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Originally written & published @bluelinerny

1st Party Data – The Key to Opportunity Is Already In Your “Hands”

 

You may not realize it, but you may be growing your business by harnessing the power of the data that you already have in your CRM.  This is what we call 1st Party Data.

While we hear a lot about 2nd and 3rd party data nowadays, what about 1st party data? What is it? Well, it’s the data that belongs to you. The more of it you have –  and the more you know about each individual – the more powerful the rest of the process will be.

You can utilize your preexisting 1st party data even more effectively from referrals, upsells, and new customers to increase your profits. Here are some helpful terms to keep in mind:

1)    Onboarding – a new term that refers to exporting your data and then importing it into a data management platform that can model your best customers, enabling you to learn more about them by appending 2nd and 3rd party data.

2) Look-A-Likes – this means using data modeling to create the closest, unique look-a-likes of your best customers…the top 20%! This is a sensitive process for many reasons. First, it is paramount to target and then omit the data that’s not relevant to your goals or business services/products. Second, you must know what data to retrieve.  Third, locating sources to retrieve that data is essential. Web behavior, demographics, lifestyle, and household and transactional data that is appended to your file will enable you to determine consumer intent, demand, desire and the reasons consumers share positive reviews.  As a benefit, this process will also directly and indirectly refer you new customers.

3) Actionable Data – that’s what look-a-likes and onboarding create when you’re 1st party data is in the right hands, with the right minds and aligned with the right tools.

The goal is always twofold: to know more about your customer than you could have ever imagined and to use your  data effectively.

Whether you’re attempting to harness 1st party data, 2nd party data, or 3rd party data, the goal is always business growth. Here are some great ways to achieve that growth:

1. Referral Program – This straightforward method can start by creating one-off incentives and to see what quick and varied results that fluctuate in relation to different types of customers.

2. Upsell/Cross-Sell – Finding the correlations between customer data and the other products/services your company provides (or other products/services that your company can partner with other companies to provide).  This improves your customers’ access to your products/services.

3. Prospecting – what methods are working the best: PPC, SEO, Email, Mobile, Direct Mail, TV, Radio, etc all need to be examined.

4. Mobile  – I will not put stats here; we all know the smartphone has changed how we communicate with and market to our customers. The more value we can deliver via mobile devices, the better.

5. Retention – This is a reverse model at first, looking at lost customers and opportunities and analyzing what went wrong and how we can fix it. The important question to always keep in mind, ”What can I do for you to make you happier?”

6. Loyalty – This comes from first addressing any retention issues, as noted in #5, and using analysis from the most loyal customers to determine what needs to be consistently provided via communications, content, offers, and customer service.

7. Personalized content – Content is exceedingly important, and the more personalized it is, the better. I remember when PURLS (Personalized URLS) were introduced to direct mail. The result: an instant lift in response by a minimum of a 0.50%.

8. Alerts  – Alerts allow you to inform your customers about improvements in your products and services. It’s important to find the best method to communicate your message, as an alert is helpful in re-targeting consumers who have not yet transacted.

9. Incentives – everyone likes a bonus, look at the cosmetics business for example whether via  web or in-store purchases samples are provided…leads to new purchases and data on what samples are performing better than others to convert into  sales of new products or sale items.    As mention in #1 this will also over time show what incentives/offers  customers like the best and can now be consistent via a Referral Program .

10. Birthday Wishes and Gifts  – A birthday wish is always appreciated especially when it comes from a non-expected source, a birthday gift…well who doesn’t want one of those.

These are the options. Now it’s time to decide what first steps are the best for your business.This process works most smoothly if it involves the right people and the right teams, depending on the size of your organization.

For example let’s say you own two local pizzerias, the counter staff, waiting staff, and delivery staff are the key to the customer experiences and what may be missing from making your customers happier!

Now let’s say you are the CMO of Domino’s with more staff in the three areas…the difference is that you have a lot more staff to communicate and as a result, it would be optimal to set up a simple survey system that lets the employees choose whether or not they want to be anonymous in the system. This garners the most honest data possible.

Domino’s showed the power of analyzing and making data actionable with their revamped online ordering system that allowed customers to watch their orders from start to delivery online.  This is the quintessential system with all the bells and whistles you could think of that creates internal efficiency via transparency.

So to summarize, we hear the following terms quite often these days:

BIG DATA

2nd Party Data

3rd Party Data

However, it all starts with 1st Party Data and the Data in your CRM, your web logs, your POS, etc. but as mentioned above in the two examples of a local pizzeria to a major chain your employees that are the stakeholders in deploying your customer service strategy can provide amazing “hands on” experiential data.