Editorial
There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken tension in the age of digital marketing: when we talk about “delivering a superior customer experience,” it's defined by the marketer, relative to business outcomes, not by the consumer, relative to their preferences.
Put another way, improvements to customer experience (CX) are measured by business metrics, not by consumer happiness. Yes, there’s a relationship between them, but at the end of the day, if conversions drop on the website, for example, that web experience will be revised.
Time for a Reckoning
The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are a series of laws going into effect on May 25 this year that will come with heavy fines and penalties for non-compliance, which is why most of the business world are so concerned about what they need to do to ensure they comply.
The text includes a lot of technical requirements, as well as considerable uncertainty about how it translates in practice.
As privacy experts and commentators issue warnings about widespread unpreparedness for something that isn’t entirely clear to what extent one must prepare, absent is the discussion about what this actually portends for marketing: namely, a reckoning between the customer’s preferences and the marketer’s.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
6
The Future of Social Media: Emerging Trends and How to Stay Ahead of the Curve
The impact of emerging technologies like AI on social media
Webinar
Jun
7
The Building Blocks of Personalization
This webinar will explore how personalization can create powerful ecommerce shopping experience.
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
Webinar
On demand
AI for Marketers: Optimize Personalization Across the Funnel
Understand the benefits of utilizing AI across your entire marketing stack
A Fundamental Shift in How We Approach Marketing
At the same time that digital channels have given rise to the empowered customer, so too have marketers been dealt a bevy of riches: more ways to communicate (inundate?), more insight to be relevant (creepy?), more budget for integrated campaigns (impressions?). Marketers rarely have asked for permission nor provided transparency about what kind of data they can collect and, perhaps more importantly, the purpose for which it is being used.
GDPR challenges that practice to the core. The question of GDPR readiness for marketers is far more than whether or not they are compliant, or asking permission to collect and use data within a narrow scope, or supporting a customer’s right to be erased from the marketer’s database. Rather, readiness is about fundamentally rethinking marketing to be about delivering value — actual, real, compelling value — to their customers that eases the tension once and for all.
Such a shift is so much bigger than consent management. For every ask of the customer, the marketer will be required to grapple with the questions:
- “Do I really need this data to accomplish a goal?"
- “Why would a customer want to provide this information to my brand?”
- “Is the message/campaign/newsletter I am providing in exchange for the information going to be seen as an adequate exchange by the customer?”
Done right, marketers who already recognize the importance of basing marketing on first party data will actually have even better data, because it is transparently collected and used. GDPR puts the notion of responsible stewardship of customer data front and center. The marketers who rise to the challenge will be better marketers with more loyal customers over the long term.
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