Marketers rely on customer data to make their campaign decisions—but there’s a ton of data out there across channels. 

That said, one kind of data is losing its usefulness: third-party data. With third-party cookies being phased out in 2023 and customers desiring security around their data, first-party data is the way to go.

But first-party data’s benefits go beyond customer privacy concerns and compliance. Here are five ways this type of data optimizes your marketing.

1. Build better target audiences and behavioral segments

The key to successful marketing is knowing your audience. Brands need to connect with customers through relevant messaging and personalized digital experiences.

First-party data is captured directly from visitors’ online behaviors and engagement with your brand. Directly collecting your user’s data makes it more accurate and predictive, so you can target audiences and segment them by their interests.

Ultimately, this boosts your return on ad spend(ROAS) on any ad channel you use to reach customers. Your customers are more likely to buy, earning you more revenue for every dollar spent on ads.

Using AI and machine learning, Lytics stitches the data you gather across all your marketing channels into customer profiles for better campaign targeting across numerous ad platforms, from Facebook to Amazon to Taboola.

Additionally, Lytics uses advanced behavioral scoring techniques to calculate propensity to buy. The platform continually gathers customer data in real-time so you can decide the next best experience for each customer depending on where they are in their journey. With this insight, you can split your customers into various segments to target them with different campaigns and marketing messages.

Lytics also packs in several out-of-the-box behavioral audience breakdowns since understanding the Lytics Scores involved in building these audiences does require some understanding of the underlying data science.

You can fuel revenue by targeting new audiences likely to buy with Lytics’ audience builder. Using existing customer data, you identify characteristics and behaviors of user-profiles with a high probability to convert. Lytics will give them a unique score. With that score, you can build a lookalike model based on the same characteristics of customers with a higher chance of converting or brand loyalty. As a result, you’ll boost your ROAS even further.

2. Personalize content recommendations

Some customers aren’t ready to buy just yet. Others have bought already but need a reason to remain loyal to your company. That’s where good content relevant to each customer’s needs and interests comes in.

The key here is relevancy.

Consumers interact with your brand on different devices and channels. But they expect a consistent digital experience. A big challenge brands face is unifying data from different sources such as email and web pages to create a single profile so they can seamlessly deliver personalized content.

Additionally, different people prefer different content formats. Some like reading blog posts. Others like video content. Still, others may prefer downloadable eBooks or guides.

To top things off, your content is competing with a record amount of content from other places, whether that’s competitors, Netflix documentaries, or even random YouTube videos.

You have to nail all the above elements to maximize your chances of capturing and holding your customers’ attention. 

Fortunately, if you’re gathering first-party data, you already know what kinds of things they’re looking for. From there, it’s quantifying the chance users will engage with your content—something we call content affinity.

The Lytics platform has a built-in content affinity engine that handles this on autopilot. This engine crawls your content pages and extracts their metadata. Using natural language processing, the engine understands what topics each piece of content covers, then serves up that content to users based on their past interactions with your content.

It ends up working like Netflix, but for content:

Say a customer engages with a blog post on a specific topic, providing Lytics valuable data for future content recommendations. Lytics then serves them up another blog post covering a similar topic—perhaps further along the customer journey—the user is likely to interact with based on the data it gathers.

Here’s what one of our clients, Industry Dive, says about the Lytics content engine:

“Before Lytics, we struggled to get a clear picture of our readers. Now we have much better customer intelligence about how people are engaging with our content and can use that information to drive smarter content recommendations and better experiences.” – Robin Re, VP of Marketing at Industry Dive

3. Personalize product recommendations

A Mckinsey report shows that up to 35% of Amazon’s total revenue comes from product recommendations. You don’t have to be a behemoth retailer to leverage your first-party data with product recommendations. With Lytics, you can offer personalized product recommendations on your website and email campaigns to boost clickthroughs and increase sales.

Just as Lytics automatically ingests your content and makes it available for content recommendations, Lytics automatically ingests your product catalog to make it available for product recommendations. 

One way Lytics does this is by analyzing past customer purchases to recommend more products to those same customers. If a new customer doesn’t have purchase history data,  Lytics uses content families to make personalized recommendations. The platform curates dynamic collections of content based on several factors, such as:

• Author
• Affinity
• Date published
• URL

. . . and much more.

