3 Essential Ways to Use First-Party Data in Marketing

TL;DR:

• Personalization — through email marketing, dynamic content, or loyalty programs — is one of the ways to use first-party data in your marketing efforts.
• AliExpress is an example of a retailer who leverages user behavior data to create dynamic personalized content on their homepage.
• First-party data can also be used for segmenting your audience according to demographics, psychographics, behavior, and more.
• Haleon, the parent company for the health brand Centrum, created a Jebbit experience that engages customers while collecting data that they can use to refine their audience segments.
• Targeted advertising becomes more accurate and relevant when you use first-party data, helping you generate a better ROI on your ad spend.
• Asana’s paid ads are a great example of how brands can leverage first-party data to retarget previous website visitors.

Historically, marketing teams have relied on various types of data — including second-party and third-party data — to drive marketing and advertising. However, these days, using first-party data in marketing is rising in prominence because it offers major advantages over other data types.

Below, we’ll show you how to use first-party data in your marketing through personalization, audience segmentation, and targeted advertising.

How to Use Your First-Party Data for Your Marketing Efforts

Three of the best ways to use first-party data in your marketing is for personalization, audience segmentation, and ad targeting. Below, we’ll give you ideas for how your data can be used in each of these categories. We’ll also give you real-life examples of these techniques in action.

1. Personalization

One of the best ways to implement first-party data in your marketing techniques is through personalization. You can apply personalization in various ways, including for dynamic content or email marketing. However, no matter how you leverage personalization, it requires you to create tailored marketing messages targeting individual customers.

But how do you know what the individual customer wants to see? That’s where first-party data comes in. With it, you can get valuable insights into customer behavior and customer needs. 

For example, if one customer’s purchase history shows that they often buy fabric and thread from your arts and crafts e-commerce store, that’s a good indication that they’re interested in sewing. You can use those insights to then create personalized recommendations for similar products (like more fabric in different patterns) or to recommend adjacent products (like a new sewing machine).

There are many advantages to using data in this way:

• Examining user behavior with the intent of creating personalized experiences tends to provide you with fantastic customer insights that you can use throughout your overall marketing strategy.
• Personalized content provides a much more engaging customer experience than more generic content — and that leads to increased loyalty and higher conversion rates.
• Recommendations instantly provide customers with the products they want, saving time they’d otherwise have to spend researching your offerings. Using personalization to build a better user experience will help you forge stronger customer relationships.

Ways to Use First-Party Data for Personalization

As noted, there are a variety of ways to use first-party data to implement personalized marketing. Here are a few to consider: 

• Email marketing: Use customer data like purchase histories and browsing information to zero in on the products that interest customers most — then send out personalized marketing emails featuring these products.
• Dynamic content: Your e-commerce site features several touchpoints where dynamic content can make a big difference. Use data like customer preferences, browsing information, and details from other customer interactions to add real-time personalized product recommendations to your home page, product pages, or even your checkout page.
• Loyalty programs: If you’ve implemented a loyalty program as part of your digital marketing efforts, you can use first-party data to add customization here, too. Use data to identify the items customers want most, then target those customers with offers or opportunities to earn extra points when purchasing those products.

How AliExpress Leverages Personalization

The e-commerce giant AliExpress is an excellent example of a brand that uses first-party data collection to engage its customers. Whenever you browse — either via their mobile app or on desktop — AliExpress uses data points collected from past shopping sessions to populate the homepage with personalized product recommendations. 

For AliExpress, this is a great way to make the customer experience even better since people can easily pick up shopping where they left off or find products related to those they’ve purchased in the past.

2. Audience Segmentation

One of the best ways to improve the ROI of your marketing campaigns is through audience segmentation — and one of the best ways to improve audience segmentation is through the use of first-party data. The idea behind audience segmentation is to analyze your target audience and then break it down into groups that are as specific as possible so that your marketing efforts are more targeted and more effective.

First-party data allows you to add a lot of specificity to your datasets. It’ll provide you with accurate behavioral data, demographic information, purchase histories, user preferences, and more.

Ways to Use First-Party Data for Audience Segmentation

There are many different types of audience segmentation — and you can use first-party data with each to create highly specific segments that are well-suited to your particular business objectives. Here are some examples:

• Demographic segmentation: Use first-party data to split up your audience based on education, careers, income levels, etc.
• Psychographic segmentation: Gather first-party data surrounding values and belief systems, which will help you zero in on customer preferences like cruelty-free or vegan products.
• Behavioral segmentation: Add purchasing behavior to your segmentation model to understand what people are buying, how often they make the purchase, and why they make the purchase.
• Needs-based segmentation: Survey users about how they use your product to gather first-party data so that you can unlock insights about how different groups of users put your product to work.

