Proximity Marketing: Privacy Concerns

Do you think that privacy and proximity marketing cannot co-exist? You are wrong! Here are people’s biggest fears and how to overcome them.

About privacy

With all the new technologies on the market, more and more people are starting to have concerns about their privacy: people fear for their private activity and network to be exposed and, with that, their private data. This, however, is mainly due to misinformation or to a lack of attention for the diverse privacy policies normally accepted.

This widespread fear increases tremendously when talking about authorisations for location services in case of proximity marketing.

Proximity marketing is a segment of marketing that uses various technologies (such as beacons) to reach app users physically located in proximity of specific areas, by means of smartphone notifications.

This new strategy to create engagement with app users allows to:

• Send personalised content to users;
• Monitor users’ movements and behaviours in-store;
• Understand how many people enter the store and in which area they spend their time.

Why are users reluctant in giving their consent?

According to BizTech, 1 out of 3 consumers (i.e. 33%) is not open to the adoption of data-storing technologies based on location because of concerns on:

• Privacy, for 64% of the respondents;
• The number of notifications they may receive, in 64% of the cases;
• Security, for 55% of the app users.

Additionally from the very same article we can see how these same people may change their mind about monitoring technologies thanks to:

• Discounts, in 61% of the cases;
• Fidelity prizes, 47%;
• Faster purchasing process, 34%.

Therefore it is critical for you to communicate directly and precisely all the information related to the privacy of your clients within the limits of your activity.

Privacy steps in whenever personal information are involved in marketing initiatives and thus also with proximity marketing.

As of today, to carry out any proximity marketing campaign, apps need to ask users for their consent to receive notifications. The download phase is per se an implicit consent to receive notifications.

So, if you are reluctant about adopting proximity marketing because of all the issues related to the app users’ privacy, don’t worry!

There is nothing illegal, you just need to adopt the right precautions, ask for the necessary authorisations and inform your app users about how their personal data will be treated.

How to make users accept your privacy conditions?

To guide users to accept your privacy conditions and to share their information with you, you need to clearly communicate:

• Why you need to collect their data;
• Which data you are collecting;
• What you will do with their data;
• How long you will use their data.

Mobile devices nowadays allow users to select to which apps to grant access to their data and therefore, to avoid ending up in the black list, you need to inform users that:

• Beacons don’t track people or collect data but simply transmit data; it’s instead the mobile app that, by interacting with beacons, extracts data. For this reason, whenever the app is involved, it’s important to have a privacy policy to regulate the data collection; it will be up to the app to ask the user’s consent for the location tracking;
• They will always be free to revoke their consent to the data collection activity, simply sending an email;
• The app can only collect the data that the user explicitly gave consent to;
• Your company will treat their personal data within the limits of the law;
• The information collected from an app may be used by other apps in the same device.

The main reasons why companies collect data

Why do companies collect personal data? Here are some of the most common reasons:

• Create users profiles;
• Send notifications or promotions aligned with the different users’ preferences;
• Provide the service contractually due;
• Carry out statistical analyses;
• Carry out analyses at the aggregate level.

Beaconinside privacy policy for proximity marketing

As you can read in our privacy policy, the main personal data collected by Beaconinside (autonomously or via third parties) are:

• Cookies;
• Usage data;
• Email;
• Geographical location.

Why does Beaconinside collect personal data?

Beaconinside collects personal data for the following main reasons:

• Handling payments;
• Analytics;
• Heat mapping and sessions recording;
• User database management;
• Contacting users with mailing lists or newsletters to deliver commercial and promotional information on Beaconinside;
• Managing contacts and sending messages;
• Remarketing and Behavioural Targeting;
• Advertising;
• Location-based interactions;
• Hosting and backend infrastructure.

The platform user assumes the responsibility for the personal data of third parties published or shared through Beaconinside and guarantees to have the right to communicate or share them, releasing the Owner from any responsibility towards third parties.

How are data collected?

Personal data can be:

• Voluntarily given by the user;
• Automatically collected while using Beaconinside;
• Cross-referenced with other information about the same user publicly available, for example on the social media profiles.

To know more, get in touch with me at [email protected]