How to Optimize Your

First-party Data Strategy:

Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing
Table of Contents
• Introduction 1

• The Four Types of Data 2

First-party Data 2
Second-party Data 2
Third-party Data 3
Zero-party Data 4

• The Obligations of Customer Data: Privacy and Compliance 5

• How to Use Your First-party Data 6

• Five Best Practices for Getting the Most Value 7

From Your Customer Data

• Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 8

The Data Enrichment Process 9
How to Put Data Enrichment to Work 10

• The Seven Benefits of Data Enrichment 11

• Optimizing Your First-party Data Strategy 12

• How Treasure Data Can Help 14

• Conclusion 15
Introduction
Centralized customer data is at the core of a successful long-term customer engagement in the new digital age.
It is essential for superior customer service and delivering on customer expectations. But in order to draw useful,
reliable insights from your customer data, you need to have an accurate snapshot of your customer—with as much
information as possible.

A significant change affecting marketers is the end of third-party cookies. Cookies have long been a primary tool for
tracking and collecting consumer data on the internet. But times are changing. Google may have delayed its plans to
block third-party cookies from its Chrome browser to 2024, but it will happen. Apple is already giving consumers the
ability to opt-out of tracking and third-party cookies on its Safari browser and in apps on iOS devices.

Marketers need to evolve past the use of the third-party cookies. And that means first-party data has become
even more valuable. You need to find more ways to get consumers to share more of their information with you to
continue to deliver connected customer experiences to them across all your channels. This might include more lead
gen forms, finding ways to get consumers to self-segment through registration or preference selection, or other
tactics that help you understand your target audiences.

In addition to prioritizing their first-party data, marketers are also investing more heavily in a first-party data
strategy. That means using first-party data to guide practices ranging from audience identification to measurement.
For the “dataverse” outside first-party data, marketers are evolving their targeting and measurement practices.
Ultimately, intelligent use of first-party customer data is how you will continue to power customer engagement with
personalized experiences.

In this guide, you will learn about:

• The four types of data, including zero-party data

• The importance of data enrichment
• How to optimize your first-party data strategy

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 1
The Four Types of Data
There are several types of customer and audience data, each with its own set of benefits and challenges that can
guide your strategies. And while all types of customer data helps us build better experiences to some degree, they
are not all created equal. Let’s look at the types of data you can use and how they differ from each other.

First-party Data
First-party data is data you collect directly from interactions with your customers and audiences on your own
channels. Examples of first-party data include demographics, purchase history, website activity, mobile app data,
email engagement, sales interactions, support calls, customer feedback programs, interests, and behaviors.
You collect this data through the sales of your products and services, through support processes, forms on your
website, subscriptions, surveys, social media connections, and marketing programs.

In terms of all data types, first-party data is the most valuable because you collect it directly and know it’s high
quality, accurate, and relevant to your business. It’s not hard to collect first-party data. All customer-related
systems collect some customer data. The challenge is that they all gather, store, and manage it differently, leading
to inaccurate and inconsistent data between systems. The best way to ensure your customer data is consistent
across all of your systems is to leverage a centralized platform, such as a customer data platform, to consolidate,
standardize, and make it available to all systems regardless of where it was first collected.

Second-party Data
Second-party data is data you acquire from a trusted partner. In most cases, you know the partner, which means
you know the data quality and accuracy—and you know the partner is compliant with data and privacy regulations.
You also know the data is relevant because it comes from a partner with whom you have a mutually beneficial
relationship.

You can also buy second-party data by connecting with partners through second-party data marketplaces. When
you acquire data this way, you can discuss the data with the partner and select only the information you want. If you
decide to go this route, you can be sure the marketplace is trustworthy, the partners you are connected with are
reliable, and their data is collected and managed correctly.

In many ways, second-party data is identical to first-party data, because it’s collected in the same way, just by a
partner. There are a few benefits to using second-party data:

• It enables you to scale by connecting with new audiences that match your own audience data.
• You can combine it with your first-party data to build improved predictive models. This is especially true when
you don’t have a lot of customers from which to develop predictive models.
• You can develop better audience insights by analyzing a more extensive audience group. Combining your first-
party data with second-party data may help you find new ways to reach your audience or find new audiences to
reach out to.

Collecting second-party data is straightforward; you get it from the partner. Once you have it, you need to manage
second-party data the same way you do first-party data, which means you need to store it securely and make it
available to your systems through the same methods. You should also validate and clean your second-party data
the same way you do your first-party data to ensure it is accurate and relevant.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 2
Third-party Data
Third-party data is data you acquire from a data aggregator. Data aggregators do not collect data directly, but obtain
it from other companies and compile it into a single dataset. As a result, the data can come from many different data
sources; some large, others small, and there’s not always a clear definition of the audience that data comes from.

