Why Data Security Matters For Cross-Channel Marketing Campaigns
The digital customer journey has never been more complex. Customers often interact with your company across multiple channels—from mobile devices to social media, email, and your website. That’s what makes cross-channel marketing campaigns so effective. It helps you provide a consistent experience across all these customer touch points.
However, cross-channel campaigns are disconnected, often requiring a number of third-party services to function. Not only does this introduce additional complexity and the potential for security complications, but it also makes the entire process more difficult to manage effectively.
This is an issue as customers become more concerned about their online privacy. Maintaining proper data security measures isn’t just a requirement for your company. Keeping customers safe and secure is table stakes. Any perceived lack of security or potential for a breach is an immediate and uncompromising knock to your customer experience and your brand. And it’s very difficult to rebuild that kind of trust.
When you’re building these cross-channel marketing campaigns, it’s important to understand how data security fits into the equation. Providing a consistent and personalized experience is only going to work when your customers trust that you’re invested in keeping their personal information safe. By understanding the potential security problems with cross-channel marketing and some strategies for diminishing them, you’ll be able to provide customers and prospects with a better overall product and brand experience.
What Is Cross-Channel Marketing?
Cross-channel marketing refers to how you communicate with customers and prospects across multiple interconnected channels. Customers expect consistency and convenience in every interaction with your company. Their experience on mobile needs to match their experience on your website, and your messaging needs to be consistent across each individual interaction.
Cross-channel customer journey via Mailup.
Your customers can interact with your brand across a number of different channels throughout the customer journey. Where they start and where they end will have a direct impact on your relationship with them.
Companies that create effective cross-channel marketing campaigns aren’t just providing customers with consistent messaging at each key touchpoint along the customer journey. Those companies also see 10% to 20% increases in average order value (AOV) and overall purchase frequency.
Providing cross-channel marketing is one of the best strategies you have for boosting engagement and keeping your business top-of-mind. Every touchpoint strengthens your relationship with the customer and helps them see the value your product or service provides. That’s why it’s so important to ensure that poor data security doesn’t damage this relationship.
Why Data Security Is More Difficult in Cross-Channel Campaigns
Cross-channel marketing campaigns typically require a number of interconnected third-party platforms and tools. Managing these interconnected services requires manual input from your team and trust that each platform has the same robust security processes in place. This makes data security and privacy much more difficult to maintain, as every integration has the potential for a breach or user error.
Consider the process of sending personalized emails to a segment of your user base. Unless your email marketing platform was integrated directly with your CRM or customer data management platform, your team needs to transfer users’ information between the two services manually. There are two primary issues with that process:
- Transferring customer data is traditionally done through the use of a CSV, which means you’re actively creating an insecure document with customers’ personal information.
- The manual process of exporting a CSV from your CRM and importing it into your email platform introduces the potential for user error.
Combine these issues with the fact that you have little to no control over how your customers’ data is managed in a third-party service, and you likely created a situation that’s rife with potential security and privacy risks.
Every platform you work with needs to be documented in accordance with various data security and customer privacy regulations. Every process that makes an impact on customer information needs to documented—any issues would knock you out of compliance and damage customers’ trust in your company across the board.
Much like our email marketing example, how you traditionally gather customer data for cross-channel marketing campaigns is risky. Apple recently updated Safari, so it blocks all Google Analytics code, and many consumers are switching to privacy-first browsers like Firefox or Brave and installing plugins that bypass established data collection methods. As more people become more concerned with how their personal data is used by businesses, that’s not likely to change either.
This trend is likely to continue, so companies will need to adapt their practices to own more of these collection methods internally. Pulling information from third-party sources for personalized email marketing, push notifications, or web alerts will continue to be scrutinized and regulated.
Bottom line, you need to ensure data security across every channel to make your marketing campaigns successful.
How to Keep Your Customer Data Secure
There are steps to take that ensure you’re not opening up your valuable customer data to potential security issues. Whenever you plan out a cross-channel marketing campaign, consider how much control you’ll be able to have over each step of the process.
The best option is to keep as much of your customer data in one place. Not only does this help you provide a more consistent experience across as many channels as possible, but it also cuts down on the need to manually transfer data on your end. You can use Taplytics’ self-hosted marketing automation tool, for example, to send mobile, email, and web notifications from one platform.
It’s also critical that you follow all relevant privacy and security mandates for your industry and your country. There are overarching regulations—like GDPR, CCPA, PCI, and ISO. Depending on your industry, there are likely additional security regulations that need to be followed as well, especially if you’re working in the banking or healthcare markets. Make sure you’re aware of any guidelines specific to your industry or market segment.
Vet every provider you use based on these regulations. Check in every four to six months to ensure there have been no security changes to the tool. Regulations evolve over time, and you don’t want to fall out of compliance at any point.
Make sure you train your team in proper customer data management as well. They should understand:
- Your internal data security process,
- How it impacts their day-to-day responsibilities, and
- How to communicate your security measures with customers.
Always communicate proactively with customers when it comes to their data privacy and security. You’ll foster more trusting relationships with them by explaining both parties’ roles in proper data management practices.
Data security is an ongoing process that needs to be revisited often to maintain compliance, especially for cross-channel campaigns. Review, back up, and clean your customer database regularly to ensure there are no outstanding issues. Regularly reviewing your wealth of customer information helps you create more secure and more effective campaigns over time.
Create Secure Cross-Channel Marketing Campaigns with Taplytics
When you’re building out a new cross-channel campaign, your customers’ security needs to be a primary concern. If you’re not able to protect their data, you’ll erode their trust in your brand. Over time, that will sour the rest of the market’s perception of your product as well.
Taplytics’ self-hosted marketing automation tool helps you provide a seamless cross-channel experience across mobile, email, and web notifications on a secure, single-tenant platform. With this functionality, you’re able to provide secure cross-channel campaigns and a better overall customer experience.
Learn more about our single-tenant system today.