BlueConic offers a variety of capabilities to help you manage consent and comply with data privacy regulations around the world (e.g., GDPR in Europe). Consent management is often associated with these global legislation zones, but it also applies specifically to your marketing communications (i.e., visitors' consent to receive your emails, text messages, phone calls, etc.).
It is very important to understand, though, that "marketing consent" is separate from “marketing opt-in preferences”—what your visitors intentionally select to receive from you and how they prefer to receive it (e.g., entertainment or sports, email or text, daily or weekly). "Consent" and "opt-in preferences" are also stored differently in BlueConic.
No matter who your visitors are or where they come from, make sure you fully understand the differences between "consent" and "opt-in preferences," as discussed in the sections below, so that you're managing both in the correct and most efficient ways possible in BlueConic.
Understanding legal consent
Legal consent involves capturing consent from your visitors as legally required by each specific legislation zone, such as the CCPA/CPRA in California (U.S.) and PIPEDA in Canada. (A full list of available zones in BlueConic can be found here.)
Note: If you're looking to export data from BlueConic to an external platform (e.g., Facebook), BlueConic will block any individual's data from being exported to that platform if they do not consent to it.
In relation to marketing, consent is involved when visitors opt-in or opt-out of your marketing communications (like when they unsubscribe from your email newsletter). You must abide by each visitor's selection so you do not send communications to those who opted-out of receiving them.
Managing consent with Objectives
In BlueConic, consent is managed by Objectives (accessible via More > Objectives)—goals that are used to manage actions within the platform. Objectives control when you are required to collect explicit or implicit consent. For instance, if a visitor denies or revokes consent for an Objective, BlueConic will not execute the objects (e.g., Connections, Listeners) in the Objective for that visitor's unified profile.
As an example, if you have an Objective for "Marketing messaging" that a visitor does not consent to, that individual should not receive any marketing messaging as defined by that Objective.
You can easily add BlueConic objects to Objectives—and vice versa—to enable consent management for those objects.
Note: Dialogues are particularly useful for requesting consent from visitors for the specific purposes associated with your defined Objectives. (On the What tab of your dialogue, you can even insert specific Privacy Management Components to adhere to different privacy regulations.) You can also use Dialogues to provide a transparent way for visitors to manage their own consent.
Tip: Marketing opt-in preferences are NOT controlled by Objectives and are best stored in profile properties, as discussed below.
Selecting legislation zones on the Privacy page
On the Privacy page (accessible via BlueConic settings > Privacy), next to "Require consent," you can check the legislation zones you want to make available for selection on individual objectives and designate those zones as either Opt-in or Opt-out. These designations, described here, relate to the way in which a visitor's consent determines whether or not they meet an objective. Each zone will have the designation you select on the Privacy page anytime it is added to an objective.
Notes: The terms "Opt-in" and "Opt-in" for legislation zones are unrelated to how visitors opt-in or opt-out of marketing communications.
Tip: Pay close attention when you select a legislation zone as Opt-out, since visitors in that zone would still meet an objective if their consent is unknown. For example, for our "Marketing messaging" objective, profiles in an Opt-out zone who neither granted or refused consent would still be eligible to receive your marketing messaging.
Managing marketing opt-in preferences
Marketing opt-in preferences are captured in multiple ways in BlueConic (e.g., through Connections or Dialogues) and stored in profile properties on unified profiles. For instance, you can connect to Salesforce Marketing Cloud through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Connection to bring in visitors' opt-in contact preferences. That information can be stored in an existing profile property, or you can manually create a new property via More > Properties (or as you're building your Connection or Dialogue or Listener).
Building customer segments
Storing marketing opt-in preferences in profile properties is especially useful for building customer segments (i.e., dynamic groups of profiles characterized by a defined set of interests, preferences, etc.). BlueConic uses the latest updates of profile property values to determine if a profile belongs in a segment or should be removed from it.
For instance, if you have a segment of newsletter subscribers, you can target the individuals in that segment specifically and avoid sending emails or other communications to those who opted out of receiving them (and are thus not part of the segment).