Most third-party data is purchased through a DSP (demand side platform) or a DMP (data management platform) for
advertising. There are also many third-party data marketplaces, including Acxiom, Nielsen, Google, and OnAudience.
There are several reasons you might want to purchase third-party data:

• It helps you reach a broad audience for your advertising programs.

• When combined with first-party data via data enrichment, it can help you improve targeting.

Third-party data is bought and sold programmatically. The datasets are usually very large. The biggest concern with
this data is that you do not know where it came from, so you can’t ensure its reliability or accuracy. You also can’t be
sure it was collected according to privacy regulations. Therefore, when you select a third-party data provider, you
must do your research and understand where and how the data was collected.

Zero-party Data
Businesses need to understand their customers on a much more intimate level if they are going to create
differentiating personalized experiences and build brand loyalty. Zero-party data is the best way to do that.

Zero-party data is a type of first-party data. Initially coined by Forrester Research, zero-party data is defined as
“data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand, which can include preference center data,
purchase intentions, personal context, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize [them].”

Examples of zero-party data include data a consumer explicitly provides, such as communication preferences or the
types of information they want to receive. Interests consumers share with you are another example. It can also be
data obtained through gamification, such as quiz results.

Since zero-party data is given freely, you have permission to use it to personalize offers, content, and other
experiences. At a time when privacy regulations are increasing, and consumers are becoming more and more
particular about how their data is captured and used, having access to zero-party data is crucial. Because it comes
directly from the customer and tells you exactly how that customer wants to interact with your brand, zero-party
data—when connected with more traditional first-party data—can help you craft a truly personalized, connected
customer experience.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 3
Comparing the Four Types of Data

First-party Data Second-party Data Third-party Data Zero-party Data

Direct relationship with Indirect customer Indirect customer Direct relationship with
the customer relationship relationship the customer

Unknown if it’s collected

Collected with consent Collected with consent with consent (depends Collected with consent
on the data provider)

Individual data Individual data Aggregate data Individual data

High accuracy and High accuracy and Low accuracy and High accuracy and
reliability reliability reliability reliability

Shared only with Shared with many

Not shared with partners Not shared
trusted partners companies

Examples: Examples: Examples: Examples:

• Customer email • Website activity • Income • Communication
• Phone number • Social media profiles • Age preferences
• Purchase history • Customer feedback • Education • Product preferences
• Support history • Survey responses • Websites visited • Interests and
• Loyalty program info • Survey responses specific needs
• Customized account
configurations

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 4
The Obligations of Customer Data: Privacy and
Compliance
Businesses face many regulations that govern the collection, storage, usage—and even disposal—of customer
data. To avoid litigation and build long-term trust with their customer base, businesses need to stay on top of these
regulations–which can vary according to industry and geographic location. Privacy regulations like GDPR in the EU,
CCPA in California, and many others in progress, means that it is becoming increasingly important that companies
collect customer data appropriately and are transparent on how that data will be used.

The way we collect and use customer data is evolving as customers become more informed about what information
is collected, how it’s used, and their right to privacy. Consumers are tired of being bombarded with irrelevant content
and advertising. Many are choosing not to provide their data to companies because they don’t understand how their
information is being used and if it’s properly (and securely) managed. Naturally, marketers are concerned with the
privacy implications of data enrichment as a practice. But data enrichment isn’t about accessing private data.
It’s simply collecting data that is already public and combining it with existing data.

It’s rare to find a company that relishes the process of explaining their terms and conditions and privacy practices
to their prospects and customers. Most people don’t bother reading these long documents, and those that do
find their legal jargon difficult to decipher. Yet, it’s crucial for companies to provide notice to their customers about
what information is being collected, how it is used, and with whom it is shared. It can actually be an opportunity for
marketers to highlight how customer data can be used to the customer’s advantage.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 5
How to Use Your First-party Data
Unlocking the power of all your first-party data is the key to maintaining a competitive edge and delivering a
consistent experience to all your customers, across all channels. Ways in which you can use first-party data include:

Personalization of Web and Mobile Advertising

Experiences With first-party data, you can deliver better-targeted
Personalization goes far beyond putting a consumer’s ads across all your advertising platforms. For example,
first name on a web page or in an email. First-party you could pull a specific list of customers that bought
data includes what products a customer has already a specific product and target them with a set of ads
purchased from you, enabling you to provide related for accessories for that product. If you want to drive
offers when they visit the website or highlight content registrations for a product-related event, you can
related to using those products. For example, suppose a deliver targeted advertising to your customers who have
customer spends a lot of time watching videos on your purchased that product. Since you know your customers,
website. In that case, you know they like video content, their interests, and their past behavior, you can offer
and you can highlight more video content on product hyper-relevant advertisements to a receptive audience.
pages or in the resource section of your website.

