How Retailers Can Use Zero- and First-Party Data to Win This Holiday Season

From Amazon.com to Facebook, privacy is at the forefront of major corporations’ product and service updates. Even consumers are changing their purchasing behavior to pick devices and products that ensure their privacy is protected.

In June, Apple unveiled a series of privacy leadership initiatives, which included its Mail Privacy Protection update. With this new update, almost 40 percent of the email client market can now mask their IP addresses, and in some cases hide their email addresses, greatly limiting the amount of contextual data a retailer or marketer can glean from email recipients. This move, while in the works for years as tech companies and consumers put a greater emphasis on privacy, only highlights the inherent value of zero- and first-party data. With 91 percent of consumers wanting a personalized online shopping experience, it remains a critical strategy; it’s not only what works for marketers, it’s what consumers expect.

The update officially rolled out to Apple users in September, just in time for the mad dash of the holiday season. To create the convenient and effective marketing campaigns consumers have come to demand during the holiday season (and year round,) marketers need to pivot to zero- and first-party data and adjust their key performance indicators accordingly.

How Retailers Can Track Their Performance This Holiday Season

With the major holidays approaching, retail marketers need to quickly adjust their strategies to deliver valuable customer communications while also operating within the new realities of a privacy-first world. In addition to masking IP addresses, Apple will cache email images on its server sometime between when an email is sent and the moment it’s read, making an already imperfect metric (open) even more flawed. Marketers will need to rely on more meaningful measurements such as clicks, conversion events and revenue. Cross-channel engagement and lifetime value will skyrocket in importance as retailers gauge the success of their email campaigns as part of this new reality. Put differently, it’s no longer about driving a click, but rather focusing on the downstream value of that click.

How Zero- and First-Party Data Can Help You Win

What hasn’t changed are marketers’ priorities: hyperpersonalization, delivering the right message at the right time, and creating unified omnichannel experiences.

Now brands must think about how they surface those communications and grow their data sets. For example, retailers can leverage behavioral data to pull abandoned cart products into promotional messages or remind consumers of benefits like free shipping. Retailers can also leverage loyalty emails by asking key profile questions, showing progress to completion, and giving points for every question answered — keeping subscribers engaged while still building on their troves of data.

Buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) has become a critical part of a retail marketer's strategy over the last year and will continue to grow as consumers look for convenience first. In fact, 87 percent of shoppers begin their product search online. Instead of relying on IP addresses for store locators, brands can merge in the consumer’s preferred store on file, or the most recently shopped store to drive them to the closest brick-and-mortar location. In light of this year’s growing supply chain concerns, retailers can also use this data to keep consumers informed on product availability at their favorite store.

Omnichannel is about delivering a customer experience that's easy, relevant and personalized no matter where the consumer is engaging. Since more than 70 percent of consumers use multiple channels per transaction, retailers can use consumers’ site behaviors, like browser history or abandoned carts, to push relevant mobile messages.

While the Apple update is giving retailers little time to adjust their marketing strategies, the key to success this holiday season is data-driven personalization. Zero- and first-party data are powerful tools as retailers strive to provide the best and most seamless customer experiences across platforms.

Julio Lopez is the director of client strategy, retail practice lead at Movable Ink, a marketing software company that helps brands create custom visual content for emails and other digital marketing channels.