To remain compliant with constantly changing privacy laws around the globe and consumer demand for companies to respect their preferences and privacy, businesses must design and implement an effective solution that considers consumer privacy for both business and customer interests.
To fully comply while meeting consumer demands, the technology stack that supports these processes should include data-driven decision-making tools that enable businesses to quickly and automatically stay compliant with the ever-changing landscape while empowering customers to select how their information is used. Consent and preference management are becoming increasingly crucial to businesses due to the growing number of privacy concerns.
What is Consent and Preference Management?
Consent management is obtaining permission from people to collect, process, and store their data to carry out marketing activities. Customers provide consent when they opt-in or subscribe to something the brand provides, whether it is to receive notifications, newsletters, or offers.
Customers willingly provide marketers with information about their preferences to receive better, more personalized communication and experiences. This is a step up from consent-led opt-ins because it allows the marketer to communicate with the customer at the time, frequency, channels, and preferred topics. This is the customer’s actual stated preference, not the inferred preference marketers have been working with so far. Such data, provided voluntarily by the customer, is known as zero-party data. It’s apparent that it is the most powerful type of first-party data a brand could hope for.
Improve Customer Experience by Combining Consent and Preference – Consent and Preference Management
While consent management has been in the spotlight since GDPR was enacted, it has been classified as a compliance requirement rather than a marketing must-have. Customer preferences have typically been incorporated as stand-alone marketing initiatives. Consent combined with appreciation, on the other hand, opens up a whole new global world of possibilities for CX-focused marketers.
The business case for developing a unified consent and preference management system is compelling. While consent management is concerned with compliance, preference management can be involved with profitability. They add a new dimension to the customer experience when combined.
Marketers Can Expect One Or More Of The Following Outcomes From Consent And Preference Management:
- Build brand credibility and trust.
- Maintain data privacy compliance.
- Increase marketing efficiency by sending only the communications that are most likely to succeed.
- Allow for the most effective personalization for memorable experiences.
- Place the customer in charge of how the brand communicates with them.
- Participate with the customer at the point of churn, offer alternatives to opting out entirely, and solicit feedback or reasons for the churn.
The Key Benefits of Using a Consent Management Platform (CMP)
In today’s privacy-conscious world, tracking all aspects of consent and preference management is becoming increasingly difficult. Fortunately, there is a sizable market for automated consent and preference platforms.
Platforms for consent and preference management can be beneficial for collecting consent preferences as users interact with websites and apps. Tracking consent can be difficult because customer data may be stored in multiple applications and channels, especially if the company has various brands.
Companies can instead rely on a centralized data infrastructure to monitor changes in consent state in real-time and manage data flows between systems. This technology enables simple compliance in collecting, storing, and utilizing customer data by tracking all parameters of consent and preferences. A key component is facilitating companies’ ability to comply with customer regulatory mandates such as the “right to deletion” under the CCPA.
Why Does Your Company Require Preference Management?
Some businesses try to alleviate clogged inboxes by offering a service that mass-unsubscribe users from email lists. However, users continue to be bombarded with thousands of unsolicited emails each year, resulting in irritated users, unwanted spam filters, and additional negative consequences for businesses.
Preference management is a modern, user-friendly solution for business clients. Users can control their settings through preference management, and businesses can track where and when consent is generally obtained and required. Companies create transparency through this enablement, an essential component of winning brands.
Multi-system preference management enables users to access communication preferences, such as marketing, sales, and product update emails. Preference management guarantees that users are satisfied with the communication they receive. It may include allowing previous customers to unsubscribe from emails, offering opt-in options for product updates, or creating a clear path to subscribing to marketing content/newsletters.
Preference management also allows for more organized and traceable consent. Consent is easily tracked across platforms and is generally applied when users utilize corresponding reference forms or enter a webpage.
As businesses face rising consumer and regulatory pressure to manage users’ privacy, new tools and practices are wholly emerging to meet these standards. Preference management is one of several tools to keep users’ content and communication compliant.
