How to Connect Your Digital Campaigns with First-Party Data for Better Performance?

A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to lead a workshop at the Activation Meetup organized by Actito in Antwerp, on the topic: "How to connect Paid Marketing and your Actito data for higher performance?" In other words, how to link your digital campaigns with your first-party data to achieve better results! It was a morning filled with valuable insights on how to better activate your customer base through email, push notifications, SMS, contests... as well as digital campaigns on Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Liveramp, and various advertising networks in Belgium and abroad. 

5 Reasons to Invest in Your First-Party Data Now 

1. Efficiency Gains: Retaining a customer is 5 to 25 times cheaper than acquiring a new one, according to Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review.
2. Rising Acquisition Costs: Acquisition costs have significantly increased in recent years due to the growing number of online advertisers, especially since COVID. For example, the CPC (cost per click) rose by 13% in 2023, according to an article from Search Engine Land.
3. Increasingly Complex Campaign ROI Estimation: With the end of third-party cookies, privacy regulations (like GDPR), and the explosion of channels available to advertisers to reach their target audience, estimating campaign ROI has become more complex. These factors make it harder to pinpoint where the increase in brand awareness or conversions comes from. Solutions like Marketing Mix Modeling are promising, relying especially on first-party data.
4. Customers Expect Personalized Experiences: Consumers are increasingly frustrated with mass communications that lack personalization and only want to share their information (zero-party data) once, in a clear framework that respects their privacy and provides tangible benefits. How will you, as a brand, ensure that you deliver a unique experience "at scale"?
5. Regulatory Impact on Targeting: With increasing regulations (such as GDPR), major platforms (Google, Meta, programmatic...) have gradually reduced the number of targeting options available to advertisers in favor of optimized bidding focused on conversion goals driven by machine learning. This shift leads advertisers to target the same audiences as their competitors due to the more limited options. The alternative is to create custom audiences by uploading contact data and combining them with the native targeting capabilities of various platforms.
   
   

Based on these five underlying trends, according to a Google study published in 2023, 9 out of 10 marketers recognize the importance of having a "first-party" data strategy, but only 1 in 3 actually have one! This was confirmed during a survey of around thirty advertisers, with the majority still in the early stages of their first-party data strategy.  

Having a large database is good, but activating it is even better! 

Many marketers aim to build the largest database possible to maximize their impact. It’s a good start, but without activation, all the efforts put into building it will be in vain, as the ROI and brand effects will be limited.

You can activate your contact database through your own channels such as email, direct mail, SMS, push notifications (web and mobile), and digital wallets... but also through paid channels for greater impact, as shown in the following diagram.

To activate this data, it needs to be addressable (phone number or email) for the contacts. Then, you can share it with platforms through a technology that anonymizes the contacts.

It is the combination of owned and paid channels that makes the difference in creating a powerful experience for both the customer and the brand.

Today, only a minority of brands truly activate their data to optimize the performance and targeting of their digital campaigns. Platforms like Meta & Google have popularized this approach, but other channels can also be activated for premium placements and with the support of local players. This was confirmed by the survey during the Actito activation meetup:

Tools like Zapier, Make, or exports via API or FTP servers enable the automation and synchronization of audiences to fuel the campaigns that will drive your brand's success in the future.

How to Activate Your Data with Advanced Segmentations?

The larger your contact database, the more you can segment it for better performance and tailored personalization for each profile. There are many relevant segmentations for your brand, such as: 

• Clients vs. prospects vs. former clients.
• Combine first-party data with zero-party data (information provided by contacts themselves) to create precise audiences beyond transactional information (orders, completed forms) or email-related data (opens, clicks, etc.).
• Export your data to a platform like the DPG Media Lab and combine it with their data from their media sites.
• Use an RFM matrix (Recency, Frequency & Monetary) to segment customers based on loyalty or those at risk of churn.
• Implement churn scores, conversion propensity scores, etc., using machine learning to create high-quality audiences for targeted communication scenarios, whether through owned channels or paid advertising.
• Enrich your first-party data with "data brokers" like TheTradeDesk or LiveRamp to create unique audiences that can be activated across multiple digital channels.

In summary, having up-to-date and usable first-party data for omnichannel activation presents excellent opportunities to strengthen your brand's growth. Data governance is the key to ensuring effective messaging and, therefore, a positive experience for your customers and prospects! Your creativity will also be a great asset to innovate and connect with your contacts on a deeper level :-)

Interested in discussing your activation challenges and first-party data? The Saturn and Universem teams would be happy to meet with you over coffee! We will also be present at the Digital First trade show this Thursday, October 17, 2024, in Brussels. Contact us for your free invite!