Here's the thing about: First-party tracking - Part 1: Growth Marketing

There are 3 types of consumer data:

1. First-party data: Data collected directly from users by your organization.

   • i.e., Your company can collect the user's web and mobile app behavior, in-store or even customer service interactions, purchase history, and loyalty status to create a targeted ad for an individual customer.

2. Second-party data: Data collected and shared by another organization about its customers (So its first-party data)

   • i.e., A rental company might have a partnership with an airline to get customer information from the airline to target its marketing towards specific travel needs based on the destination of their tickets purchased from the airline.

3. Third-party data: Data aggregated, rented, or sold by organizations that don’t have any connection to your company or your users.

   • i.e., A cruise company wants to promote its newest destinations, so it buys a list from a data company of internet users who have booked a cruise trip before. The cruise company can target their ads to these users.

The thing is:

First-party data is Fresh, Free, and All Yours. ✨

If you have spent any length of time shopping online on various eCommerce sites, you might have found yourself drowning in ads for similar products after leaving the original site that you shopped on.

These are third-party cookies, hard at work. These “cookies” are tiny little bits of ad-tracking code that record our activities on these sites, and they have been a crucial component of marketing strategy for years.

However, third-party cookies are not a replacement for your first-party customer data, and with the rise of consumer empowerment, we are demanding greater privacy, transparency, choice, and control over how our data is used. Now more than ever before.

Apple announced it would block third-party cookies on its Safari browser. Google aims to phase it out of its Chrome browser by as soon as 2024.

With third-party cookies soon to become the story of an extinct world, first-party data will gain the highest ROI of any data type. We can create deeply personalized and highly targeted experiences that will drive your brand loyalty, and what better way than collecting your customer interactions directly from your very own most-trusted sources?

While consumers have increasingly high expectations for data privacy and transparency, we still desire relevant and enjoyable experiences with brands. It’s not that we will not give up our data. It is the fact that we are only willing to share our personal information given that we trust the brand.

First-party data best practice involves a two-way values exchange: the brand gains the ability to deliver a better customer experience, and the customer gains helpful information, support and offers.

As a brand, we are responsible for establishing a foundation for customer data management that we can use to create a fair and transparent exchange of values while following all data regulations. This will help gain the trust of our consumers.

The other thing is:

To begin collecting first-party data, you must identify all your data sources.

Here are a few likely sources that come to mind:

Your CRM.

The customer relationship management platform is a database containing all of your customer information collected, governed, transformed, and shared across your organization. There are 4 types of CRM data.

1. Identity data - i.e., Name, Email Address, Phone number, Social media accounts.

2. Descriptive data - i.e., Education, Interest, Industry.

3. Qualitative data - i.e., Attitude, Motivation, Behavior. Typically answers to the What and Why questions.

   • What rating do they give your product or service?

   • Why did they choose your service?

4. Quantitative data - This is how often they interact with your brand.

   • How many times have they ordered from you?

   • How often do they order from you?

Your marketing website.

If you are a SaaS company, chances are you have a marketing website that brand new visitors can visit to learn more about your product before using it. This is where you can collect their names, email addresses, and purchase transactions.

The marketing site is an excellent resource for collecting data to implement a lead nurture campaign to help educate your users during the awareness and evaluation stages of the customer lifecycle.

Your web app and mobile app.

This is where you will collect all your user’s in-app activities.

Your customer support platforms.

Some of the most critical customer interactions with your product happen on the customer support platform.

This is where you can find information about your customer engagement during a support chat, information about account creation and subscription updates, average support wait time, and more.

The last thing I will mention today:

How do you drive growth in an ever-changing data privacy environment using first-party data?

Create and nurture a direct relationship with your consumer.

As mentioned above, marketers want to build and strengthen relationships with consumers. We can accomplish this by building delightful experiences that will allow our consumers to see the value in consenting to their data collection.

So consider creative ways to offer your audience value in exchange for permission to learn from their information during your interactions with them when they visit your apps, sites or stores.

• Generate content and feature recommendations based on how users interact and engage with your website or app.

• Curate an effortless experience for users who provide you with their contact information, such as utilizing their shopping preference data to send them a notification about a product that may be back in stock.

• Gamify your loyalty program to entice users to register for exclusive benefits and content.

Establish and maintain accurate and actionable measurements.

You have probably looked up at some point in your marketing career just what kind of metrics should you track and what are you missing? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to this topic.

Marketing metrics are unique to every business and often ever-changing based on the ebb and flow of the market.

The essential practices boil down to understanding your goals and focus.

• If your goal is to increase retention by 8% this quarter, tracking the number of likes on your recent LinkedIn post probably shouldn’t be your top priority. Choose appropriate marketing metrics when crafting your strategy and ensure they align with your goals.

• We get very excited about many metrics as marketers as we want to know everything all the time. But we know that not only is it time-consuming, but it is also terribly counterproductive. Focus on the metrics that matter.

Stay relevant.

Now that you have access to first-party data, you can improve the relevance of your communications with your users and deliver meaningful experiences, all while respecting their data privacy.

For example, you can serve your power users with a campaign promoting the launch of a new feature because you know that this segment of users is more likely to adopt and eventually advocate for your new feature. The user will get a brand new feature that they might find useful and you will get a new adoptee and potentially an advocate—a win-win for both parties.

PHE-eeew, that was a LOT about First-party data.

If you are still here, thank you. & If you are curious to see some visual examples of what first-party data might look like in action, you can head over to last week’s article, where I shared some examples of real-life campaigns.

Next time I want to get into the nitty-gritty of first-party tracking for product marketing. We’ll look at in-app tracking, segment events, front-end events, and back-end events.

What are some of your best-performing events that you have tracked as your campaign’s measurement metrics?

Let’s 🌮 about it

• Jello.