Modern marketers are faced with a great dilemma: Consumers want highly-personalized marketing, but also don’t want to put their personal information at risk.
According to Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that offers a personalized experience, but according to Deloitte, 52% of consumers would decline to take a survey due to privacy concerns.
So, how do marketers consolidate these two seemingly opposing attitudes and create the best advertising campaigns?
The answer, maybe surprisingly, lies in one-to-one marketing.
If you’re a marketer looking to implement a targeted marketing campaign with consumer privacy in mind, or a curious consumer interested in how companies use your information, read on.
Also, be sure to check out An Audience of One which teaches the one-to-one marketing strategy used by leading companies such as Wamart, United Airlines, Jeep, and many more.
So, with all that said, let’s get started!
One-to-One Marketing: Why It’s Important
As the market has been increasingly inundated with advertisements in almost every medium, it has become important for companies to learn how to “break through the noise” and reach customers as effectively and cost-efficiently as possible. People have learned to tune-out irrelevant advertising, which they most likely receive from mass marketing, and openly request for a more personalized approach.
One-to-one marketing seeks to change that. And, according to 87% of marketers, the implementation of a one-to-one strategy has resulted in an increase in sales.
With one-to-one marketing, marketers can gain valuable insights through data that consumers openly provide. Marketers can go further than create sales funnels with this information by intercepting funnels at the best time and place. This is not only the case in eCommerce, as digital marketers have already been able to track most customer interactions, but also with interactions at brick-and-mortar store locations, which is the real breakthrough.
But with all this information flying around, consumers are asking how this could potentially be unsafe for them.
Interested in learning more about one-to-one marketing? Click the image below to order your copy of the essential book on one-to-one marketing by Jamie Turner and Chuck Moxley.
Addressing Consumer Privacy Concerns
Today’s average consumer likes to stay highly informed about the buying process, which has led to a slew of privacy concerns, and rightly so. According to Havoc Shield, 22% of small businesses suffered a security breach in 2020 and had an average of 43 user profiles on the dark web. This is clearly still an issue being tackled by marketers, and there’s still a lot that companies, both big and small, need to work on to protect their customers.
In an effort to address these consumer concerns on data privacy, governments have become more stringent on what and how data is being traced and used. In 2018, the EU implemented the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), created with the goal of giving citizens more autonomy over their personal data.
Since then, many other international equivalents to the bill including Brazil’s LGPD and California’s CCPA have been implemented, therefore influencing major markets.
The Covid-19 epidemic and its consequential lockdowns have also played a large role in consumer privacy concerns. With everyone now having most of their day-to-day activities online, more personal information is also vulnerable, and concern for data leaks, hacking, and misuse of information has been on the rise.
Hearing all of this as a marketer may seem daunting to tackle, but don’t worry it gets better!
Concern for consumer data privacy is a priority for reputable companies. Consumer feedback, new government regulations, and innovations spurred by the Covid-era have created technology and strategy that help marketers, companies, and consumers alike by making it easier to direct the ideal consumer to their ideal product, safely and effectively.
In comes one-to-one marketing.
Marketing and Privacy; A Symbiotic Pair?
So, you may be asking yourself, “How does one-to-one marketing bridge the gap between personalization and privacy?” The answer lies in its focus on transparency.
One-to-one marketing advocates for an ecosystem that steers away from data sources like third party cookies that can lead to data safety issues or other problems like ineffective targeting. Long gone are the days of the dreaded, random, and ‘creepy’ pop-ups that turn off consumers and put their information at risk.
Instead, companies should ask for consumer consent, and be open about what they intend to do with that data.
This not only reassures the consumer that they are safe to interact with companies, but it also opens a gateway for companies to ask for additional information that can help optimize the marketing funnel and overall customer experience. This could be done through the use of surveys, for example.
One-to-one marketing can further target audiences by creating pools or segments with content designed for what are known as “customer personas.”
Customer personas are basically IDs that reflect the culmination of authorized data a company can aggregate about a person. This data can include age, gender, location, and job, among many other traits.
So, instead of all of this information being stored under a name, it would be stored as a type of serial number, like #74322357, or basically any random number that can’t be traced back to the real person.
By using this system, consumers can tell companies what they want, and the company, in turn, can give consumers the right products/services at the right time for the right price.
Adapting to Modern Marketing
One-to-one marketing requires the adaptation of trusted strategies based on customer segmentation and a customer-first attitude, new technologies, and a more sophisticated perspective on the modern consumer.
Although there may be a slight learning curve for marketers just starting to dive into one-to-one marketing, your business and customers will thank you in the long run.
If you’ve found the information in this article to be useful, make sure to check out An Audience of One for a more in-depth look at one-to-one marketing and privacy, as well as an even broader view of one-to-one marketing as a whole.
About the Author: Francheska Rossi is a recent graduate from Emory University and marketing intern who is actively looking to land her first job in a marketing department or an ad agency.
If you’d like to reach Francheska, you can send her an email at francheska.rossi@gmail.com or connect with her on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/anna-francheska-rossi