At The Telegraph 15 years ago, the great and the good all wanted their say about the database, because organisations were and are driven by targets and managers have always had to meet these sales/ product/ media/ costs requirements.
Data is the enabler, the oxygen that allows those managers to hit the targets. Data was power.
Then, marketing consent and the opt-in was viewed as an annoying legal chore that bluntly excluded 5% of the database. Managers were not interested in it because it could neither increase nor diminish power.
But times have changed, consumers know they have choices and this and legal pressures are fuelling a move towards more explicit consent. Brands can no longer play ‘hide the opt-out statement’ because consent is not passive. It has implications and decisions are required.
Opt-in and consent process
The consent process is the base upon which databases are built. Thousands of consumers are included or excluded because of consent. The 5% drop in opt-ins predicted 15 years ago is now likely to be closer to 50% for many brands.
Imagine the impact on targets when 45% of the data is lost, particularly when choices need to be made about what type of data remains and what should go.
ICO Guidance encourages brands to give consumers choice over the channels through which they receive marketing; and research from the fast.MAP Consent Optimising Benchmarks shows choice of media dramatically affects consent rates, as does wording, structure and order. So important choices need to be made.
Is third party data crucial, because requesting this permission suppresses overall consent levels? How important is telephone? What about the importance of new media now and in the future?
Below are the consent levels achieved by five slightly different permission statements. (The actual statements cannot be revealed because of client confidentiality.)
Which statement is the best? The decision over which statement is selected will have profound implications on the amount of data generated and on managers’ ability to hit targets.
- If email is most important, then perhaps statement 1, which achieves a 66% email consent rate, should be chosen.
- SMS is a growing channel, so maybe statement 3 or 4 would prove more profitable.
- Phone, which typically generates low consent levels, may nonetheless be the brand’s best method of generating immediate revenue, which would make statement 2 its most viable option.
- Consent for post varies between 20% and 42%, but not all companies use direct mail.
Selecting statement 5 over statement 2 would more than double the volume of direct mail contact available, but at the price of the complete removal of third party data, halving the amount of telephone data and attracting fewer email consents.
Each of these choices has an effect on an organisation’s revenues, costs and politics.
Consent is power. But to retain and grow this power, managers need to convince individual groups of consumers to opt-in to contact via the media mix which will generate the most income.