make sure you tout the measures you take in your marketing.
Software is another product where privacy is a key differentiator. Use your marketing collateral to build up customer trust by talking up your privacy practices—emphasizing features like data anonymization, transparent data usage policies and robust security measures can differentiate your software from competitors.
Empowering Marketing Teams With Privacy Knowledge
Give your team the tools to understand and take advantage of your data privacy efforts.
• Role-based privacy training can help your marketing team understand how their roles impact your company’s data privacy operations. This can generate employee buy-in and support compliance.
• Build a cross-sectional privacy council to review internal data privacy practices and ensure your privacy policy works to support all departments across your organization.
• Develop privacy champions across your marketing and sales teams to support your privacy goals, gather feedback and act as a resource.
• Track your key performance indicators to demonstrate the ROI of your privacy investments and marketing strategy.
• Use engagement, conversions and product surveys to track consumer trust.
• Review customer subscribe/unsubscribe rates for email marketing.
• Track email open/click rates based on how customers set up their preference control center.
Ultimately, a marketing strategy built on respect for privacy isn’t just about compliance—it’s about earning trust, fostering loyalty and standing out in a world where transparency is the ultimate differentiator.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Read the full article here
