In today’s world, customers want easy. Whether it’s shopping, researching products, or hearing about products for the first time, they want everything to be seamless. Yet for many, the process is still fragmented. How can you connect the dots so that your customers receive a consistent, relevant message regardless of the channel? It starts with having complete data.
There are three data types you can draw from:
First-party data: This is the data you own. It includes your mailing list, your email list, data from your CRM system, and anything else, including data gathered from social media interactions with your company.
Second-party data: This is data you rent, purchase, or exchange with another company. This might be from a data house or noncompetitive company with which you have a strategic relationship.
Third-party data: This is data you gather from third parties, including websites and social media.
What does this look like in action? Here are some of the places an airline, for example, might mine data to define its target audience:
•Members of its loyalty program (sourced from CRM)
•Customers who frequently purchase travel online (sourced from its website)
•Consumers in the market for travel credit cards (sourced from a third-party data provider)
•Customers or prospects exhibiting high engagement with its monthly newsletters (sourced from email)
•Consumers posting/tweeting about travel credit cards (sourced from social media)
Gathering and consolidating this data not only helps the airline define a highly targeted audience, but also more closely customize and target its messaging.
Other market verticals can use similar strategies, mining information from their own loyalty programs, website inquiries, and email newsletters, as well as third-party data such as specialty credit card inquiries, magazine subscriptions, andcatalog purchases.
Once this data is gathered, it can be centralized so it’s all in one place. You clean it up, analyze it, and fill in any gaps. Then you can begin incorporating it across marketing channels to provide customers with a seamless, personalized experience.
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[1] Example taken from Oracle’s white paper ““Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Data Management.” | Last Updated: 03 July 2019
