Keeping personalisation ethical and compliant

Benjamin Fine at Formsort explains how businesses can strike the right balance between privacy and personalisation

 

Personalisation has been a game-changer for businesses. Supporting improved customer experiences and service, personalisation doesn’t just drive sales, it drives customer acquisition, loyalty, and lifetime value, all for a more efficient marketing spend. It’s arguably one of the most beneficial technological advancements for business in recent years. 

 

However, it comes with a significant caveat – personalisation can only be valuable if it is done correctly. Widespread data misuse has led to public mistrust, and an increasing number of businesses have realised that customer privacy also matters. So, how can businesses balance privacy and personalisation without crossing ethical lines?

 

What’s the problem with personalisation?

Personalisation isn’t new, so why is it becoming a problem now? The answer lies with automation and generative AI. While both of these things are enormously beneficial productivity tools, they are perhaps a little too efficient when it comes to personalisation. 

 

Capable of processing unimaginably vast swathes of data in the smallest amounts of time, they have opened the door to personalisation on the micro level. Using these tools, businesses can now personalise everything that they do – communication, marketing, advertising. And it’s sometimes simply not appropriate, particularly when sensitive data is used. 

 

So, while the right personalisation can benefit consumers, connecting them with the products and services they’re interested in while limiting irrelevant content, over-personalisation feels like intrusion. And when that happens, customers are more likely to move away from that particular brand. This risks loss of sales and loyalty, while potentially harming brand reputation and identity.

 

And even if a customer overlooks this over-personalisation, it can still impact the business by narrowing the customer’s field of vision and preventing them from discovering other products for themselves. 

 

So, with this in mind, how can businesses maximise the potential of personalisation without risking privacy invasion?

 

Balancing privacy and personalisation

Smarter data collection

Until recently, data collection has rarely been a nuanced process. Businesses would grab what customer data they could, fully aware that they’d never be able to process it, yet alone use it. However, with AI, all previously unusable data has become accessible and valuable. 

 

And that’s where privacy problems arise. It is no longer acceptable to capture customer data that won’t directly enhance their experience with your company. If you’re selling mobile data, you don’t need to know someone’s dietary requirements, shoe size, or sexual orientation. 

 

Smarter data collection enables companies to gather the information they need to create tailored emails and advertising that is useful, insight-driven, and appropriate, without also gathering personal data that is of no benefit to their business. 

 

By taking a privacy-first approach to marketing, you can provide an enhanced customer experience and service that benefits your business, without intruding into places you have no right to be. 

 

Transparent data practices

Consumers are a lot savvier than they were even ten years ago. We all know about the ‘reject all’ cookie button – and many of us are happy to take the time to seek it out. Rather than accepting customer’s wishes however, many businesses have started to obfuscate to get around this problem. Building multi-layered consent forms without a catch-all reject option that require dozens of clicks to get through. Online newspapers – and other sites – denying access to content or charging for content where consent is not given. 

 

The thing to remember is that consumers only deny access to data when they fear that it is going to be misused. If a person understands exactly what data is being collected and why, and how it will be used to benefit them, they’ll be a lot more likely to agree to that data being collected. So, rather than making the process aggressively complicated and jargon-heavy, providing access to clear, concise privacy policies can actually get the customer on side. 

 

Transparency is more important to consumers than ever, and it builds trust. This is why informed consent should always be the ultimate goal for businesses. 

 

Intelligent data use

According to recent research, 95% of consumers have concerns over how organisations use their data. But when data is used to the clear benefit of the consumer, people generally feel the enhancement is a fair trade for their information. 

 

If businesses initiate a policy to ensure that consumer data is only used for the consumer’s benefit – through the enhancement of services, the creation of customer experiences, and the improvement of products – they’re not only maximising the potential of the data they have, but they’re doing so while keeping the customer on side. 

 

And the thing is, it’s a perfectly achievable process. By split testing everything that collected data may be used for – marketing campaigns, communication, targeting, and customer experience – it’s relatively easy to strike the right balance. 

 

By adopting a privacy-first approach to personalisation, businesses can enhance their services and benefit their business while building long-term customer loyalty and trust. For most businesses, it won’t be a quick process, it’s something that needs to be retrofitted into the foundations of the organisation, and it will require ongoing focus. But the businesses that take these steps are likely to reap long-term rewards.    

 

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Benjamin Fine is the Co-Founder and CEO of Formsort, an online form builder for companies with advanced data protection features

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Tero Vesalainen