GDPR Consent: Channel Choice and Priority.

It may come as a given but, overall consent tends to increase, as you offer your customers greater flexibility. A higher level of overall consent can be achieved if people are offered a choice of channel.

However, certain channels are more profitable than others and some supporters are more likely to agree to be contacted through their preferred routes. Permission statements can be worded to boost consent to brands most important channels. A statement which increases consent for one medium may suppress it for another. This means media priorities must be set, difficult choices made, wording and order changed and tested until a statement is fine-tuned to achieve the best compromise.

When reviewing the performance of each statement, the challenge is to take account of each channel’s relative importance to the organisation. This can be accomplished by creating a Channel Weighted Consent Score (CWCS). Generating your own CWCS will assist you to identify which statement generates optimum consent levels across your channels.

This is a way of assigning relative importance to each channel and then using that weighting to calculate the overall performance of statements with multiple channel options. For example, if a brand generates greater income from an individual respondent consenting to phone, rather than consenting to email this is reflected in the weighting.

Importantly, the weighting relates to the estimated future value that can be assigned to a single respondent if they consent to a given channel. (The overall value of a channel to a brand is not relevant).

Figure 1. Channel Weighted Consent Score

Figure 1 shows that the overall winner is Statement 10, with a CWCS of 7.0. If your priority was email, you would select statement 9, which achieves the highest email consent of 45%. However, overall it is the worst performer, with a CWCS of only 4.5, as it generates little phone and post consent.

Ways to improve consent rates for specific channels

It is possible to increase (or decrease) consent to a particular channel by changing the way a permission statement is phrased and structured. Here are a few other factors that can affect channel consent rates:

1. Emphasising channel benefits to the consumer, such as the real-time nature of alerts from SMS, or the cost effectiveness of email can positively impact consent rate.
   
2. A channel’s position on a list and the statement’s structure can affect response rates. Sometimes, the higher a medium appears on a list the more consent it generates, but sometimes the reverse is true. Testing will reveal this.
   
3. Design and layout of a statement can have positive or negative effects on consent rates. Whether you are using both opt-out as well as opt-in channels, or if your statement requires supporters to tick either yes or no to each channel will impact consent rates. There are many different ways to present consent statements and you will never know their impact unless you test and trial.

For more articles and content then visit http://www.fastmap.com or phone/ email 0207 242 0702, david.cole@fastmap.com to speak to David for information on consent statements and testing.

• Read about the three key pillars that influence consent – www.fastmap.com/pillars
• What makes consent an ‘elevator pitch’ – www.fastmap.com/elevator
• How consent can be about quality, not quantity – www.fastmap.com/types

Download the 11 Steps to Your Consent and Permissions whitepaper – normally £50, free for DMA members with download code 11STEPS102 – www.fastmap.com/11steps

By David Cole, Managing Director, fast.MAP