Consumers want to get more than they give

If you’re a regular reader on our blog, you’re aware of how often we talk about doing your homework as a marketer. We always encourage collecting more data and analyzing the data to better suit your marketing strategy and reach your ideal, target audience — in the way that they want to be reached.

After doing the initial research to find the ways our consumers want to be reached, we must also look at what we are offering our consumers at each individual point of contact.

For example, an email address is the data point consumers most readily release to marketers. 66% of consumers polled by Charney Research and Toluna don’t mind sharing their email address. Because a majority of people are willing to give companies their email, what they get from the company via contact by email, can be relatively low value. On the other hand, only 25% of consumers are comfortable giving a company their religion. Due to this, if a marketer is going to ask for that information, the reward or incentive offered, should be substantially larger than the reward or incentive offered to those who only gave their email address.

The overall takeaway point here is that as marketers, we must make sure that our consumers are getting more than they’re giving. Whether they’re giving their email address, personal information, browsing history, or demographic data, we must be giving them more than that in whatever incentive, discount code, or priority status we are offering.

While there can be at times a disagreement between what consumers and marketers believe is acceptable information for a company to have access to, the level of comfort for the consumers must be taken into consideration. For instance, a mere 42% of consumers polled by Charney Research and Toluna are willing to share their location, but 54% of marketers feel that location is an acceptable detail to collect data on. Because location is a detail consumers are less likely to want to disclose, when they do disclose it, the reward for doing so should be greater than the risk of giving up that personal detail.

To maintain our consumers’ interest (and willingness to open up about their personal data), the give-to-get ratio must be in their favor.

Or, as a veteran direct marketer once joked ... "What's a consumer's favorite radio station? WIFM. 'What's in it for me?'"