Driving Sales in the Cookie-Less Future
Have you felt like websites are tracking you online? You’re not alone. Digital marketing has come a long way from the ads on AOL. Over the last few years, digital marketing has grown in complexity to enable the targeting of audiences based on extensive data sets. These data sets track users’ habits, interests, attitudes, behaviors and are compiled over long time periods. The data is then bought and sold many times over for targeting purposes. Affectionately, the industry calls this tracking and data, cookies.
Which brings us to the main issue of today. This concept of tracking people across the internet, oftentimes without their knowledge, has become a top concern for browsers. What does it mean to use the internet today – that you must give up your privacy in order to browse websites? Companies like Google, though differently.
83% of marketers are reliant on tracking cookies
Google is wanting to gradually get rid of these data tracking cookies. And Apple has made it’s device ID an opt-in only, allowing iPhone users the ability to choose what apps are able to pull from their device. These 2 initiatives are only broad examples of the digital marketing industry’s pivot into the privacy conversation. You can further see more examples of pro-privacy laws starting across the globe with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
While these advancements have made considerable change to the digital marketing landscape, the fact remains that consumer cookie data runs the internet. That buying and selling of data, known as ‘third-party data,’ supports advertisers and marketers running complex ad campaigns for retailers. Furthermore, this constant stream of new data allows marketers to optimize visitor experiences on websites, target seasonal ads, and track users in the buying cycle.
With both Google and Apple making huge shifts to remove these third-party tracking cookies and ID tracking, digital marketers are in a scramble for a future to the industry. Is your business ready for this ‘Cookie-Less’ future?
Preparing Your Business for the Future
While third-party data is affected by the major shifts in digital marketing, business owners still have ways to build up their own ‘first-party’ data sets. This first-party data is owned by a company due to their own activities with their customers, community, and other people. That makes the data as reliable as possible for making predictions and forecasting future behavioral trends. It can be comprised of data like:
Website: Your website includes a powerful, deep wealth of data on visitors, their behavior, transactions, and subscriber names and email addresses. In addition, you can enhance behavioral understanding by tracking mouse hovers over a page, video plays onsite, and downloads. All of these touchpoints can present further understanding of the interests and attitudes of your customers.
Mobile Website: While your website should have a seamless experience across desktop and mobile devices, you can still segment your data to review just your mobile site traffic. For example, how did your mobile traffic find your site? Are the mobile visitors more likely to call? Are mobile visitors spending more time on certain pages?
Smartphone Apps: For businesses with custom mobile apps, you have access to a great data set. Understand that these users are your most loyal customers – they took the extra step to download your app. While the app should have a similar UX as your site, your app will have unique touchpoints. You should learn what your best touchpoints are for measurement.
Email Newsletters, Text Subscriptions: A great data set here – your customer actively asked for you to contact them. The granular data available with email subscriptions allow you to understand who is opening your emails and provide you to segment audiences and adjust campaigns for more specific audiences. SMS is similar here, as you have data around open rates and click-through rates.
CRM and Point of Sale Systems: As customers purchase your products or services, or even as they load up their online shopping cart, your systems can interpret that interaction and rely back deep insights on interest, behavior, and marketing effectiveness. Your POS system can provide clear buy behavior around product interest and further into cart abandonment data. As you cultivate your customers into loyal return buyers, your CRM can provide detailed information around seasonal buying behaviors and how buyers engage with discounts.
Beacons: For many retailers, beacons are an emerging source of customer data that contributes to brick-and-mortar customer analysis. Beacons are used to know more about in-store and location-based customer behavior.
Surveys: For many businesses, surveys can provide great insights into current and future customer attitudes. Oftentimes, with surveys people feel free to give honest feedback. Surveys can be online or in-person questionnaires. Surveys can also include focus groups.
Customer Feedback: Customer feedback provides more attitude data from current customers. Customer feedback is essential to guide and inform your decision-making and influence innovations and changes to your product or service. This data can also provide customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Social Media Profiles: Social profiles provide public engagements with your customers on a daily basis. Your customers are commenting, ‘liking’, following, tweeting, or re-gramming your profile posts giving your business a shout out to their own circles. It’s always good to analyze which posts are garnering top engagements and differences in time or day to a post’s reach.
The start of any good marketing strategy (The 5 Ps of Marketing) begins with knowing your audience – which means data. Do you want to know what social profile to build? Are you looking to make a commercial for TV? Do you want to know if a YouTube campaign would work? All of these questions can be answered with first-party data. It’s the foundation of understanding your customers because it’s based on real interactions with your customers across all your touchpoints (see above list). This is the information that the customer entrusts with you, knowing that you are using it, all in exchange for using your product or service.
You should know that first-party data-backed marketing strategies garner the highest return on investment of any data type. More than likely, you’ve used this first-party data for remarketing, retention, or rebranding purposes. So, instead of paying for someone else’s data, why not create more of your own content across the full buyer funnel? From awareness to loyalty, customers are interested in relevant and engaging content. The costs are on your side since you’ll spend more money trying to buy data from other companies than you would cultivating your extensive data.
Enhancing your own marketing efforts using first-party data will protect your business from the cookie-less future and support an extensive positive customer experience. So if delivering the right experience for your customers is important, let’s start working on those data goals.
Are you ready for the shift?