How to Beef up First Party Data
Improving First-party Data: A three-pronged strategy
A customer’s visit to your business’ digital channels creates valuable first-party data that is your business to leverage, as long as the customer consents. Whether the user interaction happens onsite, within mobile apps, or email newsletters, in-store kiosks or point of sales, or even a call to the customer care, all the first-party data that is generated is proprietary to your business and not available to others.
The benefits of leveraging first-party data are widely understood, and most organisations are diligently capturing and ingesting the first-party data into their data lakes. In Syntasa’s experience though, many organisations are lacking in joining the multiple device, channel and other primary key identifiers within the vast array of disparate digital first-party data sources. This primary roadblock is preventing vast majority of businesses from actually creating new value using data.
Here is a three-pronged strategy to beef up first party data, such that it is usable and actionable
1. Strategic ID-linking Events
Your customers use multiple channels and devices to interact with the business in both authenticated and anonymous manner.
Your challenge is to identify new prospects visiting your sites and separate these from the known customers using anonymous browsing.
A simple and effective strategy is to intelligently and strategically creating multiple interaction points with the known customer that generate ID-linking events whilst also providing a valuable micro-service to the customer.
- A very common example is to send a Customer SMS text (with prior consent, of course!) with an order status update link when the order is shipped
ID-linking events provide crucial link between device IDs and channels used by a customer. Syntasa CDP is able to link these disparate datasets together inside of our customer’s own cloud or on-prem, in order to identify and unpack the data contained within these ID-linking events.
2. Stitching Customer Identities
When gathered in a customer data platform and deciphered correctly, the ID-Linking events’ data can provide a wide coverage to identify, at-least once, each device a customer may have used on a channel.
Next step is to use these and other similar ID-linking events to tie together the devices/first-party cookies used by a known customer in the historic data, leaving a small set of IDs left as a set of potential new prospects. With time, upto 80% of first-party cookies and identities can be matched, creating a very clear and actionable set of known customers and unknown prospects, that can be used in Retargeting and CRM campaigns.
Syntasa CDP’s core component is an ID Graph that maintains and manages a specialised, fast-access database of first-party identifiers, and scales to millions of known customers and unknown prospects profiles that are gathered from billions of first-party data events across historic & current data.
3. Constant Clustering
Finally, a mechanism is required to constantly and robustly (daily, hourly, or sub-minute) segment events and transactions into known customer or unknown prospect interactions based on the ID Graph.
Advanced cloud software architecture and data management techniques like partitioning & time-series lookback can allow for ID Graph to be maintained with near-real time accuracy. Without paying attention to this, all the effort from previous steps quickly becomes obsolete within weeks.
Summary
- First-party data will be the only way forward in the eCommerce world of 2021 and beyond
- Use three simple strategies to boost your first-party data by linking customer identifiers across onsite and offsite datasets in your cloud
- Syntasa CDP is the only Customer Data Platform available in popular cloud marketplaces as a packaged product that is deployable in your own clouds and creating robust first-party customer identity graph
