How Brands Can Activate and Mobilise Their First-Party Data

Marketing is all about audience segmentation, targeting, and message personalization. Marketing programs that follow the “one-size-fits-all” principle are ineffective or could hurt your brand’s credibility and financial performance. Today, it’s eminently possible to take your marketing program and your brand to the next level of success driven by personalization and relevance. The secret – first-party data!

First-party data can help you better understand your customers and give them what they want – personalized messaging and offers that resonate with their aspirations. Ultimately, this can have a powerfully positive impact on your brand’s value.

But what exactly is first-party data?

And how can you mobilize it to optimize your marketing value chain? How can you scale these initiatives? What are the limitations? And what’s the best way to leverage this powerful strategy?

This blog explores such questions and more.

First off, What Qualifies as First-Party Data?

First-party data (1P data) is all the consensual information you collect directly from customers and users online and offline sources. This includes their:

  • Email addresses, telephone numbers, and other contact details
  • Interests or hobbies
  • Age, gender, or location
  • Purchase history
  • Support history
  • Loyalty status
  • Feedback from survey forms or online reviews

You can also get 1P data from the website or mobile app activity, sales interactions, and even customers attending in-person events such as trade shows.

This data creates many valuable opportunities to help you optimize and scale up your marketing and advertising programs. And since you collect data with users’ consent, you own it fair and square.

“But I already collect second-party and third-party data. Why do I need to collect first-party data as well?”

Here’s why!

Why First-Party Data Trumps Second- and Third-Party Data

You can get third-party data from an outside source that has collected the data and then sold it to you. You don’t need to have a direct relationship or contact with the customer to get this data.

However, since the data doesn’t come directly from the customer, it’s likely to be less precise and accurate and, therefore, less reliable. You don’t know if the data provider collected the data with users’ consent. 

If they didn’t, you could get in trouble with privacy advocates and regulators, especially if your brand must adhere to specific privacy laws and frameworks such as GDPR, PCI-DSS, or HIPAA.

What about second-party data? This is the data you get from a trusted partner. Examples include social media channels, customer feedback, or website activity. While this data is more accurate and can provide more excellent value than third-party data, it’s still less valuable than 1P data. 

This is because second-party data is indirectly collected, limiting your opportunities to create a results-oriented marketing program, engage with customers, build one-to-one relationships with them, and ultimately grow your brand.

Here’s where 1P data comes in.

First-Party Data to Get 360° Customer Views

Since 1P data is “individual” data collected directly from customers, it can give you 360° or unified views of every customer. You can leverage this information to build detailed customer profiles to understand them better. Then you can personalize your marketing and branding efforts to create campaigns that “speak” to them and encourage them to purchase – and purchase more – from you instead of from your competitors.

360° customer views can also help you gauge their intent and understand their current position in the purchase cycle or marketing funnel. So if they’re still at the top of the funnel or in the awareness stage, you can engage with them via your blog, a webinar, or social media to push them towards the next phase of interest. 

At this stage, you can continue to use 1P data to create targeted email campaigns and newsletters to move them towards the other stages of consideration, evaluation, and ultimately, purchase.

Unified customer views are also helpful for calculating and optimizing customer lifetime value (CLV) and optimizing campaign costs by focusing on the more profitable, purchase-ready customers. 

Third-party data almost always involves inaccuracies and guesswork and, therefore, cannot provide the deep insights you need to achieve these objectives.

First-Party Data for Marketing Personalisation and Customer Experience Optimisation

Many brands still purchase third-party data to reach a broad audience for their advertising programs. But since this data is usually part of a large dataset, it limits your ability to create targeted and personalized marketing, advertising, promotional, and branding campaigns.

And why should you create personalized and targeted campaigns?

Well, because:

  • 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand if the brand offers personalized experiences.
  • 67% of consumers say that brands should personalize content based on the current context.
  • Another 42% get annoyed when they receive generic, non-personalized content.
  • 83% of shoppers are willing to share their personal data in exchange for more personalized experiences.

Clearly, there is a demand for personalization from customers. But are you meeting this demand? If not, you can – by taking control of your 1P data.

1P data can help you create targeted and personalized:

  • Google ads based on an analysis of search queries in your industry or location
  • Facebook or Instagram ads based on user activity (posts/likes/groups/comments) or geolocation
  • Website display ads based on users’ page views of comparison or review sites

Personalization is also a great way to build trust-based customer relationships by:

  • Speaking their language
  • Addressing their specific needs and pain points
  • Adjusting your offers to their preferences

In short, you can use 1P data to offer personalized experiences that keep customers coming back to your brand.

Conclusion

Customers expect brands to treat them as unique individuals, so 1P data is like the holy grail of all customer data. Your brand has a lot to gain by leveraging this data to increase the ROI of your marketing program.
Aroscop can help you optimize your customer buying cycle by activating and mobilizing your first-party data. Click here to know more.