How Haleon Engaged Customers While Enhancing First-Party Data Collection

Haleon is the parent company of Centrum, and when it came to marketing products from the Centrum brand, they needed a new way to engage customers and help them find the perfect product. That’s why they turned to Jebbit to create a product finder quiz. 

This quiz only takes a couple of minutes to complete, and by the end, customers get a personalized recommendation based on their answers. It’s a fun experience that simplifies the customer journey by showing people exactly what they need in just a few clicks as opposed to a lengthy research process.

Haleon created this product finder with engagement metrics in mind, and it delivered. They saw a 65% completion rate, a 43% website redirect rate indicating purchase intent, a 39% reduction in their bounce rate, and a 15-second improvement in average session duration.

And what about first-party data collection? The product finder succeeded here, too. Through this experience, Haleon was able to collect an average of 8.9 data points per customer — details that they can use to refine audience segments and customer profiles according to factors like nutritional preferences, needs, health goals, and more.

3. Ad Targeting

If you want a big bang for your buck, first-party data marketing can dramatically improve the ROI on your advertising spend. Brands have long used both second-party data and third-party data for advertising, but first-party data is becoming more popular for several reasons:

• Since it comes directly from your own customers rather than random users, it’s much more accurate than other types of data.
• Because first-party data is a true representation of your customers, their behavior, and their interests, it has a high degree of relevancy. You can use it to target ads toward customers who have already expressed interest in your brand and in specific products.
• Data privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) require brands to get user consent for data use and maintain strict compliance with user privacy laws. This is much easier to do with first-party data since second- and third-party data sources aren’t always as transparent.

Accuracy and relevancy are the reasons why a first-party data strategy improves the ROI of your advertising. With first-party data, you can accurately target the right people with ads relevant to the things they’re actively shopping for. It’s an audience that is guaranteed to be more engaged and more likely to convert compared to an audience made up of people who may not have even heard of your brand, let alone expressed an interest in your products. 

Thus, when you optimize paid advertising with first-party data, you should see an increase in engagement levels and conversions — while spending the same amount or perhaps even less in advertising dollars.

Ways to Use First-Party Data for Ad Targeting

First-party data has several use cases in advertising. Here are some specific examples:

• Custom audiences: Upload first-party data to platforms like Google Ads or social media to create custom audiences. From there, you can use your first-party data to create ad campaigns directed toward users who have already interacted with your brand.
• Remarketing: Remarketing is similar to developing custom audiences — but it takes things a step further. Remarketing (or retargeting) involves using behavioral data to target specific people with specific ads based on prior interactions with your brand. For example, if certain users spend a lot of time on a particular product page, remarketing via Google Ads will display ads for that product to those users.
• Lookalike audiences: If you’ve used custom audiences created by your first-party data on Google or social media, you can also create “lookalike” audiences, which are audiences of people who share similar characteristics to those in the datasets that you’ve uploaded. Instead of retargeting users, this technique allows you to reach brand-new users who haven’t yet interacted with your brand.

How Asana Uses First-Party Data for Ad Targeting

Asana is a well-known productivity app — and as you can see in the image above, they’re also a great example of a brand that uses first-party data to successfully advertise to potential customers. In this case, Asana uploaded behavioral information that they’d gathered from website visitors to Google Ads. 

This is what makes first-party data a better option than other types of data when it comes to targeted advertising. Since Asana collected this data from people who engaged with their brand, it’s safe to assume that these people are more interested in their product than, say, people who have never heard of them. 

Thus, when Asana serves up targeted ads like these on YouTube or other Google properties, they’re automatically getting a more engaged audience than they would if those same ads were being displayed to a random selection of viewers.

Engage Customers and Gather Data With Jebbit

By using first-party data in your marketing, you can take techniques like personalization, audience segmentation, and targeted advertising to the next level. So how can you get the kind of data you’ll need?

Jebbit is here to help. Use our platform to create quizzes, product finders, lookbooks, or other engaging experiences so that you can inform and entertain customers. The experiences that you create will prove instrumental in collecting the kind of zero-party data and first-party data that you’ll need to further your marketing efforts.

Ready to get started? Schedule a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience Expert today!