Customers crave unique, tailored communications and experiences that speak to their needs. According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2026 Report, 93% of marketers agree that personalization drives action, resulting in more leads and purchases.
To personalize their offerings, marketers need data. A marketing strategy centered around data enables you to ground your personalization techniques in real, verifiable information about your audience.
However, as much as customers crave personalization, they also crave privacy. Cisco’s 2026 Data and Privacy Benchmark Study reports that 95% of organizations that have prioritized and invested in data privacy have strengthened their customer trust and loyalty.
To balance these two—at times opposing—goals, we’ll explore specific strategies to enhance the customer experience while ethically collecting and managing their data.
The future of third-party cookies is uncertain. While Google previously stated it would roll back cookies, it has since reversed that statement, meaning users can still choose whether to be subject to third-party cookies within Chrome’s Privacy and Security Settings.
Not only is cookie-based targeting often unreliable, but many marketers also agree that this strategy feels more like spying rather than genuinely getting to know your customers. If you want to build customer relationships more ethically, focus on first-party data: the information customers share through their interactions with your website, app, physical location, and other owned properties.
Then, you can fill information gaps with data enrichment. Data enrichment involves supplementing your first-party data with third-party data from a verified data provider. This additional information enables you to learn more about your customers and may include data points like:
Demographics
Contact information
Education
Marital status
Home ownership and property data
Presence of children in the home
Income
Net worth
Lifestyle information
Instead of tracking users across the web, data enrichment applies data attributes about your customers from an external database. Just be sure to assess your data provider’s privacy and security measures. For example, they should follow all relevant privacy regulations, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and uphold SOC 2 Type II compliance.
If you’ve ever migrated your data between platforms before, you know it can be a hassle. Plus, constantly moving sensitive customer information around can create security vulnerabilities.
Instead, bring intelligence to your data—not the other way around. Use cloud-native data platforms where you can directly clean, enrich, and analyze customer data with the help of various applications. By downloading a data provider’s application like you would an app on your phone, you can run data enrichment and hygiene processes locally without the vendor ever directly accessing your customer data.
That way, this information never leaves its secure storage environment. You maintain custody and governance of your customers’ personal data, rather than potentially exposing this information via email or external sites.
One of the hallmarks of proper data privacy and management is consent. Informing customers how you plan to use their data and obtaining their permission to do so ensures you maintain their trust.
However, like most things in life, an all-or-nothing approach to data collection and use is rarely effective. A customer might not remember that they once gave you consent to use their data when they downloaded a resource from your website, and now, they’d rather not receive emails from your brand. On the other hand, a customer who once opted out of your messages may suddenly feel left out of the loop.
These scenarios indicate the need for a granular preference center. Instead of having customers click a checkbox or two to indicate their consent, you can enable users to toggle between specific options, customizing permission settings based on their preferences.
For example, a customer may opt into email communications about business updates but opt out of all SMS notifications. It’s not only important to respect preferences like this to build trust with your customers, but also to maintain legal compliance. As Mogli’s SMS opt-in and out guide explains, “SMS opt-ins are essential for staying compliant with U.S. texting laws. Failure to acquire written consent and comply with these laws can result in fines, penalties, and other legal trouble for your business.”
When customers intentionally give you their data, you don’t have to make guesses about their preferences or question the accuracy of what they’re sharing. This information is called zero-party data, or data customers willingly share with your business.
Deep Sync explains that you can collect zero-party data from:
Surveys
Preference centers
Personal interactions
Businesses often use this information to improve the customer experience. For example, if a dance parent submits a feedback survey and requests that you add more beginner tap classes to your schedule, you might share this information with the rest of your team for their consideration.
When collecting zero-party data, be sure to explicitly state what you’re using this data for so you can obtain customers’ informed consent.
Third-party cookies aren’t the only way to provide real-time personalization. Instead of behavioral targeting that relies on who the user is and the sites or pages they’ve visited in the past, contextual personalization depends entirely on the content users are currently viewing or engaging with.
Let’s walk through an example so you can clearly see the difference between these two strategies:
Behavioral or cookie-based targeting: A user visits your recreational gymnastics registration page. A few days later, you serve an ad for your gymnastics classes on a news website they’re visiting.
Contextual personalization: You serve your gymnastics classes ad on blog content across the internet related to topics like helping your child become more active, local businesses that offer afterschool activities, or why gymnastics specifically instills confidence in young adults.
The latter form of personalization is much less invasive than third-party cookies. There’s no surveillance involved, and you don’t need to collect or store any user information.
Instead, you can use a demand-side platform (DSP) to buy ad space based on webpage content rather than browser history. You’ll show your ads to anyone reading content that’s relevant to your offerings right when they’re actively thinking about that topic, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
Don’t let data privacy concerns prevent you from personalizing your customers’ experiences. Even more importantly, never prioritize outreach customization over customer trust and legal compliance. When you treat responsible data use as a key pillar of your brand and offer ample opportunities for customers to steer their own experience, you’ll create a balanced data-driven marketing strategy that engages your audience while also respecting their privacy.