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The Best Way to Activate Your First Party Data Strategy

The death of Google’s third party cookie means organizations need to take action now to build customer relationships online.

Google deferred the death of the third party cookie until 2023, but that only means you have a little extra time to take ownership of your relationships with your audience and get to know your customers within your own site.

If you go to many sites today, within a few seconds you‘re immediately presented with a giant popup window asking you to sign up for a newsletter you’re not currently interested in given the value you haven’t yet received from that site. It’s ultimately an irritating barrier to what you’re trying to accomplish on that website. Now there is hopefully some A/B testing behind that registration popup, but it’s definitely not the most effective way to get signups and build relationships – by asking (bothering, really) everyone, all the time. “That’s a common first party data strategy these days, but the likelihood of success just isn’t very high,” said Gordon Edall, Co-Founder and CRO of Sophi.io.

The newsletter bar may be lower than when you’re trying to drive registrations or logins or an account-type relationship, so it’s easier to be more… should I say persistent, and care less about scaring visitors away. But this is all part of a chain of actions you take to get your users and customers to tell you more.

You need them to login so you can develop a first party relationship. Gordon explains: “Sophi for First Party Data, very similar to Sophi Dynamic Paywall Engine, treats this as a problem of progressive disclosure – how do you get from one piece of data about your visitor, to two pieces of data, to a completely different relationship with higher loyalty, retention and engagement.” The key here is that Sophi understands when and where some of these steps can be skipped in order to get a consumer to your end goal faster.

Companies usually follow the ordered steps of first asking a user to register, then asking for their credit card for a sale or subscription, and so on. All these steps are great opportunities to activate your first party data - or zero party data - strategy, and learn about your customer. However, not every consumer needs to follow those steps in that progressive order. Making everyone follow the same path regardless of who they are and where they are in the buying cycle is a slow, ineffective process that can be optimized using artificial intelligence and machine learning-powered solutions like Sophi for First Party Data, which has visible advantages over more progressive data strategies.

Sophi’s technology system is designed to get you to the highest value state as quickly as possible. Don’t ask someone to sign up for a low value newsletter when you actually want them to take out their credit card and make a purchase.

Sophi for First Party Data is fully dynamic and personalized in real-time. Sophi can tell you – through your offer management system – how often to ask for an account signup first and bypass the newsletter all together. Or for people who signed up for a newsletter and haven’t given you their name or income yet for example, Sophi can tell you as soon as there’s a chance to trigger ‘tell me more about you’.

Once Sophi understand the tiers of your offers (for example: do nothing, ask for a registration, get a credit card number), it understands the goal and automatically goes after as many victories as possible, looking at each individual user and their propensity to say yes to a given tier of offers at that particular moment in time.

“Sophi takes your value proposition and gets users to the higher levels of value in their relationship with you, as quickly as possible.” – Mike O’Neill, Co-Founder and CEO of Sophi.io.

It’s highly portable too as it’s a lightweight trigger engine. It doesn’t replace your marketing technology stack; it integrates into it. It enhances the systems you already have in place, making them work better to achieve your goals more effectively.

Sophi for First Party Data can also be used to drive ecommerce sales directly to grow revenue, but that’s a whole other conversation.

To recap, Google has postponed the death of the third party cookie, but it is still dying. If you want that invaluable relationship with your customers, you need to start building it now by developing a robust first party data strategy within your own platforms. This inevitably means moving to a registration-based relationship where users tell you what you want to know. And they aren’t just going to do that on their own. You need to convince them to do that, to tell you their gender and their income and so on. Your competition is working on this now, so don’t handicap yourself by not taking those steps today.

Feel free to reach out to discuss enabling and optimizing your first party data strategy.

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