Behavior Prediction Audience Insights

Predictive analytics enables you to analyze the activity Audience insights allow you to look at a group of consumers
of consumers and predict what they are most likely to with similar traits and analyze their activity with your
do next (also known as next-best action). For example, company, whether that’s content they consume, products
by analyzing website traffic patterns, you learn that a they purchase, traffic patterns on the website, or something
else. Suppose you know a consumer matches a defined
consumer typically follows a particular path through the
audience, and your analysis shows that the audience spends
website, viewing certain pages and product information,
a lot of time looking at camping equipment during the
and is therefore highly likely to buy a certain product.
summer months. With this insight, you can surface sales to
You can then surface content, products, and sales or
this audience related to products that fall into this category.
specials specific to driving that desired behavior. Audience insights also help you understand what content
is working on your website, what features of a mobile
application are most popular (or least popular), where
shopping cart abandonment happens most often, and more.
Use this information to improve experiences, delivering the
information, capabilities, products, and services that your
audience most wants.

In all these examples, the goal is always to understand the customer well enough to create the personalized
experiences they have come to expect. It’s critical to be transparent and open about what data you are collecting
and how you will use it, as well as give customers the ability to update that information where possible, or opt-out if
they change their mind.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 6
Five Best Practices for Getting the Most Value
From Your Customer Data

See the customer in

a sea of data

Deepen your customer

understanding at scale

Protect the customer

and yourself

Make teams and systems

customer-aware

Delight with connected

customer experiences

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 7
Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing
Your customer datasets are growing exponentially, with new collection methods, new formats, and new touchpoint
opportunities. You probably already know a lot about your customers’ interactions with your brand—what they’re
doing on your website and on your app, which emails they open, what they buy, and when they contact customer
service.

But here’s the thing: targeting and persuasion are tough without a lot of very accurate and specific information. With
details about a customer spread throughout dozens of martech platforms, it’s hard to get more than a fuzzy picture
of each person.

Marketers attempting to reconcile a truly accurate snapshot of the customer know the pitfalls of combining
customer records from multiple systems. This is where data enrichment can help by applying powerful identity
resolution algorithms to populate customer records with the most accurate and recent information.

With data enrichment, you can create highly detailed and accurate unified profiles of your customers by gathering
data from a variety of external sources, then combining that with your own proprietary data. Once you’ve got the
profiles right, you can use them, update them, and add new data to each profile about what each customer finds
appealing and persuasive enough to close a sale.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 8
The Data Enrichment Process
Data enrichment is a methodology that applies applying tools and processes to
that improve data quality of digital customer profiles. Many of today’s companies store their first-party customer data
in CDPs that can be accessed by other systems when needed—for marketing, sales, or support purposes.

Once a company has decided to enrich their data, here’s what the process looks like:

Data is ingested from multiple sources and appended to existing

1
individual customer data tables by integrating taxonomies, ontologies,
and third-party libraries as a part of the data processing architecture.
Duplicate records are removed. Data is then validated and tested, and
updated in a continuous process.

Once data is cleansed and stored in a central location—such as a CDP—

2
marketers and data analysts can analyze it to gain insights and to inform
campaign strategy. Is a new model of your product doing well with a
particular customer segment? Is demand higher in certain geographic
locations? Which segment of existing users is most likely to churn?

You can use powerful machine learning to build new customer

3
segments and then create advanced models with which to analyze
those segments. Segments can be activated into a variety of campaigns
designed to increase sales, boost engagement and reduce churn. With
a CDP, the process happens continuously with no need for intervention
or oversight on your part.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 9
How to Put Data Enrichment to Work

Data enrichment helps with many important business operations, such as prospect profiling, ad targeting, identifying
lookalike prospects, and message personalization. Your customer data comes from many different sources, such as
email lists and lead forms. However, issues arise when the source of that data either lacks credibility and/or enough
information to make the dataset valuable. For example, many businesses rely on lead capture to source customer
data, but it’s a delicate balance to get accurate information without turning customers away with long forms. When
customers act as your primary data source, you can end up with inconveniences like multiple phone numbers, or
even fake names and email addresses.

