ANA Conference: Privacy-Protecting Data Practices Lead to More Effective Marketing

The model Lowe’s follows “starts with the intentional collection of data, knowing what data you're collecting, why you're collecting it, and what you're going to go and do with it,” said Amanda Bailey, the home improvement company's vice president of customer marketing and loyalty. Determining those pieces then “takes you into how you'll be able to deliver meaningful personalization across every step of the customer journey, and all the while having the need to build trust and transparency.”

“When customers raise their hand and join [a business'] loyalty program, they're opting in to your brand, and you have a responsibility to tell them what you're going to do with information that they provide to you,” Bailey said during her panel on personalization through first-party data. That “gives you permission to drive deeper engagement, to get to know them, get to know what they want ... That whole system really builds [a] connection and relationship" with the customer and "drives business impact.”

Holly Yonosko, chief analytics officer at Acxiom, a database marketing company, made similar points in her session. “Data innovation can unlock smarter marketing engagements, it can drive measurable growth, and all [of this is] done within a secure data collaboration,” she said.

Bailey noted that balancing data and personalization is getting harder because a paradox arises. “Customers are demanding incredible relevance in their experience,” where “they want you to know everything about them [and] they don't want to see things in their feed that are not relevant to them,” she said. “But at the same time, they're more privacy conscious than ever. They are very skeptical of sharing their information,” and “they want to know what you're doing with that information.”

Yonosko likewise cited the challenges. “We're in an inflection point right now, and data is more available, it's more powerful and really [more] expected than ever before,” she said. “But with great power comes greater scrutiny from your consumers, from regulators and your own” chief marketing officer.

“It goes without saying that sharing data must be done in a privacy-compliant way to protect both your customers and your business,” she said.

Having an “opt-in upfront” is the best way to drive personalization through data collection without compromising consent, Bailey said. Collecting only data that will be used and allowing customers to see how you use it "builds that trust.”

“You have to earn the right to personalize every single time you interact with a customer,” she said.

Bailey also noted the intersection of data, personalization and customer loyalty, because "94% of customers are more likely to stay loyal to brands that champion transparency and data ethics.” Businesses need to “be purposeful in how you think about organizing your data, what you're going to do with that data and how you're going to put it to work."

"If you're going to collect the data about the customer … then you have a responsibility and an obligation to then go and deliver something relevant and use that data effectively,” she added.

Having good data practices will also help when using AI, Yonosko said. “One of the biggest barriers we're seeing is not the technology of AI, it's the data readiness,” she said. “Enterprises have the ambition, but they lack the clean, connected, consistent data to power AI meaningfully.”

Companies “need a partner for identity resolution, data governance and enrichment capabilities to ensure the data training your AI is clean, complete and unified,” Yonosko added.

Bailey reiterated the huge opportunities that data can offer. “From the customers that you can serve to the way you drive results and even how you inform your future business strategies, that's the power of this data,” she said. “When you take it beyond the transaction and the utilitarian use of the data and really piece it together across the entire journey, there's real power in that.”