With the well-publicised demise of the use of third-party cookies for marketing purposes, companies are having to re-think their data and marketing strategies. Enter zero- and first-party data ‘centre stage’.
Zero-party data is data that email list uk customers have willingly shared with companies, usually in exchange for something (e.g. contact details in exchange for a whitepaper, personal preferences or survey responses) that is collected and owned by that company. It is typically created as a result of transactions or interactions in the course of daily business (e.g. CRM or webshop data) and can be used to create insights to drive your marketing decisions.
Limited value
The problem that marketers face is that as it is collected and stored in operational systems, zero- and first-party data only has limited value in terms of insight creation. Say you have 20-50 data elements coming from your upstream operational systems (CRM, webshop, email, etc.) including data such as contact details, channel permissions and transactional data such as date of purchase, purchase amount and product purchases. Smart marketers can create dozens and in some cases hundreds of new, so-called ‘derived’ marketing variables from this source data.
An Apteco partner recently shared with me how they generate 800 variables from 35 input data fields. This is how powerful insights are generated. This capability allows companies to lay the foundation for a sustainable competitive advantage via enhanced customer experiences. The more first-party data you have access to, the greater the potential for insight generation.