Consumers want privacy … yet demand personalization

Consumers want more personalized messages … but also increased data privacy.

Those seemingly paradoxical findings come from Gigya’s 2015 State of Consumer Privacy & Personalization report, published today.

The two trends are not new, yet continue to be at odds with one another: Personalization requires customer insight, while increased data privacy would seek to limit the availability and accessibility of customer data.

The new research from Gigya, a customer identity management provider, found that 96 percent of American consumers are concerned about data privacy.

Yet the study also found that consumers are frustrated with non-relevant messages, causing them to unsubscribe from emails, stop visiting the companies’ websites, and even stop buying from (or even advocate against) the companies.

The good news for marketers is that the use of social login is increasing, which means marketers can more easily capture profile attributes than with traditional login. Consumers benefit, too, removing friction from filling out yet another form.

The report finds that 88 percent of U.S. consumers say they have logged into a website or mobile application using an existing digital identity from a social network such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. That’s a 35 percent increase since Gigya’s 2012 survey.

Social login is just one piece of the identity puzzle, though. Identity is very complex, spanning from an “anonymous” prospect to a “known” customer.

In a recent survey of over 500 marketers, we found a wide spectrum of customer identity attributes being used by marketers for personalization.

Above: Data sources for personalization

Image Credit: VB Insight

In VB Insight’s related report, Identity and marketing: Capturing, unifying, and using customer data to drive revenue growth, we found that customer identity data resides in a variety of locations throughout an organization. Different swaths of customer data help to enable personalization efforts in different channels.

A wide variety of technology is being used to that end, ranging from data management platforms (DMPs) to tag management systems (TMS) to customer identity management vendors, like Gigya.