Target your customers in a remarkably efficient way
First-party data is thought of as marketing’s hottest asset.
What is First-Party Data?
It is any information that you collect directly from your audience or customers who have visited your website.
This includes anything related to information that they shared while engaging with your site, like their email address and demographic information, pages viewed, purchases, etc.
You can learn about a user’s behaviors and preferences through your owned first-party data. And guess what? It’s freely available, although you may need some help capturing this valuable data. You can use this information to create an enhanced, fully-customized user experience and target your customers in a remarkably efficient way.
Why First-Party Data Critical To Your Marketing Efforts?
First-party data is the best way to target and track your customer’s behavior and actions online. It’s trustworthy, reliable, and safe information that comes directly from your audience and allows you to directly meet your customers with a tailor-made experience in real-time (when you work with Fulcrum).
Most importantly, first-party data is the wave of the future, as third-party cookies are on their way out. Data is king, and if your organization doesn’t leverage it, you’ll be left behind.
How Do You Gather First-Party Data?
First-party data can be gathered in a few different ways: active interactions, passive web activity, and email campaigns. The first is via actions taken by your active users.
Collecting Data Through Active Interactions
Let’s say someone subscribes to your blog or newsletter, registers for a webinar or event, downloads a whitepaper from your site, or best yet, makes a purchase.
When they take any of these actions, you’ll capture the data that they have voluntarily offered to you. You can then make better decisions on what content to show them on their next visit to your site. Their web experience will be tailor made to what they’ve shown you they are interested in.
When a user takes action, you’ll capture the data that they have voluntarily offered to you.
First-Party Data via Passive Interactions
Passive data that you gather through onsite interactions helps you learn a lot about a user’s interests based on their behavior while on your site. If they spend a few minutes on a certain product page, you can deduce that they are interested in that item and show them content related to that particular product on their next visit.
Collecting First-Party Data Through Marketing Campaigns
You can also pursue first-party data with external marketing campaigns, for example an email campaign.
Your CMS or first-party data analytics platform can collect information like opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and purchases to gather valuable insights into what your audience is responding to. You can then leverage this information to create targeted messages and campaigns to those audiences based on their actions and see how personalization can turn churn into ongoing sales.
You Have The Data…Now What?
There are endless possibilities when it comes to what you can do with first-party data.
This includes actions like retargeting campaigns, creating custom audiences, real-time customized experiences on your website, and more. The last can only be provided on a platform like Fulcrum, whose unique algorithm will reside on your website to capture data and interact with your audience in real-time.
What Marketers Are Saying About First-Party Data
A whitepaper from Mighty Hive titled The Data-Confident Marketer collected survey responses from 200 marketers.
When they asked for marketers’ primary reasons for using first-party data, the responses were:
- Improved performance/ROI.
- Accuracy/data quality.
- Lends to more precise targeting.
- Improved measurement and attribution.
Those who leverage their first-party data are taking the lead in the marketing world.
However, despite the general agreement that first-party data is vital to success, most marketers in the study admit they aren’t leveraging first-party data to its full potential.
Only six respondents say they utilize 81 to 100 percent, while the majority fall between 21 and 80 percent.
There were 19 that fell into the zero to 20 percent category, showing that first-party data is still in its infant stage with many organizations, while others are well-versed in its power.
And those that caught on early have a great advantage.
The marketers falling behind admit as much, as 40 percent of respondents say they feel very confident that first-party data would deliver a strong ROI. Fifty-six percent were somewhat confident. The opinion on the value of first-party data is near-unanimous.
If first-party data seems too daunting, consider also that 67 percent of respondents expect to realize their first-party data goals in 18 months or less.
Summary
If you need help when it comes to making the most of your first-party data, Fulcrum is here to help. We have a unique, real-time personalization model that no other providers in the industry can match.
You’ll meet your customers in their buying moment with exactly what they want to see. It won’t even take long to see results – Fulcrum is fully functional within 21 days.
Tap into your first-party data like never before. See what Fulcrum can do for you today and let your data go to work.
