Finding the pearls of first-party data and applying them intelligently

Making smart use of first-party data: 7 best practices

Now first-party data may sound rather theoretical. So how do you apply this data efficiently and easily in practice? The following best practices will help you get started right away.

1. You already have first-party data. With historical purchase behavior, you can already make a big impact. This data is present in every company and already tells you a lot about your current customers and their customer lifetime cycle. This allows you to target repeat purchases, upselling and cross-selling.

2. Focus on customer interaction. You can capture every customer interaction and do something with it. The crux is ensuring connectivity with your customer data. Every source of behavioral data that you connect offers you more insight into the actions and thinking of your customers and potential customers.

3. Personalization is tuning. 1-to-1 customer contact is the most relevant and effective. But that usually takes a lot of time and therefore budget. A large audience is ROI-efficient but offers fewer personalization opportunities. You can automate salutation and timing, for example, but specific content per segment requires more work. Personalization comes down to constantly weighing your efforts and the potential gains.

4. Marketing automation pays off. By automating your marketing activities and driving them with customer data, you make your personalization more scalable. With less effort, you can target larger groups in a more relevant way.

5. Start small. Applying your data doesn't have to be as complicated as a segmentation model right away, that's a next step. Start with an A/B test where you split your target audience into two groups, and present them with two different versions of your marketing expression.

6. Every interaction counts. You can learn something from every customer interaction, including the negative ones. Like people who unsubscribe from the newsletter: why do they do that? What behavior preceded that? How could you overcome that in a timely manner? In the blog lead generation in every step of the customer lifetime cycle you can read how to do that smartly.

7. Keep making your marketing more relevant. As a marketer you should constantly ask the question: how do I make my message even more relevant to the recipient? Use engagement as a guide and for each new interaction, try to determine how you are creating value for your customer. That means moving the customer forward with the right information at the right time.

The biggest objection to personalization refuted

But I'm not going to cut my target audience, am I? So we're only going to mail half of our entire file? When you introduce personalization within your company and different departments start thinking about the implications, you can run into all sorts of objections. Especially in companies that sell advertising space, such as publishers, zooming in on a specific - read: smaller - target group may evoke resistance from a sales department. After all, they think they have to come at their customers with a worse story.

This calls for shifting the focus. Without personalization, you're going to mail more people who won't benefit, may become irritated and more likely to cancel their subscription. With personalization, engagement and results go up and unsubscribes go down. For an advertiser, it shouldn't be about the potential reach, it should be about the actual traffic generated and the context in which that happens. A publisher should also look at the cost of obtaining newsletter subscriptions and monitor the value of this relationship more closely. For both, they should trust behavioral data better.

The secret ingredient of personalization is interaction

Every company wants to do more relevant marketing and get better results. The secret ingredient that is often missed? Interaction. First-party data from email and website are the ingredient to take your personalization to the next level. This data is available at every company, it's just a matter of collecting and applying this first-party data properly. Are you actually running into the lack of your behavioral data in your personalization? Then check out Ternair, a turnkey solution that allows you to easily create and automate personalized 1-to-1 campaigns for all channels.