Tag: FPD

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Let’s get the party started

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The party we’re talking about is the first-party data party of course! Marketing teams, in particular, are aware of third, second, and first-party data and there’s been a growing focus on developing zero-party data (0PD) but what efforts are underway to develop your own organization’s unique understanding of the customer?

At Pretectum, we’re saying goodbye to the dependency on third-party cookies and as you will likely be aware, some of the biggest technology solution providers and companies are actively moving to wean themselves and their partners off of second-party data (2PD) and third-party (3PD) data from cookies. These cookies of course have historically been used to track people’s activity across the web.

Cookies have been used to provide detailed customer information to advertising platforms, allowing businesses to create highly targeted campaigns, some of them very controversially. You may be wondering how your future advertising campaigns can be successful without cookie data. This is where first-party data (1PD) kicks in.

What is first-party data?

First-party data is information about your customers collected by your business. You’re not
purchasing data or using insights harvested by other businesses. Instead, customers directly provide you with their information.

First-party data may be anything. From a transcribed form-fill to details provided by emails or recorded data from your website interactions from surveys, responses, etc. Tracking every interaction isn’t even necessary if you develop good first-party data and compile it into a profile in your customer master data management system. The best things about it? It’s all yours and it has been provided voluntarily by your customers and prospects.

A tool like the Pretectum CMDM is a great way to help your teams manage your first-party data. You could of course also do this in a limited way in a customer relationship customer management (CRM) system or a customer data platform (CDP) but is that the best way? We don’t think so. CRM for customer engagement, CDP for personalized marketing engagement, and CMDM for customer master data management!

Best of all, if you use the CMDM as a hub in a hub-and-spoke master data management strategy, you can have other system spokes like your Point of Sale (POS), service-desk and support, warranty, and loyalty systems. Every system and associate in your business is now reading off the same customer data sheet with a unified, consistent voice.

As explained, your business is responsible for gathering first-party data. Customers give it to you because of your sales, services, and support teams, your outbound marketing efforts, and your website.

Unlike second-party data from business partners or third-party data from faceless data brokers, your first-party comes from people who have engaged with your business, so they’re more likely to be receptive to your use of that data for improved personalization and customer engagement.

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Taking all that engagement up a notch means gathering zero-party data, namely explicitly provided data with consent for use. Here too, the Pretectum CMDM allows you to store that data and can even be used to build that data in such a way that you have no need to worry about inadvertently intruding into people’s mailboxes, calling them, or dropping them a flyer or note where they live or work.

Most of your customers will be expecting you to personalize your interactions with them and research suggests that more than three quarters are more likely to purchase from a company if they encounter a personalized experience.

Using your customer data, you can craft ultra-targeted and situation-specific messaging for your customers. You can send extremely relevant emails to people who fit the particular customer profile of a campaign, increasing marketing ROI and reducing ad spend and marketing waste.

How do you gather that valuable data?

A tried-and-true strategy to collect first-party data is to offer something valuable in exchange for the offering up of customer information and preferences. What can you offer people that makes them want to give you their emails, complete names, addresses, or phone numbers? More importantly, what do you need to offer up to get the consent to send them messages via their phones, email inbox, and physical address?

Completing an email subscription form on your website is one, you can then integrate the results of that via API with the CMDM. That email subscription is signup to a rewards program codes notifier, a promotions flyer, or tips-and-tricks newsletter.

When a customer completes an eCommerce transaction, you could ask them if they want to create an eCommerce account for use next time and to associate with their shopping cart event. When you do that, here again, you could integrate this with the CMDM to reference with an external key, the eCommerce record with your centralized CMDM records.

Signups enable you to offer distinguished offers that can be delivered ahead of official launches and on a promotional basis in exchange for contact information and the right to contact, without investing in a potentially expensive loyalty program, your CMDM becomes the loyalty or rewards program contact data hub, a digital Rolodex on steroids of preferred customers.

Contact us today to participate in the free trial evaluation.

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Managing customer data with CRM Solutions

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HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing report suggests that as much as a quarter of salespeople have never heard of or know anything about a customer relationship management system concept.

Many of those that do understand the concept of CRM itself, use manual methods, such as spreadsheets and email tools, for managing customer data. It is thought, that CRM applications can positively influence sales revenue by increasing business performance by almost a third, so you would think that picking and adopting a CRM solution would be a no-brainer as something your business might want to do.

Of course, that uplift in revenue makes many assumptions about the quality of the customer data you have in that CRM. CRM itself is a collection of practices and a holistic strategy for managing prospective and current customer relationships. The actual implementation of a CRM system or solution involves collecting and utilizing a number of critical pieces of data related to prospects and customers.

CRM solutions are designed to help with ensuring that the management of the customer data is efficient and effective in helping with the improvement of customer relationships, but a large part of this practice focuses on managing the relationship itself and not on the foundational piece of the customer digital entity itself.

You can consider the whole of a CRM solution as a kind of intelligent database built around relationship management but heavily focused on the transactional pieces of that relationship, the calls, emails, conversations etc. These in turn translate into leads, opportunities and actual sales or transactional events that bring the organization revenue, funding or revenue.

Why we care about the customer relationship

By reducing friction in customer interaction and personalizing the engagement the CRM tool helps businesses build stronger relationships between an organization and its external contacts and customers. Reduced engagement friction increases the likelihood of customer retention and long term customer lifetime value.

The brass ring of the engagement is one wherein the contact becomes a customer and a net promoter. A net promoter is someone who on the whole, will recommend your organization, its products, its services, to others.

When potential and current customers feel value and contentment with respect to your organization they will most probably not only buy your products and services but also refer your brand and details to their friends and family and others that they may meet in their own daily lives.

Who are the main users?

The content of a customer relationship management system is often used by many different interest groups in the business. Often the most interested party is sales but the content is of equal interest to those in marketing, support, service and accounting. For this reason, they all converge on needing to have the same basic understanding of the customer and the customer’s nuanced relationship with them and their role and function. This means that the customer master is often itself a hub with many spokes that lead to the systems and tools used by these other groups. Having the best possible master data that these groups can refer to in a unified way, is therefore foundational for having good customer relations.

To learn more about how the Pretectum C-MDM can help your business build the best possible customer master, reach out to us today, to learn more!