5 Strategies to Legally and Effectively Collect Customer Data

Whilst customer data has become essential for businesses to improve their marketing strategies, it has also become a huge privacy issue. Whilst 88% of marketers use data to enhance their understanding of their customers, 79% of consumers are concerned about how their data is being obtained and used.

Customer data is hugely important to improve conversions. But how do you go about collecting customer data in 2021, especially when consumers are skeptical and worried about how their data is being used.

History of Customer Data

Where has all this obsession with data stemmed from? After all, it is estimated that   are generated by humans every day. For reference if you were to write that using numbers it would look like this: 2,500,000,000,000,000,000

To put it into context, there are 10 quintillion individual insects around the world at any one time. Think of every single ant, ladybird, and beetle, all added up. Or put another way, 312,500,000 bytes of data are generated every day for each human being on the planet. Basically, 2.5 quintillion is a huge number.

But data collection wasn’t always like this, so where did this necessity to use customer data come from?

Before the digital world existed, data collection was merely done by observation and conversation. Businesses and direct marketers would simply talk to their customers and figure out the best way to market to them by physically observing their behavior.

In the 21st century, there’s much less need for physical observation or dialogue. Traditional market research is losing a lot of its importance. Any piece of data we can get on a customer across digital channels helps us to shift from traditional attribute-based segmentation towards behavioral profiling. No segment attribute is more reliable and determinant of a closure than your customers’ action. Still static data can help a great deal to prioritize certain segments over others e.g., because they have a bigger purchasing power.

Nowadays, marketers can see how many people have clicked on their ads, how many people have viewed their website, where these people are from, how old they are, how long they spent on individual web pages, etc.

Cookies mean marketers are able to know their target customers interests and browsing behavior’s. This can be causally linked to details about their life. For example, if someone is constantly looking for baby products, chances are they having a baby or are due to give birth soon. If you enrich these profiles by the help of data specialists you get the big picture.

The ways and methods of collecting data nowadays are vast (as we’ll discuss later). Email addresses and mobile phone numbers have become valuable pieces of information for any business. Businesses are now easily able to use data to predict which visitors are most likely to become customers and to target them effectively, in practice known as lead scoring, lead nurturing and trigger-based Automation. If you want to learn more about Leadscoring, we recommend reading this fine piece of content on lead scoring 😉

The new buzz word in marketing now is ‘ ’, simply relating to all the forms of data collected by companies to feed their machine learning and predictive modelling algorithms. On the operational level for Marketing and Sales activities we speak about smart data, which refers to already manipulated, scored and “useable” data pieces and leads that can be worked by your Marketers.

Data Privacy Laws in 2021

With the rise of customer data, obviously certain data management laws have had to be put in place. After all,   are getting more and more common, and bigger. The importance of data security for individuals and corporates is thus increasing dramatically.The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the primary law in the EU that helps to regulate businesses use and handling of customers data.The are ridiculously long at 99 articles, so let us try to break it down for you. In , the document states the 7 key principles of processing an
individual's personal data: