With changes in privacy legislation around the world, increased public awareness and scrutiny of the behaviour of some of the tech giants in the social media and ad-tech space, and the phasing out by all major browser manufacturers of third party cookies, it is time to refocus on truly knowing your customer based on direct behaviour, interactions, and information gathering.
Firstly, lets quickly recap what zero party and first party data are.
Zero Party data is the information your prospects and customers willingly give you. This might be name, email address, and possibly even phone number.
First Party Data is the information you learn about your prospects and customers directly from their interactions with you, be it browsing your website, purchase history, interactions with a mobile app etc. This could be product details (purchase history), or areas of interest (website browsing and app interaction).
Leveraging this data can and should be a large part of your engagement strategy with clients, but all to often this data is siloed, ignored, or only used for analytical purposes.
Web browsing information is typically seen as analytical in nature (e.g. 157 people visited page X last week, and only 23 visited page Y, lets spend more promoting Y). But what about making it live actionable information about an individual? Ensure the browsing details for all people coming to your website are integrated into a Customer Data Platform, or potentially directly into your Marketing Automation platform. This can provide a wealth of information to inform your next conversation with a prospect who has maybe signed up for newsletter – don’t send them a newsletter, send then their newsletter. For a customer, blend that browsing data with purchase history and suddenly opportunities for cross sell, upsell, and retention marketing become a snap.
Start adding in their mobile behaviour – both web browsing and app usage – and the dataset starts to get ever richer.
There is so much first party data to be leveraged that many businesses never consider. Along with the first party data discussed above, imagine a world where you monitor users responses to SMS campaigns or use speech to text and back it up with sentiment analysis to flavour outbound communications and/or their next web experience with you.
Make sure that the wealth of zero and first party data you already have, and could have, from a variety of devices and platforms is consolidated to create a complete, rich, and individual view of your prospects and customers, and then use that to inform every engagement for a better informed, richer experience. Break down those silos!
Want to know how we help our clients with these challenges every day by operationalising their data? Get in touch and we’ll buy you a coffee and have a chat.