Customer data best practices for digital marketing
Capturing, storing, and using customer data is part of any modern marketing experience, specifically for email and content targeting and personalization.
Customer data drives customer experience
Customer data is vital for matching content to the context of the visitor or audience. This is known as personalization, and personalization ensures that the content shown to the visitor or customer fits the problem or need they're trying to solve.
Large brands, such as Amazon, have proven that customers are willing to part with information about themselves, but only if it improves the service they receive and creates a better customer experience.
Personalization isn't just about the content shown on your website or the emails you send your customers. It can also include the conversations your sales and support team have, the targeted ads shown, and the direct mail sent out.
Amazon has set the expectation of how this is done correctly. Unfortunately, most companies don't have the brand recognition that Amazon does.
Their primary challenge, and likely yours, is distrust of how customer data is managed, and that distrust is measurable: 82 percent of consumers now say they've abandoned a brand in the past year specifically over how it handled their data.
People are right to be distrustful
There have been many well-publicized data breaches over the years, and the financial stakes have only grown.
Data breaches are too common
Back in 2018, Under Armour disclosed that about 150 million customer records were stolen in a data breach of the popular MyFitnessPal app.
These data breaches expose troves of personal information. Thankfully, in MyFitnessPal's case, none of it included payment information. The stakes have only grown since: the average cost of a data breach reached $4.44 million globally in 2025, and a record $10.22 million in the U.S. specifically.
The information leakage isn't just embarrassing for the company, bad actors use this information to engineer access to other systems. Unfortunately it's not uncommon for people to use the same password for all their online activities, and these data breaches provide hackers with fodder to use for breaching other systems.
And it's not just data breaches causing distrust.
The regulatory landscape has expanded fast
There's still no comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States, but 20 states now have their own comprehensive consumer privacy laws in effect as of 2026, up from just California a few years ago. Indiana, Kentucky and Rhode Island joined the list as recently as January 1, 2026. If you market to customers across state lines, you're very likely already subject to more than one of these laws, and California's CCPA/CPRA remains the strictest, including the only private right of action letting consumers sue directly over a data breach.
Governments also create meaningful legislation
Because of this distrust, governments are putting in place legislation to protect consumers. Such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has resulted in more than €7.1 billion in cumulative fines issued since it took effect in 2018.
Related: Read our summary of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.
| Development | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| 20 U.S. states now have comprehensive privacy laws | You're likely subject to more than one if you market nationally |
| No federal privacy law exists | Requirements vary meaningfully by state |
| $10.22 million average U.S. breach cost | The financial case for good data hygiene is direct, not abstract |
| 82% have abandoned a brand over data handling | Trust, not just compliance, is commercially at stake |
Unfortunately, all of these trends put a burden on organizations to ensure that they:
- Use customer data to improve the service or product experience for their customers;
- Are transparent on the type of customer data collected;
- And, that they protect the customer data they have
Below are some best practices to help.
Customer data management best practices
Below are several customer data management best practices.
1. Publish a privacy policy
A privacy policy publicly outlines how you manage your customer's data (see our privacy policy). A privacy policy includes some or all of the ways a customer's data is gathered, used, disclosed, and managed, and it fulfills a legal requirement to protect a customer or client's privacy under GDPR, most U.S. state privacy laws and other regulations worldwide.
2. Restrict access to customer data
Customer data disclosures can happen even with the most hardened technology solutions in place. Access to customer data, even by the people managing it, should be limited to what each role actually needs, a principle often called least-privilege access.
Several well-publicized stories about hospital workers reading records of celebrity patients highlight this. Even the best systems can be circumvented by the people working in the system if they have unrestricted access.
3. Store customer data securely
Just as people shouldn't easily have access to customer data, systems working with that data should do so in a secure way.
With the proliferation of web APIs, ensure data is transmitted using TLS 1.3 (the current standard, having succeeded TLS 1.2), that data storage systems are properly firewalled, and that data is encrypted both in transit and at rest where appropriate.
4. Audit history
Maintaining an audit history provides the ability to review who has accessed customer data and what changes were made. Several U.S. state privacy laws now expect businesses to be able to demonstrate this kind of accountability if asked.
Just about every modern application that deals with customer data has some type of audit system to track access and changes.
5. Customer transparency
A good best practice is to be clear with your customers about the type of information you're asking for and how you'll use it.
Often this can be covered in your privacy policy, but sometimes it's helpful to highlight this without the formality of the privacy policy, such as a short note near a sign-up form explaining exactly why you're asking for a piece of information.
6. Build toward first-party data, not just compliance
Beyond meeting legal requirements, it's worth actively building a first-party data strategy: information customers give you directly and knowingly, through purchases, account preferences, surveys and opt-ins, rather than data gathered indirectly through third parties. This matters more every year as browsers restrict third-party tracking and consumers grow more selective about what they share. See our eight benefits of personalization in your digital marketing for more on why permission-based, first-party data is worth building deliberately.
In conclusion
Customer data is genuinely valuable for personalization, but every benefit it offers comes paired with real legal and reputational risk if it's mishandled. See our six ways to comply with email marketing laws and audience segmentation to generate leads for more on putting customer data to work responsibly.
As you build out your customer data practices, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. DailyStory features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more, built with data privacy in mind. Schedule your free demo with us today.