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The most sweeping data privacy law in the country kicked in January 1. The CCPA, short for the California Consumer Privacy Act, gives the state’s residents the right to learn what data companies collect about them. It also lets Californians ask companies to delete their data and not to sell it.

The law is often compared to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), currently the benchmark for online privacy.

Here’s what you need to know about CCPA and how it will affect you and your marketing automation program.

Does this affect my company?

The CCPA applies to “any business that earns $25 million in revenue per year, sells 50,000 consumer records per year, or derives 50% of its annual revenue from selling personal information.” This includes businesses that collect or sell personal information from consumers in California, regardless of where the company itself is located.

What personal data does this cover?

CCPA covers all the data you might expect: your name, username, password, phone number and physical address. It also includes information used by companies to track your online behavior, such as IP addresses and device identifiers and browsing history. This is where your marketing automation system comes into play. Every contact that has clicked on a marketing email link or filled out a website form has a cookie placed on their computer that tracks their behavior in marketing emails and on your website.

How is this different from that other big privacy law, the GDPR?

GDPR applies to companies with contacts in the European Union, and it regulates how companies can collect the same kind of personal information as CCPA does. However, the European law puts some stricter controls on how companies must approach collecting user data.

First, GDPR requires companies to get consent to collect data or to have some other valid reason for collecting user information. Secondly, it requires companies to minimize the data collected. CCPA doesn’t require companies to go through these steps to collect personal information, so any limits on data collection will be imposed by individual users who make requests to delete and opt out.

What should we do?

Even if your company doesn’t fall under the CCPA requirements, you may want to set up a basic data privacy system now. Having a Privacy Policy in place for your users demonstrates that you value their privacy and will reinforce confidence in your company. From a legal perspective, the state of California is often at the forefront of new forms of legislation. Once California passes a law, other states tend to consider following suit. California is the country’s largest market with nearly 40 million residents, and carries a lot of weight. Already, nine other states are considering similar laws, and Maine and Nevada have already passed narrower versions of privacy legislation. Of course, if you market to EU residents, you’ll want to comply with the GDPR as well.

We recommend that you post a privacy statement on your website and have some basic consent mechanisms in place. Read this blog article for more information on Cellerynt’s recommendations.

As a marketeer, you probably spend a lot of time developing your promotional emails. You’ve carefully considered every word of the body copy. You’ve crafted a thought-provoking subject line and included a compelling call to action. After all of that work, you naturally want to send it to everyone in your database.

Stop!

There is a cost to repeatedly sending to all of your email recipients and it’s measured in declining open rates. ISPs are now filtering less on email content and more on engagement metrics, which means recipients who stop opening emails influence your deliverability and increase the chance for email to land in a secondary email folder. These folders have different names; Gmail calls it “Promotions”. In Office 365, it’s “Clutter”. To you, these folders might as well be called “Spam” since they remove your email from the recipient’s primary inbox – even for those that have opted-in to your email.

How are ISPs determining deliverability? For those that use engagement data, here are the key positive metrics:

• Message clicked through
• Message opened
• Message replied to
• Message marked as “not spam”
• Message moved to other folders or tagged
• Message images enabled
• Message forwarded
• Sender/domain added to address book

And the dreaded negative metrics:

• Unsubscribed
• Messages marked as “spam” or a reported as a phishing attempt
• Message deleted without opening

Not all of the above metrics are available to marketers but even tracking a few will help to estimate engagement.

Getting a Handle on Engagement

Most marketing automation systems and some email services report the following metrics: click through, open, unsubscribe and spam. Start by tracking overall engagement and scoring individual email recipients. This can be refined by including return visits to your website as well as off-website lead activities such as exhibition visits. Additional deliverability insights are available from third party email optimization vendors such as Mail Monitor and Return Path.

Easy Ways to Increase Engagement

Once you’ve established your current level of engagement, there are some easy ways to improve it independent of changing content.

• Optimize for mobile.

55% of all emails are now read on mobile devices, so your click-through rates will suffer if you are not phone-friendly.

• Send your broad email blasts in three batches based on decreasing engagement levels.

For ISPs that filter email based on previous engagement rates, sending to your most engaged recipients this may improve the deliverability of less engaged recipients. This is especially important if you’re sending from a new IP address (such as when you use a new marketing automation provider).

• Develop email nurture campaigns

By sending follow-on emails on the same subject to only those recipients that have opened your previous emails will quickly enrich your list. Try this with product and event-focused emails.

Driving Engagement with Subscriptions

One of the most effective ways to maintain a high engagement level is to develop and maintain a well-curated email subscription list. . With our clients, creating a permission-based list using an email opt-in checkbox as part of the collateral download process has been highly effective. If your current subscription list has dormant members, try a re-permission campaign to ask recipient to opt-in to future emails. A re-permission campaign is also a great opportunity to ask subscribers for their desired email frequency.

Make sure your great email content gets the audience it deserves. Understand your current level of engagement and increase it through responsive email design, list segmentation and permission-based subscriptions.

You’re ready for a marketing automation system to replace simple email blasts for your life science product company. You’re excited to get started with a system. Before diving in, determine how you’ll use it and what resources you’ll need to get the most out of your investment – before starting the subscription. Adopting marketing automation is more than a tool change; it takes a mind shift. Without changing your business process, your MA system will be underutilized. Fortunately, by avoiding a few common mistakes you can maximize the potential of marketing automation.

1) Not developing your company narrative in advance.

MA is most effective if used to deliver a serialized story about your company and products. Each email contributes to the narrative, helping to build credibility and eventually persuading the reader to take action. Develop a set of narratives for your company and individual products. Elements of these narratives can be mapped to individual emails in a campaign. The number and timing of your emails should take into consideration the length of the typical sales cycle. A simple drip-based email campaign may share the same content but differ in timing and complexity compared to a behavior-based nurture campaign. Remember the widely repeated marketing adage that a prospect needs to see a message seven times before responding to it.

