How leading brands harness the power of zero-party and first-party data
By Olie Navrotska, Director, Strategy & Client Solutions
Image from undraw.co
In the age of digital oversaturation, leading brands are increasingly turning to zero-party and first-party data to gain deeper insights into their customers and deliver personalized experiences that foster loyalty, drive growth, and gain efficiency. Unlike third-party data, which is collected from external sources, zero-party and first-party data are obtained directly from the customers themselves. You can learn about the fundamentals of these types of data in our previous post titled What is zero-party data, and why you should care.
Let’s explore how three leading brands (with some help from RI) are leveraging zero-party and first-party data to meet their business goals.
Fostering Loyalty (by extracting marketing value from non-marketing data)
Whirlpool
Most companies have troves of valuable data that they are not fully leveraging. Whirlpool, the company behind leading appliance brands such as KitchenAid® and Maytag®, was no exception. Whirlpool was already utilizing email subscription data to promote their products, but they had not made use of product warranty data to inform their existing customer marketing.
With up to a 10-year repurchase time frame, it was important to build and maintain long-term customer satisfaction. Which is why RI stepped in to help Whirlpool turn their warranty product data into an engine driving highly personalized, model-specific owner communications that started from the first day of ownership. Whirlpool served up tailored tips, tricks and maintenance advice via triggered emails to improve the new customer experience. The result was eye-opening, with engagement rates double the benchmarks and a 25% increase in repurchase intent. This award-winning program is a great example of how a hyper-personalized, data-driven onboarding experience can provide genuine value to customers, driving long-term loyalty.
What data does your company already have that you never considered to be marketing data? It might be time to re-think how that data can be used to add value to your customer marketing.
Driving Growth (by using data to strengthen B2B relationships)
Purolator
As a leading integrated freight, package, and logistics provider in Canada, Purolator knows full well that in B2B sales, relationships are king. However, with a limited sales force covering an entire country, often remotely, Purolator faced challenges building human connections between customers and the brand. It needed a way to replicate the personal touch of sales rep interactions in its marketing communications. This was as much about showing customers that Purolator knows them, as it was about helping them get to know their Purolator reps to create that human bond.
RI helped Purolator accomplish that by capturing the sales reps’ personalities with friendly headshots and stories about their hobbies, tastes in movies and TV shows, sports team allegiances, and favourite foods. This enabled Purolator to send highly personalized emails to Purolator customers, which included pictures of their sales reps along with fun facts about them. They also followed up with high-value at-risk customers using dimensional direct mail packages with personalized hand-written Post-its and letters from the reps, along with restaurant gift cards to “do lunch” when and with whom they pleased.
These communications delivered a solid response across a number of metrics, such as dramatically increased shipping revenue, positive customer feedback and improved motivation amongst the sales force, including requests from the reps to turn the communications into a recurring program. Email results showed customer engagement rates of over 30%, well above historical averages. But most importantly, customers replied to these communications by stating how pleased they were to put a face to a name and mentioning the hobbies and interests they had in common, creating that human connection we were after.
We often think of zero- and first-party data in a consumer context, but there are countless applications in the B2B space. What kind of data does your sales team have that can be leveraged to drive customer growth?
Gaining Efficiencies (by creating high-performance lookalike audiences)
I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!
Flora, a global leader in plant-based consumer packaged goods, doesn’t always know how consumers use I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!® products, and without these insights, its marketing can feel generic and miss potential new customers. Which is why RI helped Flora design fun and engaging quizzes to gather meaningful insights about consumer preferences, habits, and connections over food, enabling Flora to capture additional zero-party data from its existing email subscribers.
But we didn’t stop there. We also analyzed digital body language by tracking interactions across dozens of touchpoints to refine our understanding of consumer interests, which allowed Flora to capture first-party data and create lookalike (LAL) seed audiences of exactly the types of customers the brand wanted to reach. The LAL audiences were more efficient than traditional in-platform targeting and even expensive third-party data sources. In fact, over $1 million in media efficiencies were realized across the organization because of this award-winning initiative.
Implementing a new zero-party and first-party data capture strategy does not have to be arduous. You can start with the first-party data you already have access to, like digital body language, and phase in zero-party data capture. Based on your customer signals, what audiences can you start creating for media targeting?
The takeaway
You can unlock incremental value from the data you already have, and achieve loyalty, growth and efficiency gains you did not know were possible. Whether through direct customer input (zero-party data) or user behaviour analysis (first-party data), you can deepen your understanding of your audience. This empowers you to anticipate and fulfill their needs with unprecedented precision, transforming your customer relationships—and your business.