I believe this change is an opportunity to build greater trust and differentiate through personalized customer experiences. Related: The EU's GDPR: 6 Things Online Business Owners and Marketers Can Do to Prepare GDPR and the impact to personalization GDPR is an EU law that took effect on May 25th this year. Related: With GDPR Restrictions on Using Consumer Data, Marketers Will Need to Start Mining Moments Why the GDPR challenge is really an opportunity. The important thing to remember about GDPR is that it doesn’t prohibit you from collecting any data on customers and prospects. Better data allows for even better, more relevant customer experiences. The key to developing trust and delivering personalized customer experiences in a post-GDPR world? I don’t want to lie about who I am, create a bunch of different accounts so Spotify can’t track me across devices, or even ask them to scrub my data. Every consumer knows that Amazon is collecting data on them, but they trust Amazon and don’t mind freely sharing their data in exchange for the provided value. How can you deliver experiences that will inspire individuals to want to share their data? They need to deliver value to their prospects now to build a relationship to become each prospect’s trusted provider over time.
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By now, most people in business have heard of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Marketers around the world have been preparing for the new law over the past year, while far too many companies over the past few months have been in a mad scramble just to comply.
While we are catching our collective breath from implementing measures to be GDPR compliant, let’s consider the long-term implications for personalization and privacy in a GDPR world. One thing is clear: concerns over privacy and data usage are only going to increase. We can spend time lamenting this change, or we can embrace it, see the good in it and leverage it for competitive advantage. I believe this change is an opportunity to build greater trust and differentiate through personalized customer experiences.
Related: The EU’s GDPR: 6 Things Online Business Owners and Marketers Can Do to Prepare
GDPR and the impact to personalization
GDPR is an EU law that took effect on May 25th this year. It gives EU citizens more control over their data, allowing them to consent to what information about them is collected and how it is used. It gives them the power to demand their data not to be tracked or even deleted altogether. Significantly, the law applies to every company in the world that interacts with an EU citizen. GDPR applies to you if someone from the EU lands on your site, regardless if you are presently located in the EU or anywhere else.
The challenge with improved privacy measures is that data is at the core of any great personalized experience. You cannot truly personalize an experience in any channel — on your website, in your mobile app, through your email campaigns, in your advertising or even in a store — unless you know something about that person. And you can’t get to know someone digitally unless you can collect data. GDPR and the increasing concerns around privacy complicate this.
But it’s not all doom and gloom for marketers. As with any potential setback, you have to look at it as an opportunity.
Related: With GDPR Restrictions on Using Consumer Data, Marketers Will Need to Start Mining Moments
Why the GDPR challenge is really an opportunity.
The important thing to remember about GDPR is that it doesn’t prohibit you from collecting any data on customers and prospects. It just gives individuals more control over who can collect and store their data. That’s good news, because people are typically willing to share their data for good reasons. In a survey of more than 8,500 consumers from six different countries, Deloitte and SSI found that 79 percent of respondents were willing to share their data if there was a clear…
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