First-party data is the gold standard in digital marketing. It is customer information and contact details that you often collect yourself, in some cases coming from your own digital channels, which means two things. First, you can trust it, and second, it usually isn’t constrained by data privacy issues since those involved have already consented to your use of it.
Depending on how you collected it, it’s often a pure “signal” with very little of the noise that other sources of information may contain, which can make it highly reliable and valuable.
The Eventual Extinction of Third-Party Data
By way of comparison, second-party data normally comes from a trusted dedicated research firm tasked to either interview or otherwise collect data from either outside company representatives, customers, or consumers. Third-party data comes from aggregators who conduct online research across many other sources. Platforms like Google and Facebook have traditionally used third-party cookies to target audiences with certain browsing and purchasing behaviors. But the use and efficacy of third-party cookies is dwindling with stricter user privacy regulations.
The most reliable source of customer data and digital user behavior is the information that marketers collect themselves from the people that interact with their business.
The many sources of first-party data can include customer feedback, including sales and service inputs, online surveys, newsletter sign-ups, online purchases and online chat features. These sources can give marketers both consumer and company information, including demographics, website traffic, purchase history, email activity, and data on returns and product inventory levels.
Understanding Your Customers
First-party data can give you significant insights into your website visitors and customers, enabling you to segment and target key groups of people and build strong relationships with them. As you learn more about their purchasing behaviors and preferences, you can tailor your online presence to serve them more comprehensively.
Customer Relationship Management
By feeding this and other data into a customer relationship management (CRM) application, companies can begin to track that user’s behavior, like the content or products of highest interest.
Then you are armed with information to deliver personalized content and ads to those segments of users through digital marketing channels like email, Facebook and Google.
The team at Proximity Marketing can help you set up the channels to collect and centralize first party data collection – and then utilize that data to deliver more successful lead and sales generating marketing more proactively.
