With the walls of walled gardens growing higher and third-party cookies becoming less relevant by the day, first-party data has never been more valuable for marketers.
A complete data strategy, powered by the right technology, uses first-party data to drive better customer experiences and higher-performing campaigns. And it’s profitable:
Most brands are taking notice, with 60% saying they look to first-party data strategies to combat the depreciation of third-party identifiers.
But building a first-party data strategy goes way beyond simply collecting data.
While first-party data is the most valuable currency in marketing, it’s only one piece of a larger data ecosystem.
To get a complete picture of your customers, first-party data should be enhanced with zero-party data they willingly share, second-party data from trusted partners, and third-party data to fill in behavioral and demographic gaps.
This layered approach creates a unified customer view that fuels personalization, relevance, and measurable results.
First-party data is information a company collects directly from its own customers and audiences through its own channels. Typical sources of first-party data include:
Maintaining accurate contact information and clean first-party data helps build deeper customer connections and activate a data-driven marketing strategy. But that’s only the first step.
There’s a lot more to know about your customers outside of your first-party data, like where else they spend their money and what their preferences and opinions are. That’s why second-, third- and even zero-party data also have key roles to play in your first-party data strategy.
According to Forrester, marketers are facing four massive forces eroding their ability to connect with consumers:
The urgency to maximize first-party data has therefore never been greater.
First-party data, enriched through identity resolution and complementary data sources, enables you to consistently recognize individuals, tailor messaging to their needs and measure performance at the person level. Brands that invest in thoughtful, privacy-forward data strategies today will be the ones still thriving tomorrow.
Even with customer data in hand, many marketers still face roadblocks that keep them from realizing its full potential. Common pain points and obstacles include:
Unfortunately, the consequences of underutilizing first-party data are dire. Marketers often waste spend on the wrong audiences or repetitive messaging. Disconnected touchpoints create friction in the customer experience. And ultimately, brands that fail to maximize first-party data fall behind those with more robust first-party data strategies.
Epsilon’s blueprint for building a first-party data strategy follows a five-step, repeatable process that moves you from scattered, incomplete records to a unified, actionable and continually improving customer view.
To see it in action, consider one of our multi-brand retail clients whose customer data lived in a dozen different databases. At the start of the process, it was impossible for the retailer to understand cross-brand behavior or market efficiently.
The first step to building an effective first-party data strategy is identifying and organizing all the first-party data you already have:
For our retailer, this meant pulling customer records from the 12 different databases across its various brands and channels into one unified profile.
As Epsilon’s Kate Sirkin, EVP of Global Data Partnerships at Epsilon, explains in a recent webinar, “All of the disparate data can be very messy. This stage is about getting all of the existing data into one single view of the customer that makes the data accessible across teams and platforms.”
Once your data is organized, identify the missing pieces that will help you better understand and serve customers, whether that’s preferences, channel behaviors or category interests.
First, consider how you can collect additional zero- and first-party data through value-driven exchanges like loyalty programs, surveys or interactive experiences.
Then use identity resolution to further enhance your first-party data with trusted second- and third-party sources to create a more complete profile. This could include demographic, transactional or behavioral data that fills in the context your systems can’t capture.
For the retailer, enrichment meant layering in loyalty sign-up data and survey responses (zero-party data) along with third-party demographic and purchase-category insights from Epsilon’s clean rooms. This revealed new cross-brand patterns, such as customers who bought in one category but were primed for another.
With clean, organized and enriched data, you can now unlock its strategic value. Apply analytics and segmentation to uncover patterns in customer behavior, preferences and purchase triggers. Identify your best customers, your at-risk segments and untapped audiences.
Look for opportunities to grow your data set and deepen engagement, such as adding a loyalty program, refining your email/SMS strategy or expanding into new channels. These insights guide smarter creative, offers and media planning, ensuring your campaigns are built on evidence rather than assumptions.
When Epsilon analyzed the retailer’s unified data, it discovered a major opportunity to shift from brand-first to customer-first marketing. The team could now see customers’ activity across multiple brands and categories, enabling targeted cross-sell offers and better budget allocation.
Put your data to work across every addressable channel, including email, SMS, paid media, in-store experiences and more. Orchestrate personalized journeys that deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, with sequencing tailored to their behaviors and preferences.
Track performance in real time and use early indicators to pivot quickly. Continually refining targeting, messaging and channel mix reduces media waste, increases conversions and keeps your brand relevant as customer needs evolve.
The retailer activated personalized email, SMS and paid media campaigns, sequencing offers based on cross-brand behaviors. Real-time tracking allowed the retailer to shift budgets toward the most responsive audiences.
The real power of a first-party data strategy comes from closing the loop. Measure performance at the person level—connecting campaign exposure to online and offline actions—to understand exactly what’s working, for whom and why.
Feed these learnings back into your customer profiles so they become richer and more accurate over time. As customers’ preferences and circumstances change, your strategy adapts with them, ensuring every interaction is informed by the most current, complete picture of the individual.
For our retail client, this meant building dashboards that gave leadership full visibility into campaign performance and how data was driving growth. The results were substantial:
Privacy laws will continue to proliferate. Consumers will continue to become increasingly privacy-aware. And walled gardens aren’t going to give us easy access to their data any time soon.
The brands that build and use first-party data strategically will be the ones delivering the most relevant experiences, spending media budgets more efficiently and growing loyalty while others fall behind.
In other words, the future of marketing is first-party data-driven, and building an effective first-party data strategy today is imperative for brand success.
However, you don’t have to figure it out alone—connect with Epsilon today to maximize your first-party data.
This post was originally published on March 22, 2024, and has since been updated.
