What you’ll read:
- There are more restrictions on collecting data than ever before, but marketers can still reap the benefits.
- The data marketers gather is more specific to individual users than ever before, potentially strengthening personalization and your bottom line.
More than ever, people understand how companies gather, use, and sell their their data — and as much as they can, they’re opting out. Large corporations like Apple have come to their aid, making it easy for a user to limit gathering and selling user data. So with once plentiful data now becoming scarce, how do you market successfully with less information? You focus on getting the best data you can, and you use it smartly.
Data privacy awareness continues to be a customer concern
When Apple released iOS 14.5 earlier this year, it gave users clear and understandable ways to opt out of data tracking and sharing from their apps—a prompt when opening an app, rather than a hidden setting. The initial results were astonishing: people opted out of tracking 96% of the time.
And it’s not just coming from Apple. In 2020, California introduced the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which gave users the ability to tweak which cookies websites gathered from their browsing (and introduced intrusive pop-ins for California residents). Google’s upcoming Android 12 will also introduce massively overhauled privacy controls, including a privacy dashboard, giving their users similar options to opt-out as Apple.
When it comes to data, remember the 80/20 rule
The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, states that 80% of the outcomes come from 20% of the causes. It covers everything from social media (20% of users create 80% of the content) to business (20% of customers account for 80% of sales) and project management (the last 20% of a project invariably takes 80% of the time). But in marketing, it infers that 20% of the data will give us 80% of the information, the leads, and the results. With these new restrictions, what is the 20% of data that we’re getting, and how can it best be used?
How to use less data, better
The upside of these data restrictions is that what’s now available comes much more reliably from the user, rather than filtered and collated through other parties. First- and zero-party data provides a much more personalized view on the specifics of individual users.
While first- and zero-party data might not be able to get you the massive, population-wide datasets that other types do, they offer distinct advantages. You can know exactly where the data is coming from, and it’s typically relevant. In a climate where distrust of data-sharing is a norm, staying open and upfront about where your data comes from helps build trust with users.
First- and zero-party data is most powerful when leveraged as an avenue for contextual marketing, taking the information you can glean about an individual and tailoring interactions to them. With the data available to you, you’re still able to see where a user comes from, which devices they’re using, the setting they employ, and how they’re interacting with your page. You can easily segment your user population by their place in the lifecycle of using your site: Are they new to your site? A returning customer? Have they gone part of the way through the purchase process, but stalled at the last minute? Dynamically modifying your content — and better targeting a user based on their familiarity with your product — means the user encounters a more relevant page, personalized page, which can increase the company’s bottom line.
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Providing a user with an experience specifically tailored to them also means a higher chance of forming a stronger positive association with your brand. This can get even more specific if you use tools to ask what sort of content they’re looking for directly and then deliver it. A powerful example of this is how beauty brand Inkey List allows users to build their own skincare system by answering a few questions — giving the user hyper-specific and useful recommendations, while the brand collects accurate data.
There’s an immediate inclination to rely on this data for heavy retargeting to close the loop on a sale or purchase. But while a “you left this in the cart, here’s 10% off” can be a welcome email, days and weeks of follow-up emails rapidly become irritating and could easily drive a customer away. Likewise, aggressively personalized communications could read as intrusive by a person who is already anxious about how their data is used. The information you gather can give you a remarkable level of detail on the individual, so it pays to have a light touch so as not to come off as overbearing.
The importance of digital privacy is only going to increase over time. The sooner marketers rethink their engagement strategies, the better. But that doesn’t have to mean wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch! The data that you’re still able to gather is more specific to individual users than ever before, and provides significant insight into their needs and behaviors. It’s a matter of approaching what data you do have smartly, and using it to create a tailored campaign that’s sure to win people over.