Gathering Zero-Party Data is the Way to Move Forward in the Cookieless Future

As the world is moving to adapt to the cookieless future, it has become essential for businesses to start focusing on opportunities to gather zero-party data to minimize the impact of the demise of third-party cookies.

Bygone are the days when brand and consumer relationships were very straightforward. Buyers’ journeys today have become more complex, and consumer demands have also tremendously evolved. Consumers today have become more aware of their rights and expect businesses to respect their right to privacy. To respect the users’ right to privacy; businesses need to gather zero-part data.

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Following are a few ways that CMOs can consider moving forward in a cookieless future:

Gather users’ preference data

CMOs should consider designing and implementing marketing operations that help them to deliver an interactive customer experience to gather zero-party data. It is crucial to set processes that execute multiple kinds of research on the users and get relevant opt-ins from them to get necessary permissions and yet deliver a top-notch customer experience. This approach is one of the most significant ways to gain customer trust. Marketing teams can design questionnaires, polls, quizzes, and other social media posts that engage the customer. Moreover, it is also essential to integrate loyalty programs that assist the marketing teams in gathering zero-party data at scale. Expectations around customer loyalty programs are moving beyond points and discounts. True customer loyalty is based on an emotional connection and trust, so businesses need to actively make loyalty an organization-wide priority rather than an initiative or program. This ‘loyalty-driven commerce’ approach is a mindset that makes customer loyalty a top priority for the entire C-suite and a way to future-proof an organization’s commerce business.

“Loyalty programs collect omnichannel data that are almost impossible to get any other way, leading to valuable insights that can inform every strategic decision – from what to make and where to sell it to how to market it. Every part of the business will benefit from these insights, so every part of the business should work to improve customer loyalty,” says Johan Liljeros, General Manager and Senior Commerce Advisor, at Avensia.

The Zero-Party Data Maturity Model

Enterprises that aim to develop their customer database to move forward in the cookieless future need to have effective strategies to gather zero-party data and first-party data.

Moreover, it is crucial to have strategies to deliver hyper-personalized customer campaigns based on the gathered insights. The initial stages of every data-centric marketing strategy in the cookieless ecosystem is to increase their first-party database and gather Personally identifiable information (PII) data from the one-off users. After gathering all the relevant information, businesses need to convert these users into loyal customer bases by offering effective marketing campaigns that create user-generated content to develop more trustworthy customer relationships. Gathering first-party data is an efficient way to yield higher open rates, click-throughs, and conversions as the users will respond and provide the enterprise with wide sets of self-reported data points to the marketing database, which enables the organizations to make their data more finely segmented and refined. Once enterprises have these crucial data sets, it becomes easier for them to develop a comprehensive customer profile that enables the presales teams to identify the motivations, purchase trigger points, and intentions. It is one of the most effective ways for the marketing teams to offer a consistent marketing experience throughout all the channels and gather relevant information from the customer.

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Gathering Zero-party data is going to be a new normal that enables organizations to deliver the hyper-personalization that the modern consumer expects from the brands they interact with.