Rashmi Vittal, vice president of product marketing, Gigya

Consumers leave behind footprints as they wander online, creating digital identities—“digital gold” that marketers can use to better understand customers’ wants and needs in order to deliver more engaging and personalized experiences. But these identities aren’t built overnight; rather, they’re gathered bit by bit through an ongoing, progressive exchange of information and value—in other words, a relationship.

This approach, called “progressive identity,” follows a customer through the full buyer life cycle: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention and advocacy. It involves offering value in exchange for customers’ information and consent, while giving those customers control over their profiles and preferences. Follow these guidelines to ensure you continue to build rich customer profiles while also fostering trust.

Manage consent properly to achieve a win-win for your business and your customers.

Today, managing consent properly is not an option or a nice-to-have. Doing so keeps businesses compliant with evolving data protection laws and regulations. However, don’t look at managing consent as a heavy burden; rather, consider it an opportunity. Businesses that retool their strategy to handle consent properly prove to customers that they’re committed to respecting their privacy. As a result, customers are more likely to trust the business and remain loyal to the brand. Then, once customer trust has been established, businesses can progressively collect information about the user to add more value to each interaction through personalization.

Managing consent throughout the customer lifecycle can prove difficult unless centralized systems are in place to do so. As brands ask for permission when exchanging value for information with customers, technologies such as customer identity and access management can help manage that consent across the customer journey while progressively building rich customer profiles.

Offer incentives in exchange for information.

Businesses can continue to build relationships with customers by offering incentives in exchange for additional information. These incentives can be special offers, sale events, newsletters, or whatever else may be of value to particular customers. In return, the business may ask for more information about customers, such as clothing sizes, product or content preferences, or favorite artists. This transparent, value-for-information transaction demonstrates the business’s engagement and interest in the customer without adding undue friction to the experience.

Collecting email addresses has been used for years as an easy way to sign up online visitors for newsletters and promotions. But if that information is stored and managed in an isolated data silo connected to an email service provider, a big opportunity may be lost. Rather, businesses should use that valuable gateway identifier as a foundation for a customer identity that can be progressively built over the customer’s life cycle within a centralized profile management solution. And remember, just because someone provides an email address and consent to receive a newsletter doesn’t mean a business should bombard them with spam. Choose your communications wisely, engage judiciously and always offer real value to customers.

Profile customers progressively while giving them control over privacy and preferences.

In order to continue to build a customer’s profile while also maintaining trust, it’s important to make sure the customer is in control. They must have access to their profile data and preferences, and be able to easily change their privacy settings at their leisure.

Continue to build rich customer profiles for use downstream.

The more a customer engages, the more their dataset increases in quantity and quality, which in turn enables marketers to deliver a more consistent, personalized experience. In addition, insights from the information gathered can be used to build valuable lookalike models to target the best potential customers. This helps optimize campaign costs and conversion rates down the line.

Now more than ever, loyal customers are the best advertising, as word of mouth via social channels and viral marketing are increasingly massive market disruptors. So, it’s important to make sure customers have something good to share with their network. For example, capturing likes and preferences can inform more accurate segmentation to drive highly targeted campaigns that convert pre-qualified customers. Then, behavioral data gathered as customers engage, such as page views, click-throughs and streamed media, can be added to build a more detailed customer profile that grows in value over time and enables true, one-to-one marketing, encouraging return visits and brand advocacy.

When businesses make it easy for customers to share and react to content or products, it results in dynamic digital experiences that prolongs engagement. Signals generated by their behaviors can help marketers uncover insights and social trends that sharpen customized digital marketing programs and programmatic advertising. Then, customers can be rewarded for things they already do on-site or in-app. Analytics applied to the data generated by these activities can help tie on-site behaviors to individual users, enabling pinpoint campaigns, recommendations and more.

Any data added to a profile should also be synchronized to downstream marketing, sales and services technologies. This is why it is absolutely crucial to obtain express permission from consumers to capture their personal information—for each individual intended use of that data—and to offer them self-service control over their profiles and preferences. This allows the business to continuously evolve and fine-tune each customer’s experience without incurring new risks, while fostering ongoing trust and loyalty.

The bottom line is this: Be a good friend to your customers. Remember that relationships develop over time, and require a strong foundation of trust, attention and feelings of value. The kind of soft-touch, progressive strategy described here will help you respond better to customer wants and needs, and ensure a strong, growing base of loyal customers.

Gigya provides customer identity and access management technology.