Cookie Less Marketing And Working With First Party Data
As we start moving towards a world without cookies, there’s been a real shift with an emphasis towards first-party data collection. By leveraging first-party data along with content, site availability, and overall marketing metrics, you are put in the best possible position to understand your customers better than ever.
There are multiple places where first-party data can be collected, including your website, apps, surveys, social media, competitions, loyalty programs, games, etc. Additionally, the types of data that can be collected are demographics, purchasing histories, site activities, email engagement, sales interactions, customer service calls, customer feedback programs, interests, and behaviours. First-party data represents the information that the business gathers directly from their audiences -- site visitors, customers, and social media followers.
Zero-party data is the optional information that the customer has chosen to volunteer to the company, promising better product recommendations and personalised experiences. Customers give companies this data free of charge, saving them the cost of purchasing costly data from a third party. This data is more relevant, since you are collecting it directly, rather than buying from a third-party provider. Often, customers are willing to give up a portion of their data in return for better personalisation and services.
Customers today are hungry for a more hyper-personalised customer experience, yet privacy remains a top priority. Instead of first-party data being captured via third-party cookies, first-party data properly handles the identities of customers, enabling marketers to create trusted, meaningful, and long-lasting customer relationships, all the while providing a more hyper-personalised customer experience. Unlike third-party data, the power over how much data is shared is in the hands of customers -- giving them a better sense of agency and trust while engaging with the company. In doing so, companies can use data that is already aggregated to derive insights and analytics on their customers to deliver better services, products, and customer experiences.
Marketers can build greater opportunities for engaging customers by nurturing unique data insights and developing a portfolio of services where the richness of customer experiences is enhanced when building a richer data profile.
Ultimately, the move toward first-party data could move marketers to engage customers in a more meaningful way that helps them build value and grow their organisations. Of course, having access to first-party data, which comes with greater affordability, can help you refine your marketing efforts even more and make more authentic connections with customers. To keep providing relevant campaigns, and stay ahead of changing regulations and customer sentiments, marketers may want to consider using first-party data to power their digital marketing efforts.
As brands reduce their dependence on third-party cookies and build their own strategies around first-party data, marketers will have an opportunity to experiment, measure, and refine their data efforts. With third-party cookie deprecation rapidly approaching 2023, marketers and advertisers are exploring what comes next for their data strategies. The ban has spurred several brands to investigate new technologies and marketing strategies.
The impending changes will disrupt the digital marketing industry, removing a famous cookie from Chrome. With Firefox, Safari, and Edge already blocking third-party cookies, and Google eliminating them by the end of 2023, marketers will have to embrace alternative solutions for targeting prospects. With cookies going away in 2021-22, brands need to look at alternative means for identifying, managing, and nurturing customers. While cookies going away will decrease your access to third-party data, you can still find the right balance in your acquisition strategy and give customers a highly converting, highly personalised experience.
As 3rd-party cookies decrease, brands should focus on maximising their 1st-party data collections, including, but not limited to, CRM and loyalty data, online behavioural data from your digital assets -- such as websites, apps, and media -- such as clicks and views. As one-to-one consumer tracking and profiling becomes more challenging as they are removed, brands should investigate more sophisticated statistical and machine learning measurement techniques for measuring success. Policies like GDPR and the PDPA, as well as decisions by the leading web browsers to delete third-party cookies, are impacting how digital marketing is practised today.
Thanks to the evolution of customer insights solutions, marketers are now able to integrate all offline and online data from the brands first-party data to target and engage with real customers, no matter where they are on their decision journey. For marketers, data is particularly critical because it provides deeper insights into consumers behaviours and allows audience targeting at the granular level. First-party data captured from customers is the truest form of insight about your customers, since they provide it to you with trust and in return for a promised value, expecting insight, tailored discounts, and more useful experiences in general.
Tracking allows the business placing that cookie to get insights about your interests, demographics, geographic location, and other helpful information, which it can then use to deliver highly tailored, targeted ads. Once this cookie is placed on your device, it effectively tracks your online browsing activities across websites, apps, and more.
Useful Links:
https://www.invoca.com/blog/marketers-first-party-data-cookieless-world
https://www.scuba.io/blog/why-you-need-first-party-and-zero-party-data-in-a-cookieless-world
https://emarsys.com/learn/blog/first-party-data-cookieless-world/
https://signal.co/resources/first-party-data/
https://www.quantcast.com/blog/importance-of-first-party-data-in-a-cookieless-world/
https://deloitte.wsj.com/articles/meeting-customers-in-a-cookieless-world-01642090689
https://www.artefact.com/blog/1st-party-data-sg/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/first-party-data-cookieless-recap/448239/
https://www.onetrust.com/blog/capture-first-party-data-in-a-cookieless-world/
https://netconomy.net/blog/first-party-data-cookieless-future/
https://www.lytics.com/blog/securing-the-cookieless-world-of-first-party-data/
