GDPR For Marketers: How the New Law Affects Personalization

GDPR helps increase transparency and trust. Here’s what you need to know to stay compliant

For online marketers, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been creating quite a stir.

This new EU law, which will go into effect on May 25, 2018, is designed to give individuals more control over their personal data.

It affects how companies gather and utilize information from their website visitors, prospects, and customers.

In short, marketers aren’t allowed to collect, store, or use the personal data of any European Union (EU) citizen without an explicit consent.

The key areas covered by GDPR include breach notifications, right to access, right to be forgotten, data portability, privacy by design, and the appointment of a data protection officer.

GDPR In the age of personalization

What does GDPR mean for marketers who use a data-driven approach and personalization technologies in their marketing strategies?

Here are a few critical GDPR concepts you need to know when collecting information and obtaining consent:

Legitimate interest

You don’t need permission to obtain or use personal data when there’s legitimate interest behind the request for the information. For example:

  • When a visitor comes to your website and you need to present personalized offers so that you can market to them efficiently.
  • When a shopper is making a purchase and is expected to provide relevant information to complete the transaction.

Permission required for everything else

You can only collect data without explicit consent for the “main action” that visitors are expected to accomplish by providing their information. For anything else, you need permission.

For example, when a customer makes a purchase on your website, you don’t need consent to get the information required to complete the transaction. However, you do need permission if you want to add them to your email list or obtain additional information to personalize marketing messages in the future.

Individual rights

GDPR covers several individual rights, including the right to access, the right to object, and the right to erase.

Under the right to object, individuals can request a company to permanently stop all permission-based marketing and personalized communications. Under the right to erase, individuals can ask to have all their data deleted and be treated as a new user whenever they visit your site. This implies, that on their next visit, they will not see any personalized content.

Make GDPR work for you

GDPR helps increase transparency, which will ultimately help you cultivate more trust with consumers.

Most consumers appreciate personalized content and they’re willing to provide their information to the business that they trust.

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Becoming GDPR-compliant offers an opportunity to clean up your database and obtain the necessary re-permissions.

The process will help you better utilize the existing GDPR-compliant information to segment your audience, create highly targeted groups, and distribute personalized content.

Your liability increases as you collect more data. You should get clear on your personalization strategy and only ask for data that is necessary for effectively communicating with your customers and serving them better.

In addition, ensure that you’re storing the data in a secured centralized customer database so that you can manage the safety of your customer data while leveraging them effectively for your marketing initiatives.

4 Marketing Personalization Mistakes to Avoid

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We’ve posted quite a few articles on marketing personalization best practices and ways to increase value with personalization, but what we haven’t touched on are things to avoid when it comes to building momentum with marketing personalization and automation.

Here are four marketing personalization mistakes you absolutely have to avoid like the plague if you want a smooth ride(relatively) on your path to personalization.

1. Infringing on customer privacy and not protecting customer data

Don’t be manipulative when it comes to gather information from customers

All it takes is one screw up for a huge PR disaster and plenty of lost potential and current customers. Just don’t do it.

This applies to email opt ins on retailer websites, to mobile app permissions, to social log ins on websites. Be clear, respect your customers by letting them know exactly what you will be using information for, and you’ll earn their respect.

Since one of the first steps of true hyper-personalization is building an integrated data management system that can bring in multiple external and internal data sets, the inherent risk is quite clear. With all your data in one location, there must be significant care in protecting the customer gold harvested because one data breach can mean multiple streams of data are vulnerable.

Be honest with your customers about what you are taking from them, and once you have their trust, protect what you have. It’s that simple.

2. Relying on one set of data

To build a 360 degree view of your customers, you need to draw insights from various data sources. While one data source may constitute a large majority of your data analysis into your personalization platform, the more diversified your data collection points are, the more accurate your predictive analytics will be.

For instance, a big box retailer with may point to POS data and their eCommerce data as their main data feeds into a marketing personalization tool, but forgetting to integrate social media data for crucial life event data would be simply be a waste. There will be sources of data that will be more relevant than others, but finding out where to piece in and weigh each data channel is too important to ignore.

3. Neglecting testing

Testing is a pain. Multivariate testing can get very messy with hyper-segmentation, but always remember to test while executing. The closer you get to hyper-personalization, the more marketers will be tempted to skip various parts of the testing process.

Don’t fall into that trap. Just because the testing process will become more complicated doesn’t mean you should take your foot off the testing pedal. It will become even more important to your personalization journey that all your data sources, creative pieces, and messages are carefully tested to optimize your personalization efforts. Remember that a marketing personalization tool is exactly that…a tool that needs constant recalibration to make the high, consistent returns that you expect.

4. Thinking you’ve reached true hyper-personalization

Thinking that hyper-personalization is a place where you will someday reach and lay claim to is unreasonable and dangerous to long-term marketing personalization efforts.

Algorithms can be update and tweaked, new sources of data can be added, execution points can be refined and tested.

Knowing your customer 100% and predicting their needs exactly won’t happen without having Jedi mind reading powers, but you can always keep moving in the right direction.

Nobody said personalization was easy, which is why very few have figured out the right path towards marketing personalization. With these tips in mind, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money while consistently moving and accelerating in the right direction.