Make Consent Management a part of your Composable CDP
As marketing departments have been continually challenged to navigate through vast amounts of customer data to uncover valuable insights and drive impactful campaigns, the Composable Customer Data Platform (CDPs) has emerged as a groundbreaking approach to harnessing that data. Built on top of a modern data platform, the Composable CDP allows a marketing team to stitch together the best of breed tools that solve the challenges unique to their business and industry while having the data centralized in a platform they trust.
Although not all pieces are uniform from company to company, there are some “standard” pieces to a composable CDP. You need a tool to gather all your data from disparate sources, you need identity resolution to unify the cross-channel data at a person level, you need a customer engagement platform to reach your customers by email and text, you need “reverse ETL” to activate your data to paid channels, and of course you need a modern data platform to underlie it all.
There is another piece, however, that needs to be a part of every CDP build: the consent management platform (CMP). One reason for the rise of the composable model is that with increasingly stringent privacy legislation, businesses want to keep more control of their data. They don’t want copies of it floating around in tool after tool. Those copies create management challenges. If you are wondering why it costs the average company $648,000 per million identities managed to handle privacy requests, these copies are a major culprit. When a data subject requests that their data be deleted, it can kick off a manual hunt for all of the copies floating around the enterprise.
Centralizing the data is not sufficient, however. If the data platform is to be the platform for marketing action, before we send an email or reach a customer on Facebook, we need to be sure that the consumer has consented to the use of their data in that way. As such, consent data needs to not only be collected, it needs to be a part of the Customer 360. When the data is centralized, the consent data can govern the use of the data. If a consumer has not consented to emails, the email marketing team should not even be able to see the row.
Selecting a consent management platform and making it a foundational piece of your CDP, instead of trying to “bolt on” consent after the fact, can save you from costly fines for non-compliance with privacy regulations. It can also engender trust from consumers — which can turn consent into a business advantage.
