How to Deliver Digital Experiences While Remaining Privacy-Compliant
Even before the pandemic struck, companies had sought new ways to meet ever-rising consumer expectations for digital. For marketers, this means understanding consumer behaviors and preferences to ensure you are staying in touch when face-to-face interaction isn’t possible. In a world where digital is a brand’s most valued presence, brands have to adopt personalization and data-driven approaches to retain customers and remain competitive.
Today, marketers rely on multichannel strategies to produce marketing campaigns. While this practice enables marketers to customize their journey, it also presents unique challenges. To have a successful campaign, brands need to properly attribute a customer to understand where they came from and determine whether or not that campaign is worth pursuing.
However, with looming privacy changes, how can brands deliver digital experiences while also remaining compliant? The answer lies in pursuing multitouch attribution while being as transparent as possible about the data you need to collect and why.
Focus on Attribution
Eighty-two percent of consumers turn to mobile for help with research and reviews before making a product decision. Shifting more ad spend online helps marketers reach these potential customers and start to scale their impact without increasing their budget.
However, attributing what channels customers are coming from is a challenge when they use a bunch of channels, some of which may not belong directly to the brand or retailer. By solely relying on the insights from a customer’s last stop before making a purchase, marketers can’t tell where the journey originated.
For marketers, this common scenario poses the question: “What is driving my inbound leads?”
To get the full picture for these leads and learn which campaigns are driving them, marketers need to understand multitouch attribution. Customers’ decisions are influenced by each connection they make with a brand, and multitouch attribution helps marketers understand how each step along the customer journey contributes to conversion and revenue.
This even works with leads that come via phone. When a business uses call tracking software, they can use trackable phone numbers to show the attribution of their call leads — tracing them back to social media ads, PPC ads, or through content marketing. Knowing the attribution allows marketers to better understand and personalize their messaging to reach customers via the preferred channel.
Today, customers have higher expectations for their experience with a company than ever before. In fact, 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
If you are not providing a personalized experience that resonates with your customers, they’ll find someone who can.
How to Navigate a Post-GDPR and CCPA World
Multiple devices and touchpoints and growing regulations on data privacy and tracking make marketing and advertising attribution both more difficult and more important than ever.
It wasn’t until recently, with new regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the Virginia Consumer Protection Act (VCPA), that companies widely began to embrace privacy.
Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2023, 75% of the world’s population will have their personal data covered under such privacy regulations.
While this shift can mean significant changes for some attribution practices, it also may usher in more innovative practices and technology. One best practice we’ll see more of is reliance on first-party data.
For companies to meet the challenges with cookies, it is important to be as specific and transparent as possible in their privacy policies. It is equally important to define what personal data is. Once your privacy policy is clearly written, understandable, and available, you can take the necessary steps toward getting your organization compliant and offer a better customer experience.
Through attribution, brands can better understand the customer journey and personalize messaging to fit each customer’s needs, leading to better campaigns and increased customer retention. With transparency, you can build a brand while staying on the right side of emerging privacy guidelines.
Laure Fisher is co-founder and COO of CallTrackingMetrics.