The real value of data enrichment, ultimately, lies in what you do with your customer data. Data enrichment helps
with key business operations, such as prospect profiling, ad targeting, identifying look-alike prospects, and message
personalization. Using powerful machine learning, you can build new customer segments and create advanced
predictive models to analyze those segments. You can pinpoint key target groups of prospects and improve
efficiencies across your campaigns.

Data enrichment tools serve the purpose of filling in the gaps left by incomplete or incorrect information. The first-
party data you already have can be matched with zero-party data, and second- and third-party data. A system for
data enrichment then appends new information to the records that are already captured and stored, pinpointing key
target groups of prospects or improving efficiencies across your campaigns.

For most companies, data enrichment isn’t something you do once and then never do again. Think of your customer
data as a snapshot in time. People move; they get married; their income levels change—the possibilities are endless.
In order to help avoid personalization failures for your company (if your information is outdated), data enrichment
processes need to run on a continuous basis.

Most larger companies, with many prospects and customers, find it most efficient to rely on a repeatable process—
making marketing programs more manageable and scalable. In order to continue learning about their customers,
and gleaning ongoing insights, a repeatable and ongoing data enrichment process is necessary.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 10
Seven Benefits of Data Enrichment

1. Segment audiences
Enriched data provides you with an opportunity to segment customers
according to new parameters. These segments can then be used to power
targeted campaigns across a wide range of channels.

2. Expand your reach

You can use data enrichment to analyze patterns, experiment with different
markets, or expand the scale of your campaigns. This can help you identify
new customers and segments for targeted personalization.

3. Turbocharge lead scoring

Data enrichment can add critical new information to existing leads to make each lead
score significantly more accurate.

4. Make new customer acquisition easy

With in-depth insights into your existing customers, you can build more
sophisticated buyer personas. You’ll improve customer acquisition strategies
because you’re always talking to the right people at the right time in their
buying journey.

5. Make personalization pay off better

Demographic and behavioral data can provide important insights that
enable you to offer personalized coupons and shopping recommendations just
when they need them. This builds customer loyalty because customers feel like
your organization really “gets” them.

6. Improve customer experience

When you’re able to identify customer hobbies, interests, likes, devices, and
channels, you can design each touchpoint and message to meet customers
exactly where they’re at in the customer journey—and deliver exceptional service.

7. Customize offers and customer experiences.

Customers don’t all use your product the same way. With data enrichment,
you can customize their experience from day one.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 11
Optimizing Your First-Party Data Strategy
Your data is only as good as your data management strategy. You need to develop the right strategy to collect, store,
manage, and share your first-party data across the company, so every department delivers consistent, relevant, and
impactful customer experiences.

The first step is to understand your requirements for customer experiences across the entire organization. Once you
know what you want to do, you can figure out what types of data you need to implement those experiences. Next,
you need a way to bring all your data together, so it can be validated, cleansed, standardized, and compiled to make
available to everyone who needs it. This includes zero-party data, but also any kind of relevant second- and third-
party data that can help complete a holistic picture of your customer.

Finally, it’s critical to continue to test and measure the impact of your overall strategy. This will never be a “set-it-and-
forget it” situation. Your customers’ needs and interests will change, so you have to keep innovating. You will always
need to think of new ways to collect and update data, stop collecting specific data, start collecting other types of
data, integrate new source systems, and more.

To optimize your first-party data strategy, follow these steps:

Define Your Goals and Objectives

The first thing you need to understand is the goals and objectives for your business. Is your goal to sell a
certain amount of a product, acquire new customers for a new product or service, improve customer support,
or build loyalty? Once you understand your goals, you can start to map out the activities and tactics you will
perform to achieve them. It’s the activities and tactics that inform the type of customer data you need.

Identify Customer Data Sources and the Type of Data Collected

Now it’s time to understand what customer data sources you have and the types of data you already collect.
First, look at the systems you currently use and document the data collected by those systems. There might
be data hidden in siloed applications or outdated solutions. A data source mapping project gives you a clear
picture of the customer data you have now and the data you still need to collect. Be sure to note if the data
was collected under any relevant privacy regulations.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 12
 Develop a Data Standardization Strategy
With customer data spread across systems in the company, you will find that similar data is often stored in
different formats, updated on different schedules, and is usually not consistent. To leverage this data in your
marketing and sales programs, it must be integrated, for consistent access across all the systems that store
it. If it’s not uniform across all systems, you risk building customer experiences on different data, leading to
frustrated and confused customers. A data standardization strategy defines how each data type should be
formatted and stored, and how it’s updated across systems. This strategy also describes how customer data is
cleaned and validated, including the tools that you can use for data cleansing.

