Digital marketers must retain the trust and confidence of their audience to be effective. If not, they will consistently struggle to get people to consume their content, let alone persuade them to take action. Savvy marketers know this and therefore prioritize transparency, consistency, and accuracy in their content and customer interactions. That’s fine and well, but there’s one more crucial piece of the puzzle: making privacy a top priority.
When your followers know you care about their privacy and your own, they’re more likely to:
- Trust you with their personally identifying information
- Share your content with others
- Become an advocate for your brand
With that in mind, use these five tips to stay on top of data privacy and earn your audience’s trust.
1. Be Transparent About Your Use of Data
People are begrudgingly aware that their data is collected and used by brands and marketing agencies for various purposes. However, that awareness doesn’t translate into confidence. The reality is that people feel less confident about data privacy now than ever before.
The good news is that you can help ease these concerns by simply being transparent. It’s the ethical thing to do and often required by law.
2. Implement a Simple Process for Opting Out
One of your biggest goals as a marketer is to obtain customer data so you can continue to engage with them and eventually convert them into a sale. However, there are limits to obtaining data. Subscribers have the right to retract any consent they have given to you regarding their information at any time. They may even be able to go as far as instructing you to remove their data from your servers entirely.
This is known as opting out, and it’s disappointing when it happens. However, if you want to be seen as a brand that respects customer data privacy, you should make this process as easy as possible by including an unsubscribe option in every email and on your website.
3. Protect Your Own Data
Customer data privacy is important, but so is your own, and it’s crucial to remember that data breaches put all information at risk, whether it pertains to your customers, products, employees, or finances. Hackers may even be able to access and control websites and social media accounts that aren’t adequately secured.
Therefore, you should audit your security methods frequently. Use strong passwords on your accounts, and implement multi-factor authentication wherever you can.
4. Implement Access Control to Protect Customer Information
You may need customer data to engage with your audience, but that doesn’t mean everyone on your team needs access. Regarding customer-identifying information, access should be limited to a need-to-know basis.
This starts with your customer relationship management software. Make sure you implement a strong access control policy on your CRM that limits who can access that data. Then, ensure that everyone else who can access it is adequately trained in what they can do to keep that information secure.
As you consider access control methods for your CRM, consider looking into other options to protect your customers further. For example, it may be worth switching to server-side tag management as an additional privacy measure.
5. Monitor Comments
Comments are a good indicator of engagement, and these conversations allow you to connect with your audience. Unfortunately, there’s also a dark side to the comments section.
Comment spam is bad enough when people are simply rude or inappropriate. Still, it creates a new level of concern when people use public comment sections to exploit others or access their information via phishing tactics.
As such, you must take ownership of your comments section, just like you do with the rest of your content. Be vigilant about content that is posted to exploit other followers.
Framing Privacy as an Opportunity
Taking all these steps to prioritize data privacy may seem like a burden. It may feel like a waste of time to stress about customer data when you could be working on a great marketing strategy. But privacy is important to customers. In fact, it’s such a key concern that they will abandon brands they don’t trust with their information. Therefore, this is a golden opportunity for you to position your business as one that doesn’t just understand data privacy but one that also works diligently to protect its customers.
