Marketing Industry Makes Remarkable Recovery One Year After GDPR

Published: May 22, 2019

LONDON, May 22, 2019 Marketing databases have successfully recovered to 93% of their pre-GDPR levels, according to research published today by Yieldify. The study showed that marketers’ expectations of GDPR’s impact were overly pessimistic and businesses in retail have been the most successful in their recovery.

Remarkable recoveries have been made since GDPR was implemented in May 2018. At the time, 33% of marketers lost over 30% of their databases and just 22% claimed to be unaffected by the new regulations, which demanded higher levels of consent to process customer data. 

Since then, retail marketers report that their databases have recovered to 101% of their pre-GDPR size, whereas travel marketing databases remain at 74% of their levels last year. Some of the hardest-hit sectors have enjoyed the strongest recoveries: the media industry and IT/telecoms industry saw +27% and +29% regrowth respectively.

Intriguingly, there was a clear correlation between business sizes and patterns of recovery. Larger businesses generally lost greater proportions of data last year: businesses of 100-500 people lost 29% on average but have recovered at a rate of 24%. In comparison, businesses with less than 100 employees have only recovered by 18%.

While recovery for larger businesses is not complete, their high regrowth rate can be attributed to the diversity of tactics that they have employed in order to recapture data. The study found that larger businesses utilized a greater range of strategies. These included loyalty programmes, content optimization and in-store incentives alongside the more common strategies of competitions and incentivizing newsletter sign-ups.

Romain Sestier, VP Product and Data at Yieldify, said: “The results of the study really confirm the trends that we’ve been seeing amongst many of our clients over the last year. Recovery from GDPR is completely achievable if you employ a smart and diverse range of strategies. We’ve created nearly 3,000 lead capture journeys in the last year, resulting in over 2.6 million new email leads for our clients’ CRMs. What’s more, these contacts are usually far more engaged than those that were lost in May last year.”

The survey also found that marketers’ expectations around the impact of GDPR were often inaccurate. With high levels of panic and scaremongering ahead of staging, marketers’ expectations were overly pessimistic. One year later, 26% of marketers said that the impact on overall acquisition, website personalization and single customer view was better than expected. However, this trend changed for email marketing and ad personalization, with 32% and 24% of marketers respectively claiming they were worse off than predicted.

Jay Radia, CEO and co-founder of Yieldify, added: “This time last year, marketers were heading into the unknown – we saw an unprecedented level of panic as everyone struggled to pick their way through complex new rules. What today’s report shows is some good news. While there’s a way to go and marketers still need to work to make up for lost time, they’re finding a way through.”

More information about Yieldify and today’s report can be found at yieldify.com

About Yieldify

Yieldify is a customer journey optimization company that brings personalization to the full customer journey. It combines award-winning software with a proven CJOTM methodology to deliver measurable results quickly and easily.

To date, Yieldify has influenced over 100 million sales through more than 200,000 journeys. It currently delivers customer journey optimization for over 1,000 leading e-commerce websites, including Domino’s Pizza, L’Oreal and megabus. Learn more at yieldify.com

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