The Increasing Importance of Privacy In Marketing
Customer data is extremely valuable for any marketer nowadays. The data generated by marketing campaigns help marketers in understanding the market, its customers and the wants and needs to optimize the products or services. As you can imagine, such valuable data is also a target for cyber criminals or competitors.
However, as valuable customer data is, it’s also essential to keep the data private. If you fail to keep customer data secure and private, it may have disastrous consequences.
In order words, if you launch a new marketing campaign, you can’t deny the importance of keeping privacy in mind. In addition, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws – enacted since 25 May earlier this year – ensure that companies are in compliance with data security and privacy of European citizens.
In this article, I’ll discuss why data security is incredibly important when launching marketing campaigns, why people value privacy more than ever these days and what you can do in the future to secure your marketing campaigns.
Data Privacy & Security
Every marketer and business must comply with privacy laws and regulations. However, if you can ensure customers that their data is in a safe place, you also build trust. If you can’t ensure that their data is safe and you suffer a significant data breach, you’ll likely lose many customers, as well as fail to attract new customers.
There are plenty of companies of all different sizes that have been sued over privacy issues in the past. Most large enterprises such as Yahoo or eBay who experienced huge data breaches are capable of surviving such an attack but many small companies couldn’t keep their head above the water. It’s a simple fact that weak security and unprofessional data handling can cost you everything.
Thus, data privacy and protection must be at the top of the priority list when creating a new marketing campaign.
Why People Value Privacy More than Ever These Days
Consumers place more and more value on their privacy and what type of data businesses store. In general, people don’t like to be watched, so they don’t like the fact that some businesses know a whole lot about them.
Although it’s not illegal for businesses to store personal and payment information, it’s not always an advantage. Privacy isn’t secrecy, but most people don’t fancy the idea of their information somewhere out there.
It’s comparable to the USA Freedom Act that restricted US surveillance agencies such as the FBI, NSA and CIA of wiretapping everyone in the U.S. without any reason. U.S. citizens had a huge issue with the fact they were constantly being watched.
Another example are the numerous Hollywood actresses who fell victim to the infamous iCloud hack in 2014. It’s not directly related to shared personal information, however, these situations lead to people being increasingly aware and value their own personal information more.
Trust is another important factor why people value their privacy more. Especially in the digital world, it’s essential to provide a feeling of trust. Data breaches are the opposite and usually obliterate that trust.
Due to the relatively high number of recent data breaches – and more expected to follow, most people who’ve already experienced the consequences of their personal and payment information being stolen tend to tread more carefully and are reluctant to trust other online businesses.
The awareness in regards to online privacy has increased, which created a sense of reluctance to simply share every piece of personal information as it could always end up in the wrong hands.
Tips for the Future
Here’s what you can do in future marketing campaigns in order to improve privacy.
- Privacy Protection Analysis
Cyber criminals may always try to breach your campaign website or server and abuse the information for fraudulent activities. It’s best to bring in an IT expert to rigorously test your current security practices and improve where necessary.
- Data Collection
In order to minimize the risk of losing data, carefully consider what type of information is essentialto your business, to keep it running. Is the data gathered strictly necessary? If not, you might want to reconsider what data you collect from campaigns. The less you store, the lower the risks.
- Communication
Communication is extremely important when it comes to privacy protection. People don’t want to hear what you’re going to do in case of a data breach, they want to know what you’ve already done. Communication is key to engagement and trust as well.
- Data Security
Proof the audience you follow the best security practices and use top-notch security software to keep their data secure. You’re not only doing it to be compliant with regulations, but also in going to great lengths to protect the user data.
- Privacy Policies
Most marketing campaign data is shared with many other departments and people within a company. It’s therefore important to establish clear privacy policies. Human errors are still a huge factor in data losses/breaches. Thus, the more important everyone is aware of threats and security policies.
Guest Post from Bill at PixelPrivacy.com. Whether it be one of our in-depth guides or our expertly crafted “how-to” articles, we’re here to show you how to stay safe online. We believe everyone has the power to keep their data secure, no matter what your level of tech expertise is and our site will show you how!