 2) Not having enough content.

Remember producing your first newsletter? If your company was like most, the first couple of editions were easy to fill with great articles, but it got more difficult with time. Your blog may have had the same issue, with progressively more time between posts. MA takes the time out of sending emails, but it doesn’t automate content generation. Those emails need persuasive content to engage readers and compel them to take action.

Create a flow chart of your email campaigns and the kind of content and collateral needed to convey the narrative. Inventory your collateral currently available and under development with special attention to top-of-funnel collateral such as white papers that you’ll need immediately when you start your campaigns. Don’t forget content that can be derived from customer-authored journal articles and conference presentations. Your most credible advocates are your customers and their most credible statements are in peer-reviewed journals.

3) Under-resourcing your marketing automation initiative.

It’s easy to imagine that MA will free up time for your marketing organization; it actually does the opposite. Developing software expertise as well as building, testing and deploying the workflows and tasks within a MA system takes time. Integration with your CRM system takes time. As mentioned earlier, MA devours content, which takes more time to write.

Identify in-house or consulting resources to manage the system and make sure that enough time and budget are allocated.

For complex, high-value life science products, marketing automation is an essential tool to help nurture prospects over long sales cycles. With planning, you can make the most of your investment in marketing automation.

Be a contender for your customer’s attention

In my last post, we looked at Dana Farber’s “Discover, Dream, Believe” campaign, which features four technical White Papers on cancer research – they are mentioned in banner ads, print ads and even in NPR radio spots. For Dana Farber, the White Papers’ function is to build on their reputation in the research and clinical community. Let’s see how this works for Dana Farber and how it can be applied to life science tool companies.

Dana Farber has a long history on the leading edge of cancer research but in a fast-moving field it is essential to maintain mindshare to help recruit new researchers and influence physician referrals. For instance, their lung cancer white paper connects Dana Farber’s history of EGFR research with the latest trends in precision medicine. It concisely explains the need and challenge to develop new therapies, Dana Farber’s history in research and future directions. A select reference list is included.

Lessons for Life Science Companies

While white papers might not have the buzz of some the latest digital promotional tools, they are a great way to educate and market at the same time. For life science vendors entering a new market, white papers can help establish credibility by demonstrating an understanding of challenges and provide an opportunity to frame the decision-making process. When developing a white paper:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the customer’s need. Dana Farber starts each white paper with the clinical challenge such as the prevalence of lung cancer and the problem of drug resistance. Note that your customers’ challenges may extend beyond just technical issues; they can encompass financial, IT, training and organizational hurdles to achieving research goals.
• Consider all the stakeholders. Dana Ferber’s white papers primarily are for researchers and clinicians. Capital equipment sales often involve multiple levels of purchasing authority. For your corporate customers, consider the perspective of executive readership, including Finance. For academic customers, include supporting content for grants. For instance, if your products are eligible for a Shared Instrumentation Grant (S10), don’t overlook platform-level features like scheduling software or the availability of separate software analysis seats that can be used independently of the instrument.
• Make it durable. Think of white papers as an articulation of your brand, not your catalog. Save product-specific information for your brochures and data sheets, your white paper should focus on platform-level features. This keeps the white paper high-level and will also save you from updating it with new product models.
• Include journal references. There are no better advocates than your current customers.

Direct links to Dana Farber’s White Papers:

The EGFR mutation and precision therapy for lung cancer

http://www.discovercarebelieve.org/app/uploads/2015/03/5688-EGFR-Lung-Cancer-White-Paper.pdf

PD-L1 – Immunotherapy: Unleashing the body to fight cancer

http://www.discovercarebelieve.org/app/uploads/2015/03/5688-PD-L1-and-Immunotherapy-White-Paper.pdf

Treating AT/RT: New hope for kids with a rare brain cancer

http://www.discovercarebelieve.org/app/uploads/2015/03/5688-Pediatric-Brain-Tumor-Research-White-Paper4.pdf

New DIPG Advances: Promise for kids with brain stem gliomas.

http://www.discovercarebelieve.org/app/uploads/2015/03/5688-Pediatric-Brain-Tumor-Research-White-Paper4.pdf

Marketing automation systems collect information from individuals that open your emails or visit your website and therefore companies that implement systems such as HubSpot, Pardot and SharpSpring should be aware of consumer privacy regulations such as CalOPPA, CCPA and GDPR. A central part of complying with these regulations is implementing a  Privacy Policy.

Even if your company doesn’t fall under some of these regulations, having a Privacy Policy in place for your users demonstrates that you value their privacy. Consumer confidence is woven into many laws that require you to write your Privacy Policy in simple terms the typical site visitor can understand, as well as to make your Privacy Policy easy to find on your website.

A well-written and legally compliant Privacy Policy provides your users with important information to educate them about their privacy rights and your use of their personal data.

• Include a Privacy Statement on your website. This should cover the core tenets of consent, access and data erasure.
• Provide consent mechanisms. We recommend implementing a pop-up cookie notification system on the website for European visitors. It will notify them that information is being collected and direct them to the Privacy Statement. The Privacy Statement page should have links to: (1) unsubscribe from marketing emails, (2) request a copy of personal data held in your marketing automation system, (3) request erasure of personal data in your marketing automation system.
• Enable access to personal data upon request. Set up a simple request mechanism for email and website contacts to request access to the data collected by your marketing automation system.  The mechanism can simply be a form or dedicated email address to send data requests.
• Enable erasure of personal data upon request. As with enabling access, a simple mechanism for contacts to request erasure from your system should be implemented.