First Party Data – a marketer’s powerful ammunition

With the slow but sure death of third party cookies, first party data becomes critical to a marketer who wants to create engaging and relevant customer experiences for his audience.

First party data is the most reliable data in the hands of a marketer. Using it, marketers can get insights into their audiences and create highly personalized experiences for them. Apart from this, marketers can spot patterns and logical sequences in this data and based on which can improve their retargeting strategies and even predict future trends.

Take a look at Gumtree’s story. Gumtree is an online classifieds and community site that gives users the space to find and advertise various things. Gumtree’s executives wanted to make data work harder in their ad deals and they looked for a better technology that was better at matching advertisers to audiences who were visiting the online classifieds site. And so they switched technology partners, and got a new strategy in place to achieve that goal.

The magic started to happen.

The click through rate of the direct ad campaigns that ran during the first three months of the year was about 36% higher than the rates for the whole of 2022! If you compared the average cost per thousand impressions of this direct inventory of this time period, to the same period a year ago, this year showed a 14% increase! Gumtree makes a killing in the open programmatic marketplace.

After crunching the data that they had, they were able to add at least 400 different audience segments to their tally, and way more audience types.

This has attracted more advertisers who have wanted to buy and also pay more for them!

First party data is a gold mine. And it is something that brands already have about their customers.

And it is on this first party data that your brand’s future success depends. By successfully and skillfully using first party data, brands will have myriad opportunities to strengthen client relationships. And for this, a robust customer data management system is crucial. Along with the technological and analytical expertise that will be absolutely necessary to harness the power of the platform.

Trust will be crucial for brands to make strong and meaningful engagements with your customers. A strategy built on ethics and accountability that is transparent when it comes to using customer data, is vital. Respecting the various privacy laws and regulations that govern the way a brand can collect and use customer data, is a necessity.

Brands must realize that every single customer touch point is a fantastic opportunity for you to increase the trust and loyalty that your customer has in you. Customers must get value from each interaction in exchange for the information that they share with you and the consent they give you to use that information to further improve their interaction with them.

It is very important to give customers control over their data. Let them decide how much they will share with you. Find your customers’ needs and meet them. Give them what they are seeking. When you give them value at every interaction and touch point, you will find that customers are quite happy to trust you with even more information!

Then, and only then can you create great customer engagement strategies at scale.