With the near approaching enforcement of GDPR in May 2018, pressure is building within both marketing and legal teams, ensuring consent to contact is optimised before this dreaded day…
With the environment changing, consumers know they have choices and this legal pressure is fuelling a move towards more explicit consent. Brands can no longer play “hide the opt-out statement” because consent to contact is not passive. It has implications and decisions are required.
ICO Guidance encourages brands to give consumers choice over the channels through which they receive marketing; and research from the Consent Optimising Benchmarks shows choice of channel dramatically affects consent rates, as does wording, structure and order. Thus, important choices need to be made.
Is third party data crucial, because we know it supresses consent levels across other channels? How important is telephone? What about new media which will grow in importance?
Below are the consent levels achieved by five slightly different permission statements:
Which statement is the best? The decision about which statement is selected will have profound implications on the amount of data generated and on managers’ ability to hit their targets.
If email is most important, then perhaps statement 1 which achieves 66% should be chosen. However, with SMS becoming a growing channel, maybe it should be statement 3 or 4. Phone, while not necessarily popular, is arguably the best at generating immediate revenue and statement 2 is the best for telephone.
Consent for post varies between a miserly 20% to a more acceptable 42%. Selecting statement 5 over statement 2 would more than double the volume of direct mail contact available, but this comes 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 give their consent.
- Read about the three key pillars that you consider for your consent marketing fastmap.com/pillars
- What makes consent an ‘elevator pitch’ – fastmap.com/elevator
- How consent can be about quality, not quantity – fastmap.com/types
Download the 11 Steps to Your Consent and Permissions whitepaper – normally £50, free for DMA members – www.fastmap.com/11steps
Alternatively, for more information on consent and how to optimise your permission statements through quantitative research, please see our guides on ‘The Complexity of Consent’ or contact David Cole, Managing Director +44 (0) 20 7242 0702 david.cole@fastmap.com.
