Consumers are concerned about how their data is being used, and advertisers often don’t know what they are buying, where, and if their spending is impactful. This degraded consumer trust and lack of transparency in the digital world has led to a search for control. Big technology platforms are responding by restricting cookies in their browsers, and governments around the world are passing laws and instituting new regulations to protect consumers.

This means that the practices used for years in the industry are no longer sustainable, and data in advertising is breaking. Overall, advertisers have three categories of concerns: consumers’ brand trust; campaign performance and measurement; and transparency and efficiency of the buying process.

A survey conducted by the Permutive and AdExchanger captured leading brands. The study found that 98% of advertisers are concerned about online privacy and identity changes negatively impacting customer and audience trust.  

This loss of trust is prompting consumers to opt out of tracking or use ad blockers. Nearly 40% of online users are browsing in cookie-less environments. Other research conducted shows that 75% of consumers are not comfortable purchasing from brands with poor data ethics.

With consumers increasingly exercising their choice to opt out of sharing their personally identifiable information is impacted.

Consumers have high expectations when it comes to the quality of their experience and the level of personalization being provided by their favorite brands. They expect companies to deliver relevant content, offers, or messaging while respecting their privacy and upholding their preferences. Especially now, many consumers are more risk averse and are sensitive to messaging that doesn’t match their expectations.

How can businesses drive growth in times where there is strong economic pressure and buyers’ expectations are at an all-time high?

One area to focus on during economic instability is your customer base. Nothing is more important than ensuring your current customers are happy and their needs are met.

Speak to the Moment and Build Trust Through Targeted Consumer Messaging

By understanding your customers, you will learn to speak their language and this is the start to developing a long-term trusted relationship. This means you need to understand their business vernacular, experiences, challenges, and what drives them. Once you have that, the next step is to ensure you have a unified view of your customers to activate targeted engagements and messages (ex: offers) at scale and in real-time.

Embrace Consumer Sensitivity and Test New Pricing and Offers

Look for insights on how your own customer base is responding to price adjustments. Develop strategies to align different segments of your customer base with different offers by using trusted customer data and activate those offers in multichannel programs. Bonus, the information you learn about your customers with these programs can also be used in your strategies for attracting new customers.

Reinforce Your Privacy Preferences and Accessibility to Drive Trusted Experiences

Proper data collection and usage, privacy, and accessibility are more important than ever. Customers are keyed in on how companies are using their data and will be put off if they don’t think you’re being responsible with their personal information.

Make sure you have your customer data properly collected and organized so it’s easy to maintain privacy preferences.

The good news is your organization already has customer data. Some of it is probably being used and analyzed, which is great. The challenge is it can be outdated, incomplete, or stored in multiple places. That makes it more time-consuming and expensive to use effectively.

When data is in siloes or not collected in real-time, it can result in poor experiences. For example, a buyer might not have their privacy preferences updated accurately or they receive a communication that just misses the mark (which can be frustrating for a loyal customer).

Accurate customer data is essential to deliver the right results. Imagine how incomplete or outdated customer information can impact how that data is activated (email, mobile, website, product updates, etc.).

Aspects that help with retention

Data ethics refers to the principles and standards that guide the responsible and ethical collection, use, storage, and sharing of data. With third-party cookies phased out – being ethically on the right side is crucial for any modern-day marketer.

Marketers must balance the need to use data to drive insights and optimize marketing campaigns with the need to respect consumers’ privacy and ensure that their data is used in ethical and legal ways. Marketers today collect first-party data directly from their customers. Ethical data practices are crucial when it comes to first-party data collection – this is because companies have a direct relationship with their customers and are responsible for data privacy.  An ethical consideration within first-party data collection is transparency.

Companies must be clear with customers about what data they are collecting and why, as well as how that data will be used. They should also provide customers with easy ways to opt out of data collection or delete their data if they choose to do so.  

Another important ethical consideration is security. Companies must take steps to protect customers’ data from breaches or unauthorized access. This includes using secure data storage practices and regularly reviewing and updating security protocols.

In addition to ethical considerations, collecting and using first-party data can also provide significant benefits for businesses, such as insights into customer behavior and preferences. However, to do so in a responsible and ethical manner, companies must prioritize data ethics in all aspects of their operations.

Potential challenges for Business Leaders, Marketers, Brands

Today Online Conversions tend to be the main focus for most digital marketers. But one cannot discount the value Offline Conversions bring to any digital marketing strategy. Offline Conversions occur when a customer takes action outside the digital world – such as visiting a physical store, making a phone call, etc.

This is crucial because it allows marketers to measure the effectiveness of their online campaigns. It helps them understand how their marketing efforts can translate into offline sales and customer behavior.    

Offline Conversions can refer to the action of tracking and measuring the impact of online advertising on customer behavior that takes place outside of the digital environment. This means that offline conversions refer to any action or behavior that happens in the physical world, such as a customer placing a phone call or visiting a store and purchasing in-person after being exposed to an online advertisement.  

Offline Conversion Tracking refers to the process of monitoring and measuring customer interactions and conversions that take place outside the digital environment, such as in physical stores or over the phone, which is known as offline conversion tracking.

Benefits of Offline Conversions Tracking

Conversion tracking is when a brand monitors the actions consumers take toward the completion of a business goal. These actions can include signing up for a newsletter, downloading a content offer, or adding an item to a cart. Conversion tracking is a way to determine the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, design change, and other marketing components as consumers move toward conversion.

What Conversion Goals Should Be Tracked?

Conversion tracking tools like Google Analytics require account managers to define measurable goals for conversion. Goals are typically connected to specific pages, events, or other products and services.

