Over the past decade as our current era of a data-privacy dominant marketing landscape has emerged, ensuring key customer data is handled appropriately, transparently, and with complete respect to consumer privacy has become essential. While doing so can be a challenge, prioritizing these efforts can actually benefit your customer engagement outcomes, says Jillian Burnett, Chief Customer Officer at the customer data platform mParticle.

We connected with Jillian on this topic at FORGE 2022, our annual customer engagement conference, and here are some of the key insights about what privacy-conscious customer engagement looks like in a post-GDPR, post-CCPA world.

Marketers must be proactive about creating and enforcing data privacy policies

When GDPR was first introduced, and as additional developments, such as Apple’s transparency framework, emerged, companies had to react and adapt their practices to comply with changing policies and guidelines—but that’s changing, says Jillian.

“Now, today, there’s an acceptance that change is constant, and these things are going to keep evolving,” Jillian adds. As a result, leading companies are building compliance into their data strategies from the start versus reacting later.

Building data compliance into your data strategy from the start takes asking tough questions about:

• What types of customer data to collect

• How that data will be gathered

• How to maintain that data

• How that data will be shared across different systems

• What the rules for using that data will be

• What the end date will be for when that data will no longer be needed or used

At the same time, marketing leaders recognize how not being compliant could tarnish brand reputation and damage consumer trust—and are increasingly becoming more involved in shaping companies’ corporate approaches to privacy and compliance.

Improving your data practices can boost customer engagement and lifetime value

Within marketing, there’s an ongoing push and pull between two opposing forces, the demand for greater privacy and the desire for deeper personalization, says Jillian.

Personalization will always win in the end,Jilliansays, because customers want more useful and relevant information and experiences.

Still, the onus is on brands to get customers’ permission to collect relevant, meaningful information, use that information in respectful ways, and store, maintain, and share that data between systems as securely as possible.

Taking these steps—building out consumer privacy workflows, investing in privacy practices that establish customer trust, and ensuring customers have control over how their data is collected and used—requires work, says Jillian.

“But ultimately that work is worth it because if consumers trust how you’re going to manage their data, they’re going to lean into their relationships with you and they’re going to engage with you more,” Jillian explains. “If they engage with you more, you’re able to collect more information on them ideally and deliver them utility and a more personalized experience, which means they engage with you more, and it creates this whole lovely flywheel where you’re able to increase your customer LTV.”

Investing in centralized, flexible data infrastructure tools will help brands keep up with changing compliance expectations

One of the greatest data privacy compliance challenges for companies with a footprint across geographic regions is that there’s no uniform approach to privacy laws. Consequently, maintaining compliance across different areas of the world can be complicated and time consuming.

“By investing in centralized, flexible data infrastructure tools, companies can be better positioned to comply with existing privacy regulations and adapt to future legislative changes,” advises Jillian.

Successful companies build privacy into everything they do

“Building privacy into everything you do, into every point of contact with consumers, is essential in today’s privacy focused world,” says Jillian.

Brands that don’t bake privacy into their personalization strategies from the start face creating more work and risk for themselves and losing customer trust down the line, Jillian adds.

Discover 3 Compliant Ways to Achieve Personalized Experiences

In our guide Minimum Viable Data: What You Need to Balance Personalization and Privacy find out how brands can use first-party data in compliant ways to deliver the types of tailored experiences that consumers expect and that drive results, with a real-world case study from the financial services brand Payomatic.