How Marketers Are Leveraging New Technologies as Data Privacy Laws Tighten

The digital marketing landscape has faced game-changing challenges recently, forcing brands to adapt their tracking solutions to ensure they comply with new and evolving regulations. Savvy marketers aren’t waiting until the last cookie crumbles to get their house in order. They’re adopting robust first-party data strategies that help them understand customers better and personalize their marketing messages in ways that are also good for the bottom line.

Customer metrics drive business metrics. To thrive, businesses must become increasingly reliant on first-party data to power their strategies. This will help ensure they hold onto customers and remain a step ahead of their ever-evolving purchasing habits.

Using first-party data, companies are seeing up to a 5X return on ad spend in paid channels. And recent research shows that brands using first-party data in key marketing functions achieved a 2.9X revenue lift and a 1.5X increase in cost savings.

It’s also important to note that customer data isn’t just for marketers. After building a secure unified view of customers, that data can also then be made available to advertisers, marketers, analysts, IT operations teams and product developers.

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Making Marketing ‘Offensive’ and ‘Defensive’

Becoming customer-centric takes more than first-party data. Brands need technology that can help them centralize customer data across all internal systems. Only then can they unify, clean and make sense of their “dirty data”.

Traditionally businesses justified technology by building business cases around ‘offensive’ metrics, such as increase in engagement, volume of conversions, increase in average order value and loyalty. Today things are changing, and business cases must also be built around ‘defensive metrics’ like operational improvements, privacy breaches or customers wanting their data erased – all costly exercises if processes aren’t centralized.

The right customer data platform (CDP) can help. A CDP provides marketers with a strong customer identity foundation, allowing them to build the most accurate and comprehensive view of their customers, helping them manage and grow the business.

For example, using a patented machine learning approach, Amperity’s first-party data ID resolution is purpose-built to create unparalleled customer profiles, giving teams the data they need to delight customers and fuel growth.

Unleashing the Power of ID Resolution

A technology that can be used to improve the ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ strategies of a business, ID resolution allows organizations to gain a better perspective on who their customers are so they can provide them with a premium service. It also allows the business to quickly access all the data it has about a customer/student/guest/citizen when requests like “delete my data”, “show me what data you have”, etc. arise.

ID resolution also unleashes results that can only be achieved with the most trusted and up-to-date customer view.

Please take a look:

• +128% – The increased return on ad spend at Brooks Running
• +62% – The increased conversion on generated leads at Servco
• -98% – The reduction in data delivery time for a leading hotel brand

Data privacy management software solution Ketch, is also a brand to watch. A ‘Trust By Design Platform’, it enables businesses to be responsible stewards of consumer data by providing simplified privacy operations and complete, dynamic data control and intelligence.

And with all the change and privacy regulations, requiring brands to get serious about instilling measures around obtaining explicit consent from customers for data collection, providing opt-out mechanisms and anonymizing personal data, another solution is back in the spotlight – data clean rooms (DCRs).

With marketers exploring new avenues to discover high-value audiences, recent predictions indicate that 80% of advertisers with media buying budgets over AU$1.43 billion will use DCRs by 2023.

Mitigating Regulatory/Consumer Risks

The best way marketers can minimize the risk and steer clear of poor technology choices is by considering use cases to improve their ‘defense’, i.e. protecting customer data at all costs. Yes, sales are important and can have a direct ROI, but how about the ability to provide individuals with more choice and control over how you use their data? Preference centres are not new, but they are fast becoming a must-have utility that all businesses should leverage.

Transparency is also key. Marketers should be fully transparent with consumers about the data they collect and how it’s used. They should clearly communicate their data privacy policies, making it easy for consumers to opt out of data collection or marketing activities if they choose.

At the same time, they should also monitor and respond to feedback from consumers. And importantly, take action if they identify any issues. Processes should be in place for responding to complaints and addressing concerns.

Following these best practices and performing proper due diligence can save a lot of headache down the road, helping them make better technology choices from the start and reducing their exposure to regulatory or consumer risks.

In a Privacy-First World, First-Party Is the Only Party

Regardless of the mountain of challenges that marketers and advertisers face, they can easily and effectively scale each one by ensuring their first-party data is in order. The input from their own systems will be first-party PII (Personally Identifiable Information) no matter how the new ecosystem unfolds. Higher quality PII will result in better match rates, making their advertising in paid channels more effective. First-party data will be used for activation, suppression and measurement, replacing third-party tag-based measurement.

Bottom line: A robust first-party PII strategy will put you in the strongest position to make the most of both existing and new channels. It’s a matter of being prepared and saying good riddance to bad data practices.

Amperity is the leading Customer Data Platform provider that helps companies use data to improve marketing performance, build long-term customer loyalty and drive growth. Amperity’s flagship enterprise CDP is used by many of the world’s best-loved brands, such as Alaska Airlines, Endeavour Drinks, Kendra Scott, Lucky Brand, Planet Fitness, Seattle Sounders FC, Under Armour and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.