Implement a Data Management Solution

When first-party audience data is spread across the company in different systems, it’s challenging to leverage
that data consistently across all your customer touchpoints. Implementing a tool like a customer data
platform (CDP) helps you connect all these systems and unify customer data in a central system. You can then
build a single view of the customer and leverage tactics to enrich your first-party data to improve experiences
further. Marketing, sales, customer success, and other groups can then access this centralized data to ensure
the experiences they create and deliver are all built on the same information, providing a consistent, accurate,
and relevant experience across all channels.

Data Enrichment
Using data enrichment, you can create a detailed composite of your customer by gathering additional data
and combining it with your first-party data. Once all the data is stored in one place, you can analyze it to
gain insights, inform your business strategy, and adapt as customers change the way they interact with
your brand. Using powerful machine learning, you can build new customer segments and create advanced
predictive models to analyze those segments. You can pinpoint key target groups of prospects and improve
efficiencies across your campaigns.

Include Zero-party Data

Adding a focus on zero-party data to your overall data strategy gives you unprecedented insights. Zero-party
data can be collected for customers and prospective customers alike. Access to this data type means that you
know what customers want; they’ve told you. You don’t have to infer it from less reliable data, and you don’t
have to make best guesses regarding intentions.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 13
How Treasure Data Can Help
Creating a unified customer profile using a customer data platform solution such as Treasure Data Customer
Data Cloud can supercharge your ability to use first-party data efficiently and effectively. Customer Data Cloud is a
centralized customer data foundation that can deliver value across every part of the business. It allows you to meet
your customers’ needs, understand their pain points, and build trust.

Customer Data Cloud offers powerful profile management. First, the platform combines datasets—such as customer
demographics and thousands of behavioral data points—into a single environment. Once that data is ingested
and unified into a complete customer profile, an analyst can correlate the data to look at the relationship between
email click-through and purchases. They can then view it in dashboards or export it into a data visualization tool. No
background in data science is required as the data can be easily visualized through multiple interfaces.

Once the data is unified into profiles, marketers can also build segments with particular sets of shared attributes,
such as shoppers who have abandoned their shopping cart in the past seven days. The platform can also estimate
fields for propensity models within specified parameters. Using predictive scores for such things as likelihood to buy
and a wide variety of attributes, you can immediately use a segment to activate campaigns.

Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud acts as a permanent home for all of your data and enrichment processes,
where anyone can analyze customer journeys, start to create models, and understand customer lifetime value (LTV).
Customer Data Cloud allows you to study behaviors throughout the funnel, and conduct time-series analysis to look
at customers over longer periods of time. You can easily spot patterns in any demographic or behavioral attributes,
slicing and dicing the data as needed to refine it through dynamic segmentation. Through the analysis and the study
of these behaviors, you can discover opportunities for data enrichment—where data might be missing, and where
you need to fill in the gaps.

To learn more about Customer Data Cloud, please schedule a custom demo with one of our experienced CDP
professionals today.

Learn How PMC Built Its

First-party Data Strategy

Watch Video

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 14
Conclusion
With the economy in a downturn, acquiring new customers is becoming more challenging. But retaining existing
customers and building true loyalty to a brand is an equal challenge. It only takes one bad experience for a customer
to switch to a competitor. And that experience could be as simple as repeatedly sending ads for a product they’ve
already purchased.

Conversely, consumers willingly trade their information for more relevant, personalized experiences, especially if they
trust you and want the value you are offering in exchange for that data. It then becomes critical that you act on that
data to deliver the experiences customers want and expect. That value exchange is what you need to grow loyalty
and retention.

A solid first-party data strategy based on data enrichment unlocks new opportunities for better segmentation,
personalization, and customization at every step of the customer journey. Over the long-term, better use of
first-party data helps you deeply understand who your customers are and what they expect from you. In turn,
this helps you fine-tune every campaign and communication, which means you can spend less to get better results.
And that’s a powerful combination.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy: Data Enrichment for Cookieless Marketing 15
Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud helps enterprises use all of their
customer data to improve campaign performance, achieve operational
efficiency, and drive business value with connected customer experiences.
Our suite of customer data platform solutions integrates customer data,
connects identities in unified customer profiles, applies privacy, and
makes insights and predictions available for Marketing, Service, Sales,
and Operations to drive personalized engagement and improve customer
acquisition, sales, and retention. To learn more, visit www.treasuredata.com.

Request a demo today | treasuredata.com | +1 (866) 899-5386