• by David Mirsky , April 24, 2020

By embracing regulations based on the most restrictive law rolled out globally, marketers will avoid regulatory and reputational risk, facilitating better personalization.

The problems with personalization

Personalization can be a high-risk, high-reward scenario for marketers.

Marketers can easily turn consumers off if they perceive their privacy is being invaded. On the flip side, it is a mistake to go too broad and omit any level of personalization, especially since 84% of customers say being treated like a person is important to winning their business, according to a Salesforce report.

Frequency caps are also important. I know myself as a consumer if I haven’t engaged with an ad but it continues to follow me, it becomes annoying pretty quickly. 

These reasons alone make it essential to focus on the signals consumers give off, such as their interests, content consumption habits or their locations, and understand how these signals indicate consumer intent, which changes over time, such as when a customer journey has ended or started. This is an opportunity for marketers to grow their data to measure and map user purchases and create custom, dynamic audience targeting parameters.

How regulations like GDPR and CCPA can help

Embracing strict regulatory compliance can actually help, not hinder, personalization efforts.

Whether it is a data lake, data management platform, customer relationship management or customer data platform, you are doing a disservice to your sales, marketing and analytics teams if you are not monitoring your own data.

The first step is to make sure you are collecting data within legal regulations. The second step is to make sure you don’t experience data ROT (Redundant, Outdated and Trivial) from the wrong data partner. Having the right processes in place will ensure compliance with existing measures like GDPR and CCPA as well as future regulations, which are imminent.

In addition, when you own your data, you really get to know your audience and can create a more cohesive and accurate customer/audience profile. You can’t validate your audience without knowing the audience first. More importantly, you can't know if that audience is taking valuable action if the dots aren't connected. Having the right technology in place to gather the right data gives you a distinct advantage over your competition to validate your efforts and show ROI. 

The better you know your audience, the more you can avoid some of the common personalization pitfalls.

Check your own data

As a consumer, look at your own Facebook and Google settings. What you find might surprise you. I was surprised to see myself listed as a Hispanic language speaker. I had recently begun taking Spanish lessons through an app, but did not expect to see that picked up as a notable data point.  

The bottom line

My message for marketers: When utilizing user-based data points, continue personalization, but proceed with caution. 

The more attentive you are to data maintenance and keeping up with the latest technology, the more compliant you’ll be with regulatory demands — and the more likely you are to get personalization right.