Strike a Balance Between Privacy and Personalization with PII Tokenized Sending

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Last year, we conducted a global survey of 1,000 customers across the US, UK, Canada, and Germany. The survey revealed that consumers were willing to share their data with brands for a better omnichannel experience. Nearly one-third of the participants expected personalization based on their purchasing history, and 21% expected it to be based on their known interests. 27% of customers were most frustrated when brands sent them irrelevant content or product messages. The message was clear — customers want personalized experiences.

However, marketers often find themselves in a catch-22 situation. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) regulations require that all forms of personal information have to be collected, stored, and secured in a specific manner to maintain data privacy.

They have to meet the following expectations:

• Information Security expectations such as adhering to GDPR, country-specific and industry-specific regulations, and organization-specific regulations and limiting PII details that are to be stored outside the internal systems.
• Marketing expectations such as access to PII and personalization data (names, age, etc.) to customize cross-channel communication, and sending ID data (such as email address) to marketing platforms to trigger customer communications.

To overcome this challenge and find a balance between privacy and personalization, we’ve introduced a new feature called Personal Identifiable Information (PII) tokenized sending.

What is PII Tokenized Sending?

PII tokenized sending is a set of configurations that enable brands to engage customers without storing their personal or restricted data in MoEngage. It ensures that your end-customers remain completely anonymous in the MoEngage database. This helps strike a balance between personalization and protecting customers’ data privacy.

It enables marketers to:

• Send hyper-personalized communication: Engage with customers without storing or exposing their personal information, such as their full name, address, email ID, social security number, etc.
• Stay compliant: Adhere to data compliance standards while using the MoEngage platforms and gaining customers’ trust. MoEngage’s platform is committed to data safety compliance, i.e., it adheres to GDPR, CCPA, and SOC2.
• Maintain privacy: The PII data is not exposed to the MoEngage platform. The MoEngage platform fetches the PII data in real-time straight from the customer database, uses it while sending out the campaign, and drops the PII data right after. The end-customer’s data stays safe.

How Does PII Tokenized Sending Work?

1. Marketers share a unique customer identifier (or token) with MoEngage and other non-PII data.
2. Segmentation is performed as usual, and campaigns are scheduled to reach audiences identified by tokens.
3. While sending campaigns, the MoEngage platform fetches PII data in real-time straight from the brand’s database to send out personalized campaigns.
4. MoEngage shows the campaign sending/delivery details for each customer in an anonymized manner.
5. No PII data is stored in MoEngage during this entire process. Even campaign-sending logs are designed not to store any data classified as PII.

Who Can Use PII Tokenized Sending?

• E-commerce store: An E-commerce store can send personalized emails to customers asking them to verify their credit card details without exposing the name or details to the MoEngage platform.
• Digital wallet company: Digital wallet companies can send a personalized SMS to the account holders to inform the current balance in their accounts without exposing the phone number or account number to the platform.
• Banks: Banks can send personalized emails to all their customers asking them to validate their information, such as their social security number or Aadhar card number, without exposing these to the platform.
• Online gaming platform: An online gaming company can send a personalized SMS to its customers asking them to validate their email id, name, or phone number without exposing these details to the platform.
• Online fashion company: An online fashion company can send a shipment status email to the customer informing the address where the product will be shipped without exposing those details to the platform.

How to Get Started

This feature is available for all customers globally. If you’re an existing customer, reach out to your favorite MoEngage Customer Success team member. If you’re new to MoEngage and want to use the PII tokenized sending feature, drop an email to [email protected].