When your customers and prospects aren't willing to share their data with you, it can wreak havoc on your plans to deliver a personalized customer experience. Without the data, you're simply stopped in your tracks - forced to be generic, make assumptions, and revert to a marketing style reminiscent of the early 2000s. Not the most effective way to put your best foot forward.
Sure, you can run free trial campaigns and registration incentives to convert the unknowns to knowns, but that simply won’t fly with the privacy-forward, anonymity-loving consumers of today. According to campaign automation technology, Braze, anonymous users are 58% more likely to purchase within 7 days of brand engagement versus known customers. That’s something worth paying attention to!
Decisioning engines like Pega and Teradata paved the way for the advanced usage of data by establishing automated pathways to a personalized, relevant customer experience. They’re essentially an intricate web of ‘if-then’ statements that make millisecond decisions to guide the consumer to conversion. These technologies deploy a set of complex rules that serve next-best actions based on the ingestion of insight from multiple data sources: zero-party, first-party, third-party, and so on. However, you need data for this to work. Unless you have access to this critical insight, you’re simply out of luck.
So… what are you to do when you’re hit by the dreaded opt-out or a privacy-focused browsing session? Do you throw your hands up in defeat and hope they simply buy on their own? Nope. You respect their privacy and turn to a two-factor strategy that combines logic and understanding with innovative technology to deliver a relevant experience regardless of their privacy preferences. A real-time activation solution that leverages the power of simple decisioning.
Simple decisioning for a BIG impact
In the past, marketers who wanted to reach a certain audience simply purchased ads on a relevant platform. For example, those interested in formal wear likely visit blogs and websites aimed at the hottest trends in prom and black-tie fashion. It was a shot in the dark, but a high likelihood of reaching buyers interested in specific products at a particular time.
Like advanced decisioning systems, simple decisioning can reap major rewards. When you establish a set of rules and understandings for how consumers interact with your brand, you can guide the customer journey and deliver relevant experiences. These rules can be basic or advanced depending on the complexity your marketing team deems appropriate. The experience becomes closer to an in-person store experience and the consumer feels supported and understood by the brand.
In action, it looks a bit like this: When an anonymous user searches for something on one of your brand properties, you can choose to take a specific action:
- Serve a relevant offer for that product,
- Provide alternatives that may be of interest, or
- Suggest complimentary items often purchased at the same time.
The power of context
Delivering relevant, personalized offers and experiences to visitors who are opted out requires a deep contextual understanding of patterns and sequences within each visit. Beyond simply what’s on an individual page, a real-time decisioning engine can recognize session-specific contextual patterns and sequences to make logical conclusions about the visitor's interest and intent at the time, based on pages visited, searches performed, filter/sorting activity, and more. This contextual understanding enables you to deliver the ultimate session-specific, real-time customization of offers and next-best actions that create a relevant and positive experience for every consumer. Since the data is never shared or stored, it’s based entirely on that unique session and the visitor’s particular interests at that time.
Leverage privacy-forward technology
Without fully realizing the breadth of their decision to use a privacy-focused browser or opt-out of cookies, most privacy-forward consumers still expect the brand to consider their individual needs and deliver a relevant experience. But if a brand can’t deploy traditional data capture, how can they gain the insight needed to provide these relevant experiences and simple decisioning rules?
The answer lies in the technology. Coupling simple decisioning with advanced technology that understands the individual customer journey without sending data back to a server, sharing data, or adding cookies to a device is crucial to respecting consumer privacy. Technology now exists to understand the digital engagement patterns consumers have with brands on a one-to-one basis, completely contained within their device and session.
Celebrus CX Vault empowers brands to deliver relevant customer experiences regardless of data privacy consent or privacy-focused browsing sessions. It never shares data and doesn’t track past a single session. Insight is understood and simple decisioning rules are applied within the session and the constraints of the user’s device to deliver relevancy to the browsing experience in real-time.
Brands can’t afford not to be proactive in ensuring experiences are tailored to individual users. If your brand can’t provide what the individual needs, they’re off to the next brand that can, all within the blink of an eye. Establishing and executing simple decisioning rules and real-time activation for privacy-focused consumers can dramatically influence brand loyalty. It’s the difference between an ordinary experience and an extraordinary experience.
