How to Collect and Use Data (Without Being Creepy)

Marketers worship data. Most of the greatest innovations in the marketing industry have centered around making data more accessible, easier to collect and more efficient to organize. Savvy marketers treat every interaction with potential clients and current customers as opportunities get know someone on a deeper, more personal level so that they can deliver the perfectly-timed and hyper-relevant messaging and content that will create that ever coveted engagement.

The world of hyper-personalization presents its fair share of challenges, however. The ways in which data can be collected seemingly grows by the day as we make more of ourselves available online. There’s a fine line between presenting buyers with something relevant, and reaching out with something that makes them feel like you’ve been hiding in their bushes like a creep.

In one unfortunate incident of personalization gone wrong, a colleague of mine was gifted a cake. With her face on it. From a salesperson she had never met. Never mind the moral quandary of whether or not to eat one’s own face in frosting form; this “mailer” didn’t even have sales team contact information listed anywhere.

Don’t be a data stalker. Make smarter connections with customers. Here are three ways:

1. Use dedicated business channels online.

If one of your prospects posts a picture of her new baby on Facebook, and you send her a branded bib as a piece of hyper-personalized content, you’re being creepy. I can’t tell you how many marketers think the entire social sphere is fair game for pulling data about the interests and life events of their targets and customers, when the reality is that most of it is off-limits.

This should be common sense, but the rule of thumb here is this: match the channel with the relationship you have with a person at any particular moment. If you wouldn’t feel comfortable sending someone a friend request because you don’t know them in a personal way, then their information on channels like Instagram and Facebook shouldn’t be used for business purposes.

Stick to LinkedIn and other professional networking sites where the assumption is: If it’s shared, it’s safe for work.

2. Use information you gather in a strategic way.

You can’t fast-forward your relationships. If a customer happens to share with you in your first meeting that they’re partial to red wine, that’s not a hint to send over your finest bottle the next day with a note that says, “I remembered!”

Be emotionally aware so that you can surprise and delight when you do reach out–saving the bottle for down the line when the gift might matter more. If you wouldn’t give the gift in person, don’t be tempted to hide behind technology.

When you’re too quick to prove that you know something personal about someone, you can come across as desperate at best, stalker-ish at worst.

You don’t even have to gather all of your information online, either. Valuable insights can be gained by talking to coworkers and colleagues of your target to find out what might make a good deliverable–even if you’ve never discussed that particular interest with your customer.

If you do end up sending a surprise crowdsourced gift, make sure to include a note saying someone let you know that this (insert idea here) might be of some value to your customer.

3. Demonstrate value, always.

You might be thinking all of this advice is well and good, but you don’t have a robust network yet that can even get you the right contacts to target in a strategic manner. If that’s the case, you need to call upon people in your circle whom you do trust to make introductions that will break down that wall. And you need to do it with a value proposition.

If you know who you need to meet, and you know a third party who could make that connection happen, lead with the value you’re willing to provide. Never make the middle person fill in these value gaps for you. That’s just lazy.

The more you develop your own value statement, the more energy your contact can put into flattering you in the intro message. Even if it’s over LinkedIn, those initial seeds of a relationship go a long way, and if the person you’re trying to reach knows exactly how they’ll benefit from connecting with you, you’ll get that meeting every time.

From there, it’s all about listening, curating information from the right places, and sending personalized content that doesn’t require your customer to have their own face for dessert.