The Challenge of Data Driven Marketing in the Era of GDPR

Data driven marketing is the process by which marketers use customer data to design their strategies and optimise their marketing campaigns. The majority of marketers use data management platforms (DMPs) to try to deliver their respective marketing strategies and Nielsen research coming from the US showed that 63% of marketers consider DMPs among the top-3 marketing and measurement technologies.

The ability to personalise campaigns is what allows a proposition and a product or service to cut through the noise that large volumes of similar content creates. According to McKinsey studies personalisation is delivering up to 8 times more return on your spend for marketing activities.

The effects of Data Protection on Data Driven Marketing

For marketers everything seemed to be on track with their data driven marketing activities and the weight of work was focused on the optimisation of the processes to maximise the ROI on their campaigns. All of this was before the announcement of the new data protection regulation. Since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came in force, the landscape of how to do marketing has changed drastically. In a short period of time, all the old standards of how to interact with customer data were no longer relevant as the ability to collect personal data was severally restricted. To make things worse, any violation of GDPR could result in penalties that could vary from a few thousands of pounds to millions (based on the incident and the size of the business), eliminating any benefit of continuing to use previous techniques to collect customer data at scale.

Make sure that your marketing strategies are aligned with GDPR

GDPR is here to stay and as the time pass more and more data privacy regulations will appear in other markets around the world. Adapting your strategies to the new regulations will eliminate the risk and will make your marketing activities more cost effective. Recent research from the Data & Marketing Association showed that over 82% of the UK’s marketers believe that their organisations are compliant with GDPR, yet only 41% of consumers are confident that brands are using their data in a way that is aligned with GDPR.

Being able to prove that you are compliant with the data privacy regulations of the market your business is active, is very important in order to build trust with your clients or partners. You can find more information about compliance in our previous blog on ‘Introduction to the Information Commissioner’s Office’ (ICO) by Matt Quinn.