Turn on, tune in, sign up – Get your marketing consent form on the right track

What motivates consumers to sign up to brands’ CRM programs? Are these motivations reflected in your marketing consent form? And how do you ensure that your customers will be inspired to keep engaging with your marketing communications?

Using fastmap’s research into consent marketing and consent form optimisation, I have investigated the factors driving consumer participation in CRM programs. fastmap’s research into the motivations for signing up to receive marketing communications from a rail company identified 3 key reasons:

1. They want to receive interesting content
2. They want to be rewarded with incentives for signing up
3. They have a Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) on offers and the latest on new products.

FoMO appears to be the strongest motivating factor; consumers are not necessarily driven by rewards and content – this supports the idea that people recognise the value exchange of sharing their personal data with brands. Brands in turn must ensure that their communications are relevant, salient, timely and of benefit to their customers.

An analysis of the motivations for marketing consent form opt ins

By analysing the results of fastmap’s rail company research in more detail, we uncovered differences by age and level of brand engagement.

Having surveyed thousands of people about what would motivate and encourage them to opt in to various organisations’ consent forms, fastmap have accumulated benchmarking data that provides context for their findings. The table below shows how this rail company’s audiences feel about each of the motivations for opting in on their consent form. The results are colour coded from green (above benchmark) to red (below benchmark).

For this rail company, the younger audience were overall generally more motivated to sign up to the brand’s communications programs and demonstrated a more pragmatic attitude towards sharing their data with those brands:

• They are more interested in incentives – 70% cite this as a motivating factor, compared to 47% for the over 55s
• 67% of under 55s are driven by FoMO, compared to 53% for the over 55s
• All three age groups are similar when it comes to the impact of interesting content on attitudes – although only 43% of over 55s quote this as a motivator, this only rises to 56% for those aged under 35.

Of course, while this may be true for this rail company, you cannot expect other companies – even those in the same sector – to see the same results. Factors like the communication channel, attitudes towards the brand, and the amount of enthusiasm and interest towards the products/services also play a huge role in how many people are willing to opt in when faced with a consent form. To learn more about these differences, I suggest you take a look at fastmap’s Complexity of Consent research report.

For this rail company, product category and brand users are (unsurprisingly) more motivated to sign up to a CRM program:

• Brand users will be more receptive to consuming your content; newer customers may need educating in the benefits of your products and services
• The priority of motivating factors is similar to results from the overall sample, with incentives playing a similar role across all levels of brand engagement.

The research also found that certain “hygiene factors” also contribute to rail consumers’ willingness to sign up to a brands’ CRM programs; in particular:

• Communication must be useful and personalised
• It should be easy to change preferences and unsubscribe, if they want to withdraw from the program.

The research showed that to maximise customer engagement with their CRM programs, this rail company should:

• Make sure communications are relevant, salient, timely and of value to the customer
• Empower customers with the ability to easily control and change their contact preferences, and ultimately unsubscribe if your CRM program is no longer relevant for them
• Apply a segmented CRM strategy to reflect differences in customer life-stage and engagement with their brand.

Completing consent marketing research and applying your findings to your brand will make for happier customers, who will in turn deliver greater returns for your brand.

This article was written by Lee Witherell, fastmap Associate and Founder of independent, data-driven marketing consultancy Wise Owl Marketing.

To find out how fastmap can help you with your consent marketing download fastmap’s consent research report, visit www.fastmap.com or get in touch with David Cole, Managing Director, fastmap on +44 (0) 20 7242 702 or david.cole@fastmap.com.