Actionable Tips on How to Protect Customer Data

Data privacy is a relatively new concept in digital marketing, but it is quickly gaining traction. Customer protection and good stewardship have been brought to the forefront with recent breaches and misuse of information.

What can you do as a digital marketer?

Your job as a digital marketing consultant and professional no longer merely entails designing insight-driven, creative campaigns. It also means that you’ll need to put specific controls on collecting, using, and storing your customers’ information.

Data privacy and security necessitate the development of policies and procedures that ensure:

Data acquisition that is legal and ethical
How data is gathered and shared with third parties
Regulations and rules governing data and information handling

For example, in Australia, there is The Privacy Act 1998, which includes the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). It is the principal data protection legislation.

What can customers do to protect themselves?

Users can now exchange information in a matter of seconds with the internet. However, the biggest concern with this rapid data flow, is that it’s not safe.

According to research, 83 percent of internet users worldwide are concerned about their privacy and demand responsibility.

And a rising number of consumers have made efforts to minimize data collecting by deleting cookies, opting out, and building separate personal and professional personas by creating emails used just for shopping.

Tips on how businesses can protect customer data privacy

You should restrict access.

Not every member of your marketing team requires access to all the information you’ve gathered. Also, your employees are unlikely to require the same amount of access to the technologies they use.

By restricting access, your company will have fewer points of vulnerability. Each entry point — such as when someone physically logs into an analytics application, is a vulnerability.

Internal data abuse is also less likely when you have less staff with access to your clients data.

Collecting of data should be optional.

While forms help generate leads and collect as much relevant data as possible, you should allow your consumers to select what they want to give.

You can accomplish this by declaring which form fields are optional and mandatory for client identification and data attribution. Consider what information you’ll need to complete the transaction if you’re a retailer and require your customers to fill out an order form.

If details aren’t necessary to complete the purchase, they should be programmed as optional fields or not included at all.

Consider engaging the services of a privacy compliance professional. Knowing how to use cookies and data storage as a marketer is one thing, but most large businesses have employees dedicated to just that. Besides, compliance is more complicated and may necessitate skillsets not generally associated with marketing.

Make use of password management software

By mandating all employees to utilize password management software, you can improve your cybersecurity and lower the risk of a compromise.

These programs generate and store complex passwords for all of your team’s tools and applications. By encrypting and storing each password, this software makes it much more manageable. When someone wants to log in to a device, they can quickly retrieve the login information from the password manager.

Final thoughts

Consumer data protection should be as vital as a company’s trade secrets, and it entails far more than just defending your digital assets from hackers.

Because data privacy is here to stay, it must be incorporated into digital marketing plans, procedures, and processes. A marketing consultancy is best placed to support you.

In the end, quality content is the motor that drives users to give out information. Great long-term connections between the two can blossom if brands earn data with rich and relevant content and retain consumers because they trust that specific brand to secure their data. It’s a win-win situation.

Here at Oracle Tree, we have marketing strategy consultants experienced in all facets of digital marketing! You can contact us today to see how we can best help you and your small business on the journey to being your best!