Putting Consent First: Building a Marketing Framework Defying the Personalization-Privacy Paradox

17 Aug 2023

Capturing customer or user consent and preferences in life sciences organizations is not just an option but a crucial necessity for ethical marketing. Respecting the privacy of your customers, including healthcare professionals (HCPs), patients, and caregivers, through consent-driven marketing practices promotes trust, credibility, transparency, and accountability.

By prioritizing consent, life sciences organizations can unlock the full potential of targeted communication and personalized marketing. Tailoring content to match their customers’ interests significantly enhances engagement and campaign effectiveness, ensuring a positive customer experience while complying with regional and global regulations that govern life sciences marketing. A strong consent backbone also empowers customers with control over their data. This empowerment, in turn, further reinforces the foundation of trust and loyalty between organizations and their customer base.

Key industry best practices for life sciences marketing in a consent-centric approach

To successfully navigate this consent-centric approach, life sciences organizations must embrace the key industry best practices listed below to build a marketing ecosystem that not only complies with regulations, but also respects the preferences and choices of their customers, establishing a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship.

Ensure transparency in data collection: Ensure that data gathering and utilization practices are transparent, and customers have clear information about how their data will be used to personalize marketing activities. Additionally, it is imperative that organizations adhere to all relevant regional and global regulations governing data operations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Provide an opt-in mechanism: Introduce an opt-in strategy where your target audience can voluntarily provide their consent to collect their data and preferences and specify the data to be used for personalized marketing. As a result, the core idea of consent is upheld and end users are given the power to make informed judgements that shape their experience with the brand. Consent can be obtained via a website sign-up form, the registration/log in section of applications, an in-person meeting, an email, or other digital/physical means.

Enable granularity in consent capture: Provide users with granular consent choices, allowing them to select marketing messages they want to receive and the degree of personalization with which they are comfortable. Instead of a binary choice, offer them the option to choose the specific types of marketing activities they are comfortable receiving, such as receiving emails but not phone calls or receiving information on new product launches but not clinical trials. This gives people control over their preferences and helps build trust with the brand while still enjoying personalized experiences.

Ensure user-managed consent: It is important to provide customers with mechanisms that allow easy access for reviewing and changing their consent choices at anytime, including the ability to withdraw or revoke their consent. By providing easy access, flexibility, and clear communication regarding consent choices, organizations empower customers to customize their marketing experiences and maintain control over their consent. This approach fosters trust, transparency, and respect for customer preferences, contributing to a positive customer experience and strengthening the organization’s commitment to privacy and data protection.

Building a connected marketing ecosystem to drive compliant marketing outreach

The collected consent and preference data need to seamlessly flow through the entire marketing ecosystem, such as corporate and brand websites, mobile applications, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, marketing automation tools, and others.

To start with, let us focus on the 3 primary systems that a consent management platform should be connected with to unlock the full potential of consent-driven marketing.

Integrating your consent management system (CMS) with a centralized data lake: Integrating consent data with the central data repository ensures compliance with data protection regulations, strengthens data governance, and provides enhanced data insights and analytics, which empower life sciences organizations to deliver superior customer experiences. A seamless integration also helps eliminate data silos and manual transfers of data, enhancing efficiency and accuracy in consent management.

Integrating your CMS with a CRM platform: This integration allows life sciences organizations to effectively capture and link each individual’s consent choices to their customer profiles within the CRM system, which can then be used to enhance customer segmentation, targeting, and communication strategies. Having access to consent and preference data can also enable sales representatives to gauge the interests of customers when engaging with them through personalized email campaigns and tailored offers.

Integrating your CMS with marketing automation platforms: Integrating your consent data with marketing automation platforms can ensure a seamless alignment of consent and preferences with automated marketing campaigns. Consent and preference data can be utilized to personalize and tailor workflows by adding consent-based triggers or decision points, thus driving higher conversions and much lower customer churn.

Benefits of a consent management solution

An enterprise consent solution is much more than just the platform itself. It is a carefully designed mix of people and processes that drives key business improvements for a life sciences organization.

A strong enterprise consent solution that is implemented correctly enables continuous listening. This would mean your organization is always up-to-date with market nuances and guidelines on regulatory compliances.

Backed by configurable deployments, this platform enables granular opt-in/opt-out and preference detail capture, as well as ensures compliance with regulations such as CCPA, GDPA, and others. A robust enterprise consent solution also offers scalability through templates and automation, which streamlines operations, reduces errors, improves analytics, and ensures better insights, allowing for continuous improvement.

Regular handshakes between different groups both within and outside the organization helps promote transparency and consistency in consent processes, which is key to a strong consent management architecture that instils trust among stakeholders.

A dedicated consent desk, as the all-encompassing people layer, provides support for brand requests, query resolution, compliance monitoring, and audit support that future-proofs your consent management practices.

Explore how Indegene enabled enterprise consent management for a global pharma and medical device company.

Key takeaways

Transparency, consent-driven personalization, secure data handling, customer education, and continuous monitoring are key to a strong marketing strategy tailored to today’s world. Additionally, customers educated on the benefits of personalization can be empowered with control over their data, which helps bridge the personalization-privacy paradox. Striking a perfect balance between personalization and privacy allows marketers to deliver tailored experiences while respecting customer preferences and privacy concerns.

While a strong marketing technology portfolio can help in getting a quick boost in your key performance indicators (KPIs), proper understanding and implementation of this stack is the only way to achieve long-term success. Indegene offers decades of life science expertise, helping you successfully navigate today's rugged consent-centered commercialization landscape. We provide tailored solutions, combining people, processes, and platforms for long-term marketing success. Talk to us to learn more.

Authors

Shaswata Bhowmick