Over and over, clients tell us they just don’t get enough funding for the kind of privacy programs that they want to create. In fact, many privacy budgets shrank in 2019 after firms were forced to spend more than they expected on GDPR compliance in 2018. But what if we told you that customer-centric privacy programs could actually drive a positive ROI — would your CFO find the budget then? We’re betting so.

That’s why we recently built a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) model on the ROI of privacy. We were convinced that there’s more to privacy investments than CYA, and we were right.

What We Include In Our Model

  • All the hard costs associated with a privacy breach.
  • The investments required post-breach, including technology and resources.
  • The positive effects of “creepiness avoidance” in marketing and advertising.
  • The potential savings on questionable third-party data as a result of access to better zero-party data.

Together, these calculations showed a 17% positive ROI for privacy investments for an average Forrester B2C client!

This analysis couldn’t come at a better time: Consumers are already asking companies to delete their personal information at a staggering rate, and third-party data quality is getting increasingly worse. Investing in a customer-centric contextual privacy program is a great way to future-proof your customer data strategy and avoid the negative impact of creepy experiences.