Examples of Conversion Goals:  

• Direct people to a physical store location
• Increase site visitors
• Contact a business via call or message
• Add item to cart
• Make a purchase
• Sign-up for a newsletter
• Download content offer
• Play a video

By tracking conversions, businesses determine their most valuable marketing channels via conversion attribution or giving a particular channel credit for a conversion. They have greater insight into how to allocate their marketing budget and resources based on their highest-performing channels for conversions, such as social media networks.

Tracking the Right KPIs

There are a variety of key performance indicators related to conversions themselves and other metrics that suggest the effectiveness of conversion efforts.

Examples of KPIs for conversion:  

• Number of conversions
• Conversion rate
• Cost per conversion/acquisition
• Bounce rate
• Pages per visit
• Hits on destination page
• Events (played videos, download content)
• Session duration

KPIs like conversion rate evaluate conversions themselves while metrics like events take into account actions that will eventually lead to conversions.

How do I calculate Conversion rate?

To calculate Conversion rate, divide the total number of conversions by your desired metric (clicks, ad impressions, sessions on-site, etc).

Your KPIs will indicate how well or how close you are to meet your goal. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of purchases for an e-commerce site, one target KPI is the number of customers who land on a “Thank you page” after buying an item.

You can also track KPIs for consumers who are close to meeting a conversion goal and then take steps to ensure the completion of your goal. If a customer adds an item to a shopping cart but abandons the cart, you can use a re-targeting campaign via Google AdWords to display ads for the abandoned items and increase the chance of a conversion.

Maximizing your return on investment (ROI)

Conversion tracking can reveal whether you are seeing an adequate return on investment (ROI), also known as return on ad spend (ROAS), for advertising campaigns.

Allocating your budget

Your ROI and ROAS can inform your budget structure.  For instance – you have two sub-projects running, a social media advertising campaign and an email marketing campaign. But your conversion tracking shows a higher ROI on your email campaigns. Here’s the point where you might want to allocate/ divert more money to your email marketing campaign.

Identifying opportunities for improvement

If you notice that certain campaign approaches aren’t converting as well as others, you can compare these campaigns with more successful ones to identify potential change areas. For example, if you see several campaigns that target one keyword converting more than campaigns that target another, you’ll know to focus on the higher-performing keyword.

Distinguishing clicks from conversions

Clicks and conversions aren’t always synonymous. In fact, sometimes, high click rates can obscure low conversion rates. With conversion tracking, you can determine the relationship between click rates and the achievement of your desired conversion.

Types of Conversion KPIs to track

Conversion tracking helps you understand how your customers engage with your business and take desirable actions, whether signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

• A Conversion is a customer action aligned with the goals of your marketing or advertising campaigns.
• Conversion tracking is the monitoring of conversions to assess the success of your campaigns.
• Tracking Conversions can maximize your ROI, inform your budget, identify improvement areas, and distinguish clicks from conversions.

For instance, you’ve recently wrapped up a marketing campaign that did not produce results. You take a different approach, but that fails. Instead of randomly trying another style, let conversion tracking show you where your strengths and weaknesses lie.  With this, you can easily determine whether your advertising campaigns are leading to your desired goals.  

All three of these functions need to recognize that the value of direct engagements with the customers will increase. And that has implications from a marketing as well as technology perspective. Because ultimately, what advertisers need to think is, “how are we going to create those consumer connections?” Those valuable engagements happen across multiple touchpoints and the leadership team needs to think about how they can build the brand ecosystem around this reality.

Technology, information management, and marketing need to figure out effective ways to build direct relationships with their consumers. Creating a two-way value exchange in which the consumer gets something, and the brand gets their data, will be mutually rewarding. The bottom line is that these functions need to orchestrate how this new operating model works across the organization.

It is easier said than done but communication is key. Asking the right questions and collectively exploring solutions can work wonders and help navigate the toughest conversations. Business leaders are custodians of their respective brands and must put themselves in the customer’s shoes.

Here are some key questions that can serve as a crude checklist to set the foundation of a first-party data ecosystem.

In today’s digital era, with thousands of brands reaching consumers across a million touch-points with myriad communications, consumers find comfort in a long-lasting relationship with their preferred brand and block away the overwhelming persuasions of all others. Hence, emerges the need for building a consumer relationship lifecycle.   

The emergence of the consumer relationship life cycle is a concept that has gained significant importance in recent years, particularly with the increasing use of first-party data. The consumer relationship life cycle refers to the various stages that a consumer goes through when interacting with a brand or company. These stages include awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. The emergence of this concept has been driven by the need for companies to better understand their customers and develop more personalized marketing strategies.

Digital Marketing Maturity is a measure of how well a company has embraced digital marketing as a strategy for achieving its business objectives. It takes into account various aspects such as the company’s digital capabilities, organizational structure, processes, and culture.

For CMOs and their digital marketing organizations, the changes of the past few years have come fast, and their full impact has yet to be felt. Two big shifts stand out. The pandemic compressed several years of digital market evolution into a few months as consumers raced online to do everything from purchasing daily necessities to seeking medical treatment. At the same time, the data stream provided by third-party cookies—one of the critical supports of precision digital marketing—began to dwindle as the industry and regulators reacted to growing concerns about privacy. Meanwhile, consumers’ expectations for more customized, even personalized, outreach and interaction continued to grow.

Many companies have responded to these sea changes with speed and agility. Others have been slower to react. The big difference is the extent to which each company has advanced its digital marketing maturity.  

ON24 – a leading digital engagement platform that drives pipeline and revenue growth, released the results of their latest survey, “The State of Digital Maturity in Europe: The Tools, Techniques, and Strategies Marketers Need to Drive Results.” Based on responses from over 800 marketing leaders across 12 countries in Europe, this survey examines digital maturity across marketing organizations and finds that the top-performing businesses are backed by a digitally mature marketing team.