Knowing your customer is the key to personalizing your offerings according to their needs and pain points. That’s how you can set your business apart in a competitive landscape. According to a year-end marketing survey conducted in 2022, 95% of marketers considered their personalization strategies successful.
While gathering customer data is a worthwhile effort, privacy concerns may overshadow its benefits. According to statistics, only 43% of customers are willing to share their personal data with businesses via interviews, surveys, and online forms. It means more than half of them have some qualms regarding providing their personal details.
Additionally, IBM notes that the global average cost of a data breach was $4.45 million in 2023, a 15% increase over three years. Besides the monetary loss, you may lose customer trust and business reputation due to data theft. These facts underscore the significance of customer privacy when gathering data to know them better.
In this article, we will share a few valuable tips to gather customer insights without compromising privacy.
Implement Transparent Data Practices
Transparency is the core of ethical customer relationships. A 2022 survey found that nearly 60% of customers prioritized trustworthiness and transparency as the most valuable traits of a brand. Being transparent about the data you want to collect, the way you want to use it, and the benefits they will get in return wins their trust.
Communicate these aspects to your customers and provide accessible and easy-to-understand privacy policies. It ensures that they are informed about the primary objective and scope of data collection. With transparency in the data collection process, you gain customer trust, which translates into loyalty and robust relationships. You can implement a consent management platform to enable customers to opt in or out of specific data uses.
Leverage Identity Resolution Technology
With customers using different channels to interact with brands, gathering data for different channels is often challenging. The evolving privacy regulations complicate it further. You can leverage identity resolution technology to address both concerns. It enables you to attribute all customer behavior across different channels, platforms, and devices to a single identity.
Intent IQ notes that marketers can use this technology to create single customer identities and create targeted marketing experiences for them. The best part is that it is tailor-made for compliance with user privacy regulations. You can get the best of both, knowing your customers and maintaining their privacy while collecting personal data.
Without identity resolution, you may never know whether the data collected from different sources belong to the same customer. The solution enables you to reconcile disparate data and attribute different activities to a single customer. You have a comprehensive view of the ads they view and the products they search.
Identity resolution technology relies on a digital identity graph, a database of information such as devices, habits, demographics, and lifestyles of customers. This database bundles each piece of information into a single user identity. Besides ensuring privacy, identity resolution enhances ad quality and accuracy.
Prioritize Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity should be a top priority for businesses collecting customer data. With 42% of US adults concerned about online data, this step becomes non-negotiable for businesses seeking customer trust and loyalty. A breach can erode the trust people place in your business, so you should go the extra mile with the measures to prevent it.
Robust cybersecurity measures include access controls, encryption, and regular security audits. Additionally, conduct regular security training for employees to create awareness to help them recognize potential security threats and protect customer data. With these measures, you demonstrate a commitment to customer privacy.
Regularly Review and Update Privacy Policies
Data privacy is an ongoing matter, so you cannot take a set-and-forget approach to it. Besides hacking threats, evolving regulations and technology make it vital for business owners to be more conscious about privacy. At the same time, it does mean giving up on gathering data to know your customers and personalize your marketing plans.
Regularly review and update your privacy and policies to stay a step ahead of attacks. It also keeps your business compliant with the industry’s best practices and legal standards. Every time you fine-tune your privacy policy, communicate changes to customers to enable them to reassess their preferences. Adapting to the evolving privacy landscape helps build trust and credibility.
Summing up, businesses may struggle to balance the quest for customer awareness and the imperative of privacy protection. It requires an ongoing effort because you may not want to miss out on either of these aspects. These steps can help you achieve both goals of staying legally compliant and fostering trust, loyalty, and long-term customer relationships.
