Gathering the right data for personalization, in a privacy-driven world

It’s estimated that the chance of finding two identical snowflakes is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Likewise, you’re an individual in the sea of humanity. You don’t want same-same treatment, you want your interactions to be personalized and contextualized – with your likes, dislikes and habits embedded throughout applications. But collecting (and using) that type of data is becoming increasingly contentious.

Every brand is wrestling a paradox. People crave personalized experiences, but also want their privacy. Brands desire strong customer relationships, but when personalization gets too close, they risk violating their customers’ trust. It’s a fine line to walk.

Personalization is rooted in customer data. The usual logic that's applied by companies, is the more CRM data that’s acquired, stored and used in personalization, the more effectively you can offer perfectly timely and relevant experiences. However, personalization is a long-play game of balancing your needs and customer wants. And the rules of the game continue to change.

Research company Gartner, has defined personalization as “...a process that creates a relevant, individualized interaction between two parties designed to enhance the experience of the recipient”. But as more companies seek to gain advantages from their CRM data, concurrently our privacy protection laws are evolving – making personalization a volatile faultline.

That presents a conundrum for brands: greater sales may be on offer, as are deeper relationships, but if you cross that faultline you risk alienating those same people you’re trying to win over.

The task ahead is to wisely cultivate, manage and use the data our users and customers entrust us with, without being ‘creepy’ in your efforts.

What is personalization?

True personalization is a customer-centric approach that's utilized company-wide, not only in the traditional areas of sales, marketing and customer service. It allows you to have a presence at the right time, with the right message or action, in the right place.

Personalization works to collect personal data, then detect patterns, and discover correlations across those multiple data sources, and matching the personal attributes and behaviors that align with a brand’s goals, values, offerings or activities. By finding these opportunities, it allows a brand to:

• Build elevated brand and customer experiences
• Fine tune messaging and personal outreaches
• Create personalized content, emails, quotes and proposals.

At its most effective, personalization engages people during designated ‘micro-moments’ within their customer journey. Those micro-moment touches are specially designed to lead them to the next step – be that enquiring, registering, subscribing, re-booking, having (or extending) a conversation, consuming more content, dwelling for longer on your website or taking the ultimate, final step of purchasing.

What's the right data to collect to match privacy concerns?

With personalization efforts often going too far and edging into the ‘creepy’ zone, there's increasing anxiety around data collection and its use. Brands are struggling to find a comfortable balance between privacy and the promise of personalization, while also keeping up with growing data complexity, emerging technology and changing government regulations.

The 2022 Gartner Personalization Survey revealed a marked behavioral change amongst us, with approximately 74% of customers (both B2C and B2B) actively disabling all tracking and muting many brand communications.

On top of that, there's a changing third-party data landscape that’s making it increasingly difficult to discover details about customers and to better qualify (and quantify) buyer behaviors and preferences.

Therefore, brands should be working towards building relationships with their users where personal data is incrementally shared – so they can better understand each person’s preferences, likes, dislikes and decision-making style. In this new landscape, the key differentiator amongst brands is the creation of mutual trust, where more detailed data is ‘earned’ and through the use of that data, brands slowly convert them from customers and users, to loyal advocates.

What a cookieless future means for personalization

Cookies have long been the primary tool for tracking and collecting customer data on the internet. They’re the tiny bits of data and personal identifiers that are collected and exchanged between platforms, when users click a link or go to a page, anywhere on the web.

They help brands better understand the profile of people who visit their website and to improve their browsing experience.

But a ‘cookieless future’ isn’t far away. According to Think with Google, global searches for ‘online privacy’ grew 50% in 2020 compared to the previous year. Google responded to this with (recently updated) plans to remove support for third-party cookies on their Google Chrome browser, from 2023 onwards.

Brands can therefore no longer rely on third-party cookie information and are less able to identify and target people with relevant advertising or marketing. The change is a win for user privacy, but if you're not prepared, your ad performance is about to take a dive.

The ad tech industry is scrambling to find a post- ‘cookie-pocalypse’ approach that instead places user privacy at the heart of data and targeting strategies. It’s likely that alternative identification solutions based on non-cookie identifiers (such as email addresses) will become essential components in those plans, but ultimately it’s the quality and quantity of your CRM stored first-party data that determines the efficacy of any alternatives you employ.

Custom rich text fields within a CRM

There are certain CRM-focused customizations that can be made to an advanced rich text editor that assist it’s personalization capabilities, as well as improving:

• User interface (UI)
• Content formatting
• Personalization
• Productivity

1. Streamline the UI

Why do you need to streamline the editor’s UI? CRMs are usually very busy software, often with 5-10 panes of descriptive information or enabling the user to take action on a single record. Therefore, it’s critical that your rich text fields maintain a minimal visual footprint, while still enabling users to perform advanced editing functions. A WYSIWYG editor creates an experience that’s loved by users – with many reporting 85% increases in engagement and readability.

2. Enforce strict formatting

Why do you need to enforce strict formatting in your CRM rich text fields? According to pre-pandemic research done by Sirius Decisions (now Forrester Research), between 10% and 25% of B2B customer and prospect records include critical data errors that cause 40% of business objectives to fail. Then there’s the estimated cost of a bad CRM record – it’s upwards of $100 per record. Do you need any more reasons to lock down your formatting?

3. Personalization and privacy

What are the benefits of personalizing your CRM outreaches? Adweek reports that personalization can reduce customer acquisition costs by up to to 50% and increase marketing spend efficiency by up to 30%. In the area of emails, Campaign Monitor found that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, while personalized and segmented campaigns show a 760% increase in email revenue!

Merge tag dropdowns within a rich text editor can help to maintain data quality and ensure any privacy concerns are locked down. These can be configured to limit the choice of fields, so only certain types of data can be selected for use: first-, second-, third- or zero-party data.

4. Maximize productivity

How can your CRM rich text editor improve productivity? Brands utilize CRMs to achieve massive productivity gains. According to Salesforce, using a CRM can increase productivity by up to 34% and sales by up to 29%. Upgrading the editor component within your CRM to one with a WYSIWYG experience, can reduce content creation time by 90%. Over a year, your users could save thousands of hours in their workflow.

Using an advanced WYSIWYG editor component that provides comprehensive documentation and customizability allows developers to mold rich text editor components into a CRM solution that perfectly fits their needs. They’ve been known to save up to six months' of development time for each new feature scoped.