Unlocking the potential of first-party data is key to maintaining a competitive edge and delivering a consistent user experience.
Personalization of web and mobile experiences
Personalization goes far beyond putting a consumer’s first name on a web page or in an email. First-party data includes what products a customer has already purchased from you, enabling you to provide related offers when they visit the website or highlight content related to using those products. For example, if a customer spends a lot of time watching videos on your website, you know they like video content, and you can highlight more video content on product pages or in the resource section of your site.
Advertising
With first-party data, you can deliver better-targeted ads across all your advertising platforms. For example, you could pull a specific list of customers who bought a specific product and target them with ads for accessories for that product. If you want to drive registrations for a product-related event, you can deliver targeted advertising to customers who have purchased that product. Because you know your customers, their interests, and their past behavior, you can offer hyper-relevant advertisements to a receptive audience.
Behavior prediction
Predictive analytics lets you analyze the activity of consumers and predict what they are most likely to do next, also known as the next-best action. For example, by analyzing website traffic patterns, you might learn that a consumer typically follows a particular path through the website, viewing certain pages and product information, and is therefore highly likely to buy a certain product. You can then surface content, products, and specials specific to driving that desired behavior.
Audience insights
Audience insights let you look at a group of consumers with similar traits and analyze their activity with your company, whether that is content they consume, products they purchase, or traffic patterns on the website. Audience insights also help you understand what content is working on your website, which features of a mobile application are most popular, where shopping cart abandonment happens most often, and more. Use this information to improve experiences and deliver the information, capabilities, products, and services your audience most wants.
The goal is always to understand the customer well enough to create the personalized experiences they have come to expect. It is critical to be transparent and open about what data you are collecting and how you will use it, and to give customers the ability to update that information where possible, or opt out if they change their mind.
Optimizing your first-party data strategy
Your data is only as good as your data management strategy. You need the right strategy to collect, store, manage, and share your first-party data across the company, so every department delivers consistent, relevant, and effective customer experiences.
The first step is to understand your requirements for customer experiences across the entire organization. Once you know what you want to do, you can figure out what types of data you need to implement those experiences. Next, you need a way to bring all your data together so it can be validated, cleansed, standardized, and compiled to make it available to everyone who needs it.
Finally, it is critical to keep testing and measuring the impact of your overall strategy. This will never be a set-it-and-forget-it situation. Your customers’ needs and interests will change, so you have to keep innovating: new ways to collect and update data, stopping the collection of some data, starting to collect other types, integrating new source systems, and more.
Want a consistent experience across every channel? Talk to our team about putting your first-party data to work.