A Main Concern For Online Consumers: Privacy

Privacy is a main concern for many online consumers, with 86% of users proactively taking steps to improve their safety online. Throughout the development of the internet and digital marketing, governments, industries and privacy organisations have been busy putting data privacy regulation and guidelines into place.

It is crucial that you, as a marketer understand the importance of privacy. Not only is the reputation of your business and the trust of your customers at stake, but you could be facing penalties or fines.

So what is privacy? Privacy is a fundamental human right that underpins freedom of association, thought and expression, as well as freedom from discrimination.

Online privacy is the level of privacy protection an individual has while connected to the Internet. It covers the amount of online security available for personal and financial data, communications, and preferences.

Marketers need to consider the fine line between balancing personalisation with privacy and transparency with privacy.

Personalisation and Privacy

Surprisingly, the prospect of personalisation gives us marketers a leeway to gathering consumers data. Customers benefit from targeted and personalised experiences online. Marketers benefit from customer demographics as they do not want to target consumers where messages don’t convert. It’s a win win!

Around 49% of individuals claim that they don’t have a problem with companies tracking buying behaviours if it results in more relevant offers. Additionally, 64% of consumers don’t mind being notified of offers for coupons. Overall, 61% of consumers believe getting relevant offers is more important than keeping their online activity private.

However, we always need to consider the consumer perspective. Consumers will always be cautious of their privacy, however marketers can balance this carefully in order to benefit themselves. You can read more here: This 5 minute blog post delves more into the personalisation VS privacy war: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/personalization-versus-privacy

Transparency and Privacy

In order to provide personalisation, as discussed above, marketers need to be constantly collecting consumers data. However, we are legally obligated to treat the data collection process in a respectful and fair way. In order to do this, we must be fully transparent about what data we are collecting, and how it will be used. Do not stress! With a few simple steps according to DMI Daily Digest, it is simple to transform marketing touch points around privacy into a positive customer experience:

• Develop user-centric privacy controls to give customers control.

• Avoid multiple intrusions.

• Prevent human intrusion by using automation wherever possible.

Additionally, DMI Daily Digest have suggested some extra steps that we can take in order to be more thorough with marketing privacy policies:

• Provide customers with utmost assurance that your business values their privacy.

• Publicise tools and methods that your business uses in order to ensure customers data is safe.

• Display certification clearly including any other security logos.

• Create a privacy policy and outline this on its own page.

• Let customers know when their information is being disclosed, and be extremely clear on how information is used once collected.

• Give customers the option to decline to provide their personal info, as well as unsubscribe from emails and other promotions.

• Restrict sale of data to third party organisations. Use marketing optimization that doesn’t require third party data sales to activate it.

For more information on why marketers should care about online privacy, you can read more here: https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-au/blog/why-marketers-should-care-about-privacy-rulings