CCPA, GDPR, CPRA – overwhelmed by new privacy acronyms? That’s understandable. However, ignoring them can have a negative impact on the retailers. In today’s changing privacy and technology landscape, building trust with your customers is critical. As a retailer, you have likely sent distinctive and personalized retail offers and communications based on preferences and past buying behaviors. While many buyers like the individualized attention, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of how their data is used and more sensitive to privacy matters.

In an increasingly complex data and privacy environment, retailers face the challenge of building trust with consumers alongside a growing list of U.S. privacy regulations aimed at protecting consumers. How can retailers build a customer-centric, privacy-first strategy to meet compliance requirements, deliver new and engaging user experiences ahead of a "cookieless" world, and ultimately build trust with customers?

Keeping up with Regulatory and Tech Requirements

For starters, most retailers collect, share, and transmit consumer identity data for a wide variety of purposes, such as personalization, marketing measurement, targeting and profiling. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was used as a framework for data privacy regulations around the world. The California Privacy Rights and Enforcement Act (CPRA), also referred to as CCPA 2.0, makes a variety of amendments to the requirements in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). While the majority of provisions in the CPRA do not go into effect until January 1, 2023, many retailers are thinking about these requirements ahead of time, and with good reason.

The CPRA removes the ambiguous interpretation of the CCPA’s “Do Not Sell” requirement by introducing “Do Not Sell or Share” opt-out obligations for organizations to comply with. Retailers are required to provide consumers with a “Do Not Sell or Share My Information” link on their digital properties. When a consumer opts out, that signal must be sent to your vendors and service providers, all of whom have a slice of that consumer’s data. Changes to business and privacy practices can take time, and with privacy looming on the minds of consumers and stakeholders alike, it’s important for organizations to stay ahead of the curve.

First-Party Data is Your Golden Ticket

Third-party cookies are going away, but personalization is here to stay. To stay relevant in this new advertising ecosystem, marketers must enhance their first-party data capture strategy to prepare for the deprecation of third-party cookies. First-party data is directly provided from consumers, behavioral data, or transactional data documented when a consumer interacts with a brand.

Consumers are more privacy-conscious than ever before and have more brands to choose from. One way a brand can distinguish itself from competitors is by focusing on building trust through transparency when capturing data. To do this, retailers must demonstrate their commitment to privacy. This can be done through a first-party capture form that highlights their responsibility as a data steward and communicates the value exchange of sharing data. Once collected, it’s important to enforce that data, along with consent, downstream to your martech stack to launch ethical marketing and sales activities based on consent.

Build a Trusted Brand  

Personal data appears across all aspects of a customer’s journey. From learning about a brand to receiving targeted messaging and relevant discounts to taking their first action, it’s important to understand the impact data’s prevalence has on brand perception. As a result, the desire to engage only with brands that respect and protect consumer data is growing – so is the emphasis on trust. So, how do you prove your dedication to honoring privacy and establishing trust? By prioritizing consent and preference management across marketing and advertising activities.  

As the importance of responsible data management continues to amplify in the privacy space, retailers need to adapt to and uphold consent and preference management expectations. Prioritizing consent and preference management can be approached from many angles, but always boils down to one key value: trust. Trust is influenced across many aspects of the organization, like proactive incident management and C-level strategy, but as marketers and advertisers, your team’s influence comes down to trustworthy data capture and management.

This strategy can be achieved through OneTrust PreferenceChoice. OneTrust PreferenceChoice enables marketers to drive transparent user experiences, build trust, and comply with 100s of global data privacy regulations, including the CCPA, TCPA, CASL, and GDPR. With PreferenceChoice, retailers can collect user consent and preferences across channels, domains, and devices, automate consumer rights requests, and centralize consent and preferences data for easy consumption across martech systems.  

To learn more, visit PreferenceChoice.com or connect on LinkedIn.

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