2023 Customer Data Strategies

Keeping the first-party data in the tool that collected it isn’t enough. To enable the personalized marketing experiences expected by consumers, you need to be able to analyze and take action on your first-party data.

To do so, organizations are now turning to their data warehouse to act as the store of all their customer data. Once data has been collected with tools like Fivetran and Snowplow, it is stored in the data warehouse, modeled, and activated for your many business applications with Hightouch to power targeted advertising campaigns and personalization. This architecture has been coined as the Modern or Composable CDP.

Define and Implement Data Governance and Privacy Policies

Now that you have the means to collect and store data and take action, you need to establish clear governance and privacy policies for the first-party data, including how the data will be collected, stored, used, and shared. Clear data governance will ensure that the data is used ethically and complies with relevant laws and regulations.

Develop and Implement Data-Driven Initiatives

As mentioned before, now that you have the data centralized, it's ready for action. Hightouch uses Reverse ETL to take your centralized data and send it downstream to the tooling where the action takes place.

With the goals and objectives that you set at the beginning, you can start making initiatives such as targeted marketing campaigns, personalized customer experiences, and new lookalike audiences.

Monitor and Adjust the Strategy

Finally, you should regularly monitor and evaluate your first-party data strategy to ensure it achieves your goals and objectives. You should also be prepared to adjust the strategy to reflect changes in the business environment and customer needs. By following these steps, you can build a successful and effective first-party data strategy.

Leveraging Second-Party Data

Thankfully, you don’t have to rely solely on first-party as part of your data strategy. You can utilize second-party data. In the definition of second-party data, you share data with another organization, creating a beneficial relationship. Both companies can then access further data they otherwise wouldn’t have, allowing both to enrich their own first-party data and, with analysis, discover insights that otherwise would have been concealed.

Using a data clean room is the perfect way to leverage second-party data without privacy concerns.

A data clean room is a secure and controlled environment where two parties can share their first-party data. The data in the data clean room is then matched using commonly hashed identifiers like email addresses, phone numbers, or user IDs. Once the datasets are joined, both parties can extract value through profile enrichment, audience analysis, attribution, and activation.

Third-Party Data

Most often, organizations find that first-party and second-party data provide the most value when it comes to defining their data strategies, but this shouldn’t let you rule out third-party data.

Third-party data might not be as detailed as the customer data you have, but what it lacks in detail, you gain in scale. Typically you can access large datasets of third-party data, which can really help enrich the customer data you already have.

You can assess third-party datasets from marketplaces such as Snowflake marketplace. Snowflake marketplace has a range of different third-party data, both free and paid, such as government data, financial data, weather data, and demographical data.

The benefit of using the Snowflake Marketplace is if you have a Snowflake Data Cloud, you are a few clicks away from getting access to those datasets directly within your Snowflake Data Cloud, where you can start to analyze them.

Getting Started

As time goes by, it’s clear that a great data strategy is vital for the success of your business. If you’re not thinking about how to start collecting first-party data, you’re leaving the advantage to your competitors.

If you need more information on how to get started with the best option to implement your data strategy, download the Composable CDP ebook.