Will POPI affect real-time customer engagement?

The Protection of Personal Information Act's (POPI) strict requirements may seem like a call to lay down arms in respect to direct marketing, but its potential impact on real-time customer engagement demands the same attention and diligence as with other marketing communication channels.

Effective Intelligence (EI), South Africa's leading marketing solutions and analytical data provider, is setting the pace on how companies can best utilise real-time interactive marketing in a manner that is compliant. POPI does make a distinction between electronic versus non-electronic marketing, but it does not prohibit the use of direct marketing. Personal data is a valuable commodity in the era of digital disruption; however, this means the protection of that data has become equally paramount.

Says CEO of Effective Intelligence, Julian Ardagh: "In any battle, planning is key, and appropriate planning can provide your business with a significant edge. We are seeing substantial investment and drive from organisations to engage consumers in an omni-channel environment - especially in social media marketing - as one of the means to overcome some of the constraints that POPI will impose on other channels of direct marketing such as e-mails and SMS.

There are three main customer profiles that span digital and traditional marketing channels: those consumers that you have permission from to communicate with; consumers you can gain permission from and those that you don't have or can't get permission from to engage with. The requirements of POPI are more onerous than the Consumer Protection Act (CPA), which only requires that the consumer be given an option to opt out. According to POPI, even once the consumer has "opted-in", he/she must still be given the option to opt out at the time of each marketing communication. Further to this, organisations need to realise that data may in future only be collected from public domain or permission-based sources; gone will the days be of unverified 'inside-info' lists."

Ardagh further advises that a portion of the marketing budget should be used in an intelligent manner in order to identify linking individual persons to permissions, especially so in the early stages of the symbiotic relationship between brand (organisation) and individual customer. He also advises that it's important to build a relationship and define needs rather than asking for a purchase in the first SMS.

"EI's real-time marketing engagement technology does not store the data released in a real-time environment. This is pertinent as POPI aims at regulating the processing of personal information only. 'Data' is a broader concept, and while the definition of 'personal information' under POPI is undoubtedly broad, it must be understood that it does not seek to regulate data that is not by definition 'personal information'. Under POPI guidelines, CEOs are ultimately information officers and should take the necessary steps needed to keep themselves informed of what the company is doing with data, especially so if they do delegate this service to an outsourced provider. The greatest potential risk to an organisation is reputational," says Ardagh.

Businesses will be forced to think out of the box and find new, compliant ways of vying for consumer attention, with the most innovative marketers winning the war.