Faced with the progressive withdrawal of third-party cookies, the digital marketing landscape is in the process of slowly remaking itself, refocusing decision-makers’ attention on customer retention.
This technological change, and the evolution of the legal context surrounding the protection of personal data, makes the creation of an adapted proprietary data strategy even more necessary than before. This strategy aims to reduce organizations’ dependence on media giants by improving the performance of their own channels.
In this context, the success of marketing strategies now more than ever before relies on the ability of companies to understand customer data and generate insights that will enable them to target audiences and prioritized initiatives based on their objectives.
This was the topic discussed by two Adviso specialists, Roger Kamena, lead data scientist and head of innovation, research and development, and Maxime Philippon, CRM Strategist, during a webinar held last month.
Here’s a summary of the main points of this presentation. Note also that the webinar remains available for viewing online.
Watch the webinar (in French only)
With the paradigm shift that led to the withdrawal of third-party cookies, the use of proprietary data (zero-, first- and second-party data) will become indispensable to businesses in 2023, since these are the data that will enable adequate targeting of their audiences and personalization of their communications.
Testifying to this interest in the acquisition of proprietary data is this 2020 study by the Winterberry Group, which reveals that 60 percent of Canadian businesses plan to invest in the use of proprietary data to adapt to future changes.
With email addresses being the main identifier used to access online services, customer relationship management (CRM) and its primary channel, email, will become indispensable in a post-cookie world. Companies that excel at retaining their audiences will stand apart from the competition when it comes to customer value-creation.
What’s more, many surveys conducted amongst digital marketing professionals in North America and Europe highlight the importance of companies investing in their email channel in order to adapt to the disappearance of third-party cookies.
The effectiveness of targeting initiatives depends on segmentation. While it makes sense to personalize communications based on the diversity of customer profiles, prioritizing these initiatives without the necessary data is like taking a leap of faith, with all its attendant unforeseeable results.
To benefit from emailing, which can generate a return on investment of up to 40X, segmentation and personalization are indispensable.
With email, for example, segmentation and personalization of initiatives enable higher generation of revenue by recipient. Basically, it promotes the achievement of higher rates of engagement and conversion, as well as the more efficient delivery of email (with lower spam and unsubscribe rates).
To address a correