GDPR – A Shift in Personalized Marketing Effectiveness

By now, we all know that GDPR protects consumer’s privacy and limits marketeers in their “freedom” to reach out. But it isn’t all bad news for brands! In fact, we suggest that you set aside your fears to embrace the multifaceted requirements of the GDPR. Unique business opportunities are now opened with the legislation.

Clearly, the rules are tighter and more challenging now, but the basic principles are the same as those that existed for many years.  The challenge, of course, is in using 3^rd party data, so brands need to squeeze more value out of 1^st party data and figure out ways to grow it.

Some high-level guidelines to “ride the wave of GDPR” and make the most of our new reality:

• Transparency builds trust. Leverage your transparency to further build trust in your brand and drive customer loyalty. This brings a less antagonistic relationship between you and your customer and opens the door for a two-sided conversation.
• By empowering your customer, you are also empowering your business and gain a competitive edge. Engage with your customers the way they prefer and significantly grow your customer understanding. Customers having some power back is a good thing as it can provide more results when you communicate in preferred ways to people who want to hear from you.
• GDPR offers strong opportunities to focus on existing customers and high value prospects that are genuinely interested. Although you will work with a smaller base, there is clearly a higher value, less waste and ultimately a much higher ROI on your marketing activities.
• The focus now turns to a long-term approach. Short term sales have always had a focus in marketing. Customer lifetime value orientation will drive long term topline and bottom line.
• Understanding customers preferences better and respecting those preferences helps winning the hearts and minds of your customers. This requires the delivery of authentic and personalized experiences.
• Welcome new customers with open arms. They made a clear choice to transfer their data and preferences from one company to another.  Make it easy for new customers to become your client and improve upon the benefits they had with their previous company.
• Profiling has not become fully impossible under GDPR, but there will be serious limitations if you don’t have consent. Leverage more granular segmentation techniques for those “anonymous” prospects and customers.  Go beyond “bronze/silver/gold” to help drive your business.

Solutions that apply in the light of GDPR

So now that so many tactics that you may have relied on are now a bit weakened in light of GDPR, what solutions can you turn to in order to drive results?

• Marketing Optimization and Marketing Mix Modeling - These solutions are mature and proven to help you understand and improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities, even on a very granular level without the use of PII data.
• Multi Touch Attribution - While more challenging under GDPR, especially as a stand-alone tactic, MTA is still a strong approach to understand and improve your digital marketing effectiveness for those prospects and customers that gave consent. You will not be able to track everyone, but MTA can help you drive value for a focused group of people.
• Customer Loyalty Analysis - With a stronger focus on your existing customers, it is important to better understand the potential and optimize against the customer lifetime value of each of you customers.
• Customer Segmentation - Granular segmentation techniques will help you identify high value prospects and how to reach them without the need for profiling or PII data. Modern segmentation techniques will bring you quite close to “profiling effectiveness” and still remain GDPR compliant.

Analytic Partners Can Help

We’d love to speak to you about how we can help you adapt, evolve and thrive in the face of any challenge, including GDPR. Please reach out to contact us about how we can help.