Tech’s privacy war makes it more important than ever to prioritise customer experience

The last few years has seen the tech industry pivot and try to manage the backlash against personal data collection. Safari, Firefox and Chrome have all phased out third-party cookies, which has until now made up the bulk of advertising data online. Their focus has turned to using their own vast eco-systems to create walled-gardens of first-party cookie data to keep advertisers targeting users solely within their platforms.

The latest development, Apple’s roll out of IOS 14.5 and the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) network, is likely to have huge implications for Facebook’s business model, which relies on targeted advertising for 99% of the company’s revenue.

Indeed, early indications suggest that given the opportunity to opt out of data collection by IOS 14.5, approximately 80% of users will do just that.

It seems clear that increasing unease with how big tech are collecting data is bound to start coming back to bite advertisers with greater frequency. For large advertisers in particular, the need to take control of your own data and build more reliable, trust-worthy and valuable pools of zero-party and first-party data sets will become the big topic for marketing and technology alike.

What does this mean for businesses who rely on digital targeting and customer segmentation?

Here are four areas I think successful businesses will invest in to continue to grow:

Experience is more important than ever

It’s more important than ever to ensure users want to interact with your brand directly. Creating environments online that are searchable, useful and delightful to use must be a priority for firms in the new cookie-less world.

Prioritise the journeys on your site that add most value to your users and look to optimise them to drive performance. Have a user testing strategy in place to enable the business to constantly optimise as your users’ expectations evolve over time.

Finally, close the loop on experience with valuable and differentiated CRM programmes. Think about where the value lies in the relationship between yourself and the user. What are your shared interests and purpose? Where can you add value to their lives based on your unique position in the market? These added experiences will keep users coming back to you and reduce your reliance on 3^rd party cookies and tracking.

Invest in your own data platforms

Where you have scale, a broad customer base and product selection, your business will benefit from investing in a customer data system to hold, manage and activate all your zero and first-party data.

Five to ten years ago, the trend was for businesses to invest in data management platforms (DMPs), as a way of targeting anonymous customer segments via ad networks. Shifts in regulations and trends around data privacy have meant that more frequently we’re seeing these same businesses pivoting to CDPs (customer data platforms). CDPs work differently by consolidating and unifying customer data from various channels, including known-first party data, to enable both CRM targeting campaigns and more traditional personalised ads.

Businesses have more control over the personally identifiable information (PII) data which gets stored by the CDP, than they do with a DMP, making it the technology of choice for many businesses in today’s climate.

Build…

Read The Full Article at eConsultancy