New data privacy laws and regulations are taking effect this year, creating first-time shifts in privacy and forcing companies to redefine what the consumer experience looks like. The financial services industry knows how to prioritize customer privacy, but creating a personalized omnichannel experience using customer data can often feel out of reach.
In LiveRamp’s webinar, How Financial Services Can Streamline Compliance and Improve the Customer Experience, I had the chance to sit down with Shivani Srivastava, VP, MarTech Products at Discover; and Jessica Carneiro, VP of Marketing Technology at Fidelity Investments, to discuss how they balance personalization and privacy and meet industry challenges head-on using their data and tech stack. Here are a few insights from the conversation.
How can marketers in highly regulated industries balance personalization and privacy in the customer experience?
Jessica: Financial services companies are probably the strictest when it comes to how we’re using customer data for targeting and measurement. One way to balance personalization and privacy is to think about targeting in an audience-based approach. In paid media especially, you often have to go after cohorts for scale and feasibility. We always start slow to test and learn from a small sample audience, and that provides time to validate and scale. When it comes to creating personalization, I would say start slow when rolling the campaign out.
Shivani: Customers expect privacy and transparency, but they also expect us to be relevant. Usually if privacy is our left hand, personalization becomes the right, and we don’t always see them coming together. You could put privacy by design in your solutioning for personalization and take advantage of the fact that financial services are in the business of trust. People give us their data and we manage the financial products of their life and they trust us with that. We should really bring that privacy to the forefront as a way to build customer trust with transparency.
How can collaboration help marketers get more value from data?
Shivani: With the new types of data signals that we are receiving, we need to bring our legal and compliance team up to speed on what this new landscape looks like, why it matters to us, and how we will still care for our customers in our ecosystem. I still remember explaining cookies to our legal and compliance team. Look at our world today. The cookie is deprecating. That is a critical area for data and it takes a while to build that, to get legal guidance, and build the right solution. We must also consider external partners and vendors like LiveRamp and other new adtech or Mar Tech solutions coming in as cookies deprecate. How we create clean rooms and think about deploying different ways of meeting our programmatic needs without the cookie requires a lot of collaboration. Data collaboration is absolutely required to set ourselves up for success.
Jessica: There is no single data solution to reach the type of prospects and users that you’re interested in. You’ll have various data sellers based on the type of platform or the channel. It’s like the entertainment space. People don’t have one subscription because you’re not going to get all your shows from one provider. You may have Netflix, Prime, and HBO. I think it’s the same for marketers when it comes to data collaboration — expect to have multiple partners to reach your target customers in different places. Collaboration is key because there are often a lot of data disconnects, whether it is internal or external, and we must work together with those parties to solve for these data disconnects.
How should marketers consider industry challenges when investing in future solutions?
Jessica: One of the things that’s top of mind right now is future-proofing for cookie deprecation. Google keeps pushing out their timeline, but it is happening as we speak, with users opting to navigate the web undetected in incognito mode even before the platform-wide deletion of cookies. That is what marketers will need to solve for because we need to know who we’re reaching and understand the impact of our campaigns. In doing so, I recommend considering different approaches to future-proofing. There’s not necessarily one technique that may solve what you’re looking for, so future-proofing has to be one of the top priorities for organizations to continue to have effective marketing campaigns.
Shivani: Is there a particular use case or a problem or a value that you want to unlock in front of you? If you attack it in a piecemeal way, specifically when you’re building your data foundations or identity solutions, you’ll never be able to catch up. It’s important to pay attention to the data infrastructure and your identity solution like we’ve never done before. And it’s important for all aspects of our consumers in making sure we are giving them a custom product at the right time and on the right channel, and at the same time caring for their preferences and opt-outs and respecting that with transparency. That’s required. Marketers should focus on and invest in their data and identity solution if they haven’t done that already.
How can marketers incorporate the cloud in their tech strategy?
Jessica: When I think of the cloud, I think of accessibility. It makes it easier for companies to connect to external partners. This goes back to one of the first challenges we were talking about, which is with our complex data and data systems, we often have legacy systems that are just in-house and unable to be shared with external parties. The cloud now enables us to connect with external partners.
Shivani: The cloud enables efficiency, both from the amount of data that we’re picking up and in terms of speed, because you’re not moving the data as much as you did in a typical ecosystem.
Even as new privacy laws continue to impact marketers across sectors, it’s possible to effectively and safely use data to improve the customer experience. Learn how the right technology partners can help you provide an impactful omnichannel customer experience in a privacy-centric way. Watch the full conversation.
