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Affino's smart audience engagement natively extends GDPR-compliant customer record retention

Insights24 May 2022by

Stefan Karlsson

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Getting ahead while still maintaining full GDPR compliance

Native First and Zero Party Data is the future of the Internet

Leveraging Native First and Zero Party Data for better Customer Data Retention

GDPR’s ’Storage Limitation Principle’ decrees that you should only keep personal data for as long as the purpose is unfulfilled. Once the data has served its purpose, you should then delete it. This contrasts quite considerably with the desire from all organisations to have evergreen contact lists to engage with, market to and launch new and updated services for.

Neglecting this essential cleanup / clearing process though will likely result in GDPR non-compliance and could land you a fine, with the size depending on just how significant a violation it is. More importantly an increasing number of vendors are enforcing hard-strike principles against organisations who fail to maintain GDPR compliant audience data.

And while you can draft some specific Purpose for storing data for a somewhat extended period - you are still required to clean that data - especially in the case of customer account data - which needs to be regularly and periodically re-validated.

First Party Data

This is particularly acute for things like First Party Data - where you are tracking a customer's activities across your brand engagement. Of course this all needs to take place within 'Explicit Consent' and if you try to do this via 3rd party cookies you're already fighting a losing battle.

Most of our Clients in the past have relied on Google Analytics, as well as an array of analytics and marketing tracking platforms to a significant degree - but modern browsers are increasingly blocking (or deleting after a short while) those cookies - and most customers will no longer grant consent to be tracked via 3rd party apps. The ecosystem just won't allow it, and Google Analytics' days are numbered as a result as a JavaScript plugin which delivers full and accurate insight of your audience.

The only way you can properly legally retain customer account data is via regular engagement and validation of that customer, and only when the activity is initiated by the customer, i.e. not you sending messages which they don't open or interact with. Far too many systems are reliant on 3rd party apps to track, identify and engage customer activity. And when that dries up - they are compelled to delete those user records which are no longer actively engaged and being ongoingly validated.

Native Zero and First Party Tracking

In contrast - Affino's SaaS platform has everything baked into the core of the system - Zero and First Party tracking - which occurs natively across all parts of the system - every touch-point, interaction and transaction. Moreover the system doesn't just passively track customer movements and activities - but rather it reacts via Sales and Marketing Automation to trigger further interactions and touch-points with the customer - forever making new engagements and inspiring new activities which then validate that account data.

A lot of our new and transitioning customers have a weighty obligation of having to regularly clear out disengaged, unvalidated and inactive accounts. A quite significant process goes into identifying those customer accounts and data points that are no longer compliant with GDPR - and have to be deleted from the system at regular intervals.

Affino does a lot to mitigate this, providing automated insight on disengaging members of the audience, supporting reengagement campaigns and even sending final notification messages to users that their contact records are about to be deleted and to simply click if they are ok with them being retained. All essential elements.

Crucially though, since Affino has far more touchpoints and has reliable 1st party tracking, it is far more aware than most services of the audiences' ongoing engagement, and therefore automatically extends the relationships in ways others simply can't when using traditional means of tracking web, messaging and app based activity.

Automate to Regenerate!

With Affino you can not only automate the engagement and validation, you can also automate the cleanup of the relatively few accounts which are no longer properly engaged. With other systems you just don't know for sure - with Affino all the data is natively captured and readily available.

And for successful marketing, every current data point really counts if you want to smartly target and inspire your audience.

The Affino benefits are three-fold :

Affino gathers more data and intelligence with its Native First and Zero Party tracking
It is therefore more smartly able to target specific interest groups and audience cohorts
Which means much longer retention times for essential customer data