November 2008

Best practices and advanced solutions make facilitating consumers’ privacy preferences possible
Today’s sensitive consumer environment demands powerful management tools. By Jacob Ciesielski

In today’s sensitive environment, privacy requirements are a critical factor in almost all marketing initiatives. Customers and prospects have an expectation that their preferences will be respected, and they want their choice to be included or excluded from marketing offers to be easy and convenient. Increasingly, consumers expect to be able to control not only who communicates with them – right down to the brand level – but also which channels they receive these communications through. Today, more than ever, marketers must contend with the fact that failure to meet these expectations can result in significant risk to reputation – as well as serious financial liabilities.

A privacy sensitive climate raises the stakes for marketers
There are a number of publicly available suppression sources that allow consumers to opt out of various marketing offers at the individual or household level. These include the Canadian Marketing Association’s (CMA’s) Do Not Contact Service, and – not easy to miss if you’re in the direct marketing space – the new National Do Not Call list that launched on September 30. With the introduction of the federal Do Not Call, the stakes of privacy management have unquestionably increased for marketers. Not only is there an increased level of publicity – and therefore awareness – by the public about opportunities to opt out, but the rules spell out the weighty fines that can be levied against non-compliant businesses.

While most marketers already house their own suppression information and use it to suppress prospects or existing customers from their solicitation offers, these practices have now become a legal requirement. What’s more, because most internal privacy requests are stored in separate databases and the application of these suppressions involves a manual process, there is likely a delay between the initial request and the application of the customer’s preferences, a suboptimal situation that can result in consumer backlash, especially given the current environment.

Use best practices when handling suppressions
Depending upon the type of information contained in the file, marketers have the option of suppressing consumers— either at the individual, household/phone or address level— in accordance with the type of request or in response to the degree of privacy risk identified. For example, a deceased individual removal request would be treated as a permanent suppression. This would remain on the record indefinitely and should always be applied at the individual level. However, in the case of a fraudulent postal code, marketers would have the option of removing the suppression for a consumer if he or she has in fact, simply moved to a different residential area.

Suppression match level and type both play significant roles in any regular merge/purge or database update process. And in the marketing database environment, marketers have the option of creating specific business rules using consumer-specific privacy requests, which guide the system to suppress or un-suppress records based on existing data conditions. By incorporating return mail codes and disposition codes from telemarketing vendors back into the marketing database, marketers can utilize that information as suppressions for future campaigns.

Setting appropriate suppression flags helps marketers not only to mitigate negative exposure and risks associated with consumer complaints, but also helps to reduce campaign costs and increase response rates—finally leading to higher ROI.

Advanced privacy database solutions for demanding times
Today, marketers can manage consumer privacy preferences even better through the use of an integrated, Web-enabled consumer privacy database. Using a Web interface, consumers, telemarketing companies and internal call centres can easily manage privacy requests for their existing clients and prospects. Through dynamic links and frequent database updates, privacy requests can be grouped based on channel, type, line of business (LOB), product or sub-product. Consumers can opt in or out based on their preferences, and select a specific suppression level, either at the individual, phone or household level. Each request has a date stamp associated with an action, allowing for easy tracking and auditing, and enabling customer service reps to effectively handle consumer complaints.

A range of these new kinds of privacy management solutions are on offer in the marketplace, many on an outsource basis. For those marketers who are looking to completely eliminate risk, these powerful custom engines are designed to handle all levels of privacy requirements. They can accommodate everything from simple suppression confirmation processes, where a vendor or individual agent can validate whether a single phone number and/or name/address exists on a privacy database, to a full end-to-end database application, where consumers and call centres can manage individual suppression requests and allow for product and channel opt-ins and opt-outs.
With the privacy databases available today, complex suppression processes are fully automated to facilitate speedy throughput, and ensure that results can be integrated seamlessly with existing database applications. Also important to the most risk-averse marketers is the ability to add new privacy requests from different sources in time to not only meet but anticipate privacy compliance requirements. And lastly, for these avid reputation-protectors, the ability to use the same process to suppress records at the last minute before the file is sent out to the mail or telemarketing vendor is a vital step toward privacy leadership and stewardship – which for the smartest marketers represents not just good financial management but a source of unique competitive advantage.

Jacob Ciesielski is vice president of Cornerstone’s Marketing Database Services unit. He has 12 years’ experience in database management in the financial services, telecommunications, consumer packaged goods and pharmaceutical sectors. At Cornerstone, he has been the senior executive lead in delivering a number of customized marketing databases, campaign management and privacy database solutions for some of Canada’s leading companies. Jacob is a member of the Canadian Marketing Association’s Marketing Technology and Database Intelligence Council. For more information, contact him at jacob@cstonecanada.com or visit Cornerstone’s website at www.cstonecanada.com.