Privacy is the "elephant in the room" of target marketing efforts.
The customer has been conditioned to think… How can you target an offer without my data? How is that data collected and used? Wait a second…How did you get that data? Who else has that data?
No one likes to talk about Privacy too much. Most Marketers perceive it as a negative in customer’s minds; even the root cause of failing loyalty programs.
There are different ways of dealing with the privacy issue.
- You can ignore the issue
- You can decide that it isn’t worth the hassle and give everyone the same offer
- You can point to a privacy policy and convince yourself that boilerplate from a lawyer will make a customer content vs. what it is really designed to do… cut back litigation
- You can take the high road.
The high road is to develop target marketing programs that openly target your customers for their propensity to do something, fully transparent and without apology. Remember, in most cases business rules and algorithms cannot handle fully targeted 1:1 offers, so why pretend that the offers are 1:1 Let the customer know that these are offers for "customers like them" – because thats what they are!
What about their data? You get rid of it. That’s right… you build a unique campaign database that strips out all the identifiable data that is not needed. and you tell the customer right on the offer "THIS OFFER WAS CREATED FOR CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU, FROM A SECURE DATABASE WITHOUT ANY OF YOUR PERSONAL OR IDENTIFIABLE DATA" You use a unique customer campaign number derived from, or referenced to, the customer’s data that is held in a database elsewhere. For the campaign, the unique number used is in a group for offer purposes. Essentially, the offers are not personalized down to the customer level. They are not company:1 but company:segment .
More on the "high road" If you need an email address or a name and street address to deliver the offer, you add that to the note to the customer… "THIS OFFER WAS CREATED FOR CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU, FROM A SECURE DATABASE WITHOUT ANY OF YOUR PERSONAL OR IDENTIFIABLE DATA – YOUR (EMAIL) ADDRESS HAS BEEN APPENDED TO THE OFFER FOR DELIVERY PURPOSES ONLY"
When the campaign is over, you preserve the high road policy, by using the intelligence from the campaign selectively to analyze and optimize. The next campaign uses unique campaign ID numbers again.
There is enough opportunity for dynamic offer optimization to challenge the savviest marketers with the biggest technology resources, while staying on the high road.
Now the Customer is being conditioned differently.
How can you target an
offer without my data?
- I’m part of a group getting the offer
How is that data collected and used?
- My personal and identifiable data isn’t being used
Wait a
second…How did you get that data? Who else has that data?
- I trust the company judging by the effort they have made in communicating how they use my information
Next time I’ll share my thoughts on… delivery offers.
