Foster Trust and Adopt a Customer-First Mindset Through Transparent Data Capture

Data is driving businesses' every function, and marketing is no exception. The challenge, however, lies in getting customers to provide data, and even more importantly, capturing high-quality, actionable and privacy-compliant data. While the benefits of data and the personalization it affords are alluring, there's a steep uphill climb as marketers have to navigate regulations and opt outs.

FIfty-seven percent of consumers and B2B buyers respond to "permission to track you" notifications by either disallowing tracking or abandoning the app or website altogether. This exacerbates marketers' existing woes about facing a cookieless future and winnowing personalization opportunities. As a result, the burden now falls on marketers to take ownership of their data pipeline.

To start, marketers need to leverage a trust advantage they hold over other types of companies. Sixty percent of customers tend to share data with a brand's site they're purchasing from, versus only 40% on social media and 36% on news sites. This could bode well for mounting efforts to collect more first-party data.

This advantage can vanish, however, if marketers fail to follow a number of tactical steps. An effective data and privacy strategy leads with consent by transparently outlining data usage to avoid confusion. Secondly, the data capture process should be minimally disruptive and convenient, either by progressively collecting data at relevant moments, or by optimizing the design of sign-up forms.

H&M manages to transparently communicate data governance measures while also incentivizing robust data capture in a user-friendly manner. On its account sign up form, H&M balances compliance with effective marketing. The brand links to a concise summary of their privacy policy which lays out the impetus for data collection as well as usage and benefits. The policy was last updated April 25, 2022 at the time of writing, a sign of proactive privacy ownership. On the sign-up form H&M also lists membership benefits, including birthday emails which serves to further reinforce this value exchange.

H&M enables more refined segmentation by giving prospects the option to add more personal and demographic information via an expandable menu, including first and last name, gender, and zip code. Within this section, H&M makes it clear the added data will translate to more relevant messaging. This continuous transparency could foster trust between brand and consumer.

Upon signing up the webpage immediately reloads to the consumer's "My Account" page, where they can access personalized exclusive deals and discounts tailored to the additional information they provided at the account sign up phase, like their birthday, as well as track their "My Points" and purchase history.