Let’s face it listening to customers and respecting their preferences and privacy is surely a sensible business practice. Despite organisations listening to their customers in many ways they often lack a consistent framework for tracking and measuring customer preferences and interests. This is despite the value ‘zero party’ data can provide to the organisation.

An enterprise preference management approach where the active collection, management and circulation of unique customer attributes (such as channel preference, required communication frequency, desired subscriptions and consumer interests) ensures that organisations take a holistic perspective on customers.

So, what should organisations consider as measures of success when defining their approach to managing customer preferences:

Contact Availability

Many customer databases (CDPs and SCVs) are experiencing serious declines in the availability of contactable and marketable contacts. This is due to organisations taking a tactical approach to preference management. That is, customer preference choices are often linked to email subscription lists or worst still the only option they have is to complete an opt out of all communications. A strategic approach to considering what preference choices are available (that are both sensible and reasonable for the customer) enables the contact to opt into topics that are relevant to them at a point in time and opt out of those that are not.

The fact that the contact is in the driving seat and can define the boundaries of the conversation results in fewer contacts selecting the universal opt-out. Instead, they are willingly providing valuable ‘zero party’ data that enables the organisation to craft more meaningful and relevant targeted communications that align to individual customer needs. 

Sales growth

It stands to reason that if a new customer to your organisation is able to provide details of their preferences you should be able to develop a relationship with them that is based on mutual interest. It is this ability to connect in ways the customer has defined about topics that are relevant and of interest to them that is critical to boosting revenues – be that in upselling or cross selling to them over time. The same applies of course to existing customers. Nurture or education programs and content based upon relevant preferences can be delivered to maintain and build a dialogue throughout the customer journey.

It is therefore important to track the value of preference management and its role in sales and revenue growth. What is the lifetime revenue from a customer following changes to their preferences, or what is the assigned value to a customer who is still available to market to rather than completely opted-out?

‘Martech’ stack management

It is safe to say that marketing technology has seen a huge amount of growth over the last few years with new solutions, application categories and much more. As a result, most organisations have deployed a number of products and solutions in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the competition. In many instances, despite their best efforts, this has resulted in new silos of customer information. Often the end result is a complicated and confused picture of who the customer is and what their needs are.

A holistic approach to preference management and a single centralised view of customer preferences enables better informed decision making. Marketing leaders can clearly understand the role of each system and the part they play in the ecosystem. With this information the Martech stack can be better managed with gaps identified and filled and redundant technologies eliminated.

Value of staying the right side of the law

Strong preference management approaches ensure the effective collection of consent but as or more importantly the ongoing management of consent. Let’s take the simple request of ‘right to be forgotten’ under GDPR. This request could require the updating of numerous systems. What if one is missed and the customer’s desire to be forgotten is not addressed. The same issues apply to customer updates to preferences and subject access requests. A holistic approach and centralised system will ensure compliance.

An effective preference centre also enables organisations to identify and respond to changes in contact information or permission status driven by government regulation or company policy decisions.

Managing the risk of not being compliant and being able to quantify the correct management of customer records (RTBF, SAR etc) is important. What would have been the cost – in the form of fines or even worse – if not addressed correctly.