Data Strategy
May 1, 2024
With the 3rd party cookie apocalypse on the horizon, more and more brands are seeing the value in establishing or extending their direct customer relationships through the collection of first party data. These relationships succeed based on the strength of your value exchange strategy – or the way you convince people to willingly give you their information – and give brands the power to provide a better experience.
Basically, the premise is to provide something of value to prospects and customers, and in return they will give you permission to use their first party data for critical business use cases like targeting personalized experiences and/or analyzing campaign performance.
If you’re looking for ways to engage customers directly and reap the first party data (or zero party) rewards, here are some value exchange strategy ideas to get you started.
Valuable Tools
Creating tools around your products and services can be a fantastic way to drive customer success and satisfaction, but these tools can also be a hugely valuable source of first party data insights for the wider customer experience.
For example, if you have a fitness product, is there a way you can provide an experience around the fitness program your product enables? If you sell running shoes this could be a tool that helps you map your run, track how far you’ve run, meet other runners, etc. These tools raise the CX bar of your product, but also are useful as a way of growing the audience you have access to target and analyze behavior for the overall health of the business.
ASICS provides a running app alongside their shoes to help their customers have a richer running experience. This same data and the insights within it are valuable beyond the ownership of this particular pair of shoes and is a fantastic opportunity to cultivate a richer picture of the customer, if these insights can live in a central, well-integrated profile.
Surveys / Quizzes
Many times, customers are directly willing to tell you what they think through surveys, if you’d just ask. This gives them an opportunity to express their thoughts directly, and often those who are most willing to participate will be your best customers.
If a direct survey isn’t an option, quizzes are a popular form of engagement that adds value for a customer and allows you to collect first party data. Whether the quiz identifies the customer as a certain type of user, is more playful like those you see on social media, or even operational to provide guidance, customer answers (when properly collected and analyzed) contain rich insights that could form the basis of a rich experience.
Wells Fargo provides a quiz experience around their financial products that provides value to customers looking for a mortgage. This tool provides value to customers in the moment, and also is fuel for insights and targeting around this customer’s financial journey.
Exclusive Brand Experiences
Your biggest fans want opportunities to engage deeper. If it’s an exclusive experience, even better! And don’t think you necessarily need to provide hard rewards like cash prizes or gifts. If properly positioned, soft benefits like prestige within the community, or access to provide feedback can be even more attractive.
Exclusive brand experiences give you a way to provide value to your biggest fans, and in exchange you get extra insights and first party data that enables you to target these customers directly to cultivate a really high value audience.
Nike provides the “Nike experiences” feature in their app to help shoppers book events, get product customization services and look for fitness classes. This data is valuable way beyond the in-store experience.
Loyalty Rewards
Loyalty programs are a fantastic way to drive direct customer relationships. By directly engaging with the brand, customers can be rewarded directly with gifts, discounts, access to special promotions, etc. Oftentimes, loyalty programs are siloed and not well integrated into the overall customer experience.
Engagement with loyalty programs not only provides a path to higher lifetime value through the loyalty program itself, but the insights that come from that loyalty can be used more widely in other customer engagement programs. Then the value of this first party data is extended far beyond the loyalty program itself, but finds its way into the overall customer experience.
Barcelo Hotel Group runs the “my Barcelo” membership program that helps with deepening direct relationships, providing a better experience, and getting richer insights that can be used beyond the loyalty program.
Free Stuff!
While perhaps not the most desirable way to drive engagement, free stuff is an effective way of providing value to a customer in exchange for that direct relationship through first party data. It’s important that if you choose to incentivize the relationship with free stuff, hopefully that free stuff can align very strongly with your product. Amazon gifts cards, for example, may not be the best incentive to draw customer relationships that are the most relevant to your product, even though they might be very attractive offers.
No matter what value exchange strategy you take to collect this fuel that can supercharge customer relationships, it’s essential you’re able to tie these insights back to a customer profile that sits at the heart of your engagement and analytics efforts. Tealium’s Customer Data Hub gives you the tools to not only measure these all-important data points inside a unified and well-integrated profile, but also gives you the power to use this data as you see fit to create bespoke, in-the-moment insights as the foundation for your CX efforts.
Contact us today to get a custom demo to show how we can help.
