Google’s recent announcement that it will soon prohibit the use of third-party cookies on its Chrome web browser has highlighted the growing importance of brands optimising their own first-party customer data.
In the fast-approaching post-cookie world, marketing teams from all sectors face two broad challenges if they fail to manage customer identity:
Without identifiers, brands will lose the ability to understand their customers, which will result in a degraded customer experience and increased marketing waste.
In a nutshell, what’s the solution?
Using a combination of third-party cookies and first-party data capture strategies, marketeers can start building customer data platforms that are designed for enterprise success, fit with a single view of customers, refined segments, real-time decision making and better campaign measurement, all while exceeding regulatory requirements on security and privacy.
A recent Epsilon survey of organisations across APAC, Middle East, and Africa, is indicative of global marketing spend. It reveals that:
Enterprises are increasing turning to CDPs to combat the prevalence of data silos, unify their data sources and complete customer profiles. Companies are increasingly realising the importance of thinking about data holistically and prioritising investments that help build a strong data structure that will reveal 360-degree customer views and provide end-to-end visibility of customer journeys and experiences.
According to the Epsilon's research, unified customer profiles are named by marketing teams as one of the most important features of CDPs, preceded only by audience segmentation:
Epsilon’s research reveals that accuracy and compliance are the most desired traits of an identity resolution partner, beating cost.
An ideal identity resolution partner will, therefore, fulfil the need to balance customer privacy compliance, while delivering intuitive, personalised, and data-informed customer experiences.
They are well advised to conduct frequent assessments of their data management and customer engagement strategies to ensure customer segmentation is accurate. Where necessary they should seek the support of identity enrichment experts to construct smooth customer journeys with interactions that will boost customer lifetime values.
The bottom line
Our research shows that most marketing teams are committed to rethinking their ID management strategy in the light of Google’s cookie announcement. However, there is still much work to be done to generate and operationalise first-party customer identity data. Brands who neglect to act risk losing visibility of their customers, experiencing difficulty when personalising marketing, complications with optimising ROI and a significant increase in marketing waste.