Lytics can do two things with content families: keep the customer engaged with the best content and use data regarding the customer’s interactions to make personalized product recommendations. Here are a couple of use cases for product recommendations:

• Adjacent products: If a customer adds a dress to their shopping cart, recommend accessories — like a bag — or recommend similar dress styles. With the Lytics platform you could recommend a product collection of just bags instead of your entire catalog from your Shopify store.
• Promotions: Seasonal promotions will determine the type of products to recommend — like coats in the Winter or grills in the Summer. In these cases, you can create a collection of Summer Products in Lytics to ensure relevant recommendations for your current campaign.

Product personalization with Lytics can extend across all your channels. You can use Lytics Website Personalization to recommend products to customers on your site. Comparis added a display that shows personalized product offerings on their homepage, achieving a boost in clickthroughs of over 80% and revenue per visitor of over 10%.

In addition to website experiences, you can also send product recommendations straight to customers’ email inboxes, thanks to Lytics’ integration with the email service provider Iterable.

Whether it’s content or product recommendations, you don’t need to know how to code or hire a developer to do it. Customizing and personalizing your customer journey all happens in the intuitive Lytics interface.

Personalized content plus personalized product recommendations equal more sales and increased customer loyalty.

4. Create holistic customer experiences across platforms—increase CLV

With first-party data in hand, you can unify the customer experience across every channel you use. Lytics facilitates this once again with the audience builder tool. 

As we alluded to earlier, Lytics connects to various marketing channels—ad platforms, email service providers, your website, mobile apps, and more. That way, you can create a seamless customer experience across each channel you use, keeping your messaging aligned.

For example, if you’re offering a customer a personalized coupon, you can make sure it looks the same regardless of whether they access it on the website, on your mobile app, or even in their email inbox.

The audience builder also ensures your customer has a seamless experience regardless of their “status” within your company—as in what they’ve bought, if they have a renewal soon, whether or not they’re on your list, and so on.

For example, you can move users to a different audience once they subscribe to your email list, boosting email engagement. Aside from driving revenue and profits, increased email engagement helps your deliverability. You’re less likely to end up in the spam box or trash folder, while, at the same time, you make your customers eager to get your emails.

Building an audience with Lytics also fuels cross-selling, upselling, and renewal opportunities—generating more revenue from your existing customers and increasing CLV. If a customer is due for renewal soon, you can send them automated reminders on any platform and even upsell them to a higher tier of your product.

Or, perhaps they viewed a product on your website but didn’t buy it. Using Lytics, you can identify and engage with these abandoned browsers or carts and capture more sales.

5. Reduce time to launch new data-driven campaigns

Concepting, planning, executing, and analyzing a campaign is a costly and time-intensive endeavor. First-party data can make things easier by helping you send relevant messages to your customers based on their interests.

As we’ve discussed, a customer data platform such as Lytics sifts through all this first-party data around the clock to create affinities—quantitative measurements of your customers’ interests. 

From there, it can deliver timely, personalized, and relevant communications to your customers via web or email. 

For example, global live events leader AEG Presents used Lytics Decision Engine to cut their ad campaign time to market by 80%. AEG Presents also improved their email launch times by 40% using fan’s behavioral insights like past ticket purchases and artist interests to segment audiences. As a result, AEG’s Director of CRM Alejandro Arevalo is able to increase his budget in other marketing activities. Arevalo says,

“We reduce the reach and increase the relevance for each concert and event we market, filling more seats at lower cost, and freeing up ad dollars for higher-cost channels that hit scale.” 

Grow your business faster with first-party data

First-party data is rich with marketing insights if you know what to look for. Gathering data straight from your customer is helpful for building accurate audiences for which you can personalize content and product recommendations to increase sales. 

Plus, you can cut your ad spend and launch data-driven campaigns much faster while unifying your brand experience across all your channels.

Of course, doing all this with your data still takes time to dig out insights and implement them—but not with a customer data platform like Lytics.

Learn how Lytics Decision Engine can optimize your campaigns in 30 days.