The post-cookie field guide for modern marketers

Even though cookies are gradually being phased out within the next two years, there’s still a glimmer of hope for marketers on the horizon.

The end of cookies doesn’t have to mean the end of customer insights. As marketers, it’s essential to understand that if the proper steps aren’t taken when the shift away from cookies accelerates, many online and digital marketing professionals will likely struggle with increasingly hazy customer views.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to get ahead of this transition and embrace alternative methods to user ID tracking, identity resolution, and insights.

1. Embrace the shift to contextual marketing and advertising

According to a 2022 Report from Experian, 84% of businesses today say that recognizing their customers is very or extremely important to their business. However, the most surprising bit of data comes from consumers themselves; only one-third of surveyed consumers were confident that businesses could repeatedly recognize them online, indicating a serious identification problem for marketers who rely on this data the most.

As the shift away from cookies continues, it’s important to embrace this shift and begin implementing contextual marketing and advertising strategies on a consistent basis. When we refer to contextual advertising and marketing, we mean showing visitors and prospects topics and keywords that are highly relevant to the products and services we offer.

Without cookies, relevance will become critical in maintaining top-performing marketing campaigns and having the ability to segment different groups of customers based on their topical interests and past purchases.

2. Focus on establishing solid customer relationships

Customer relationships will become increasingly important in a cookie-free world, something that companies and their marketing teams need to begin implementing as soon as possible. It’s especially true in an uncertain economy. A solution can be found in 1:1 email marketing, improved segmentation, and personalized outreach.

An excellent way to start establishing a solid relationship with your customers is to implement an email marketing and segmentation plan. With email marketing, you can consistently send your customers updates about your latest products or services, educational content, and entertaining content, and even ask them opinions or questions about what they think about your current product offerings. Furthermore, you can segment customers based on the emails they interact with or the past purchases they’ve made. Using these segments, you can send them even more relevant offers, increasing the chance that they engage with you and possibly even purchase what you recommend.

3. Pursue an omnichannel approach and implement automation

A post-cookie world means tracking customers across the web will become increasingly difficult – something that can be solved by going where your customers are.

An omnichannel approach to marketing means that you publish content and engage with prospects on every channel they hang out on. This could be social media platforms, video platforms, websites, or even online forums.

By meeting your customers where they are, you’ll be much more likely to get them to engage with your business and become future customers or repeat customers in the future.

Solving the cookie problem with first-party data

One of the primary solutions to the “cookie problem” is first-party data. If you aren’t already familiar with first-party data, this is when an advertising platform or service where you typically advertise or place your marketing campaigns sends you information about your customers through a back-channel rather than information stored in cookies.

In the past, customer information persisted in a cookie which could then be tracked and read across multiple sites or online locations. First-party data allows cookies to be circumvented completely and gives your business the ability to track customers with far greater precision and accuracy.

4 steps to first-party data-driven success

If your company wants to be successful with first-party data, there are a few points you should be aware of and follow. We’re going to cover these points and show you how to succeed with their implementations.

1. Take stock of your tech stack

To be successful with first-party data, you first need to ensure that you have the technical capabilities required to implement this type of data transfer into your existing workflows or processes. Before you can proceed, you’ll need to implement the technology required for first-party data enablement.

2. Identify key goals

Before starting any campaign with first-party data, take the time to identify key goals and what KPIs you’re seeking to achieve or improve upon. When you have a defined goal, the rest of the process becomes increasingly easier.

3. Invest in technology

Once you’ve taken stock of your technology stack and potentially made improvements in the previous steps, it’s worth investing in further technology to increase your data collection and user identification capabilities. Technology never stands still, and it’s critical that you stay ahead of the competition and up to date with new improvements and innovations.

4. Leverage first-party insights for personalization and rich snippets

If your business leverages first-party insights for personalization and rich snippets, you’ll be able to increase the probability that your prospects or visitors will engage with your marketing campaigns and result in conversions. Rather than just collecting your first-party data and identifying customers, it’s important to use this data in new and creative ways to make the most of your marketing campaigns.

Level up your marketing with Lytics

In a world where anonymous visitors account for the vast majority of website visits, it’s time to make the most of accurate ID resolution and let poorly performing or wasted marketing budgets go the way of the cookie – out the door.

With Lytics, marketers can use graph databases and deterministic first-party data to resolve user identities and create a better customer experience from the get-go.

Contact the Lytics team today to learn more about first-party data and precise user identity tracking in an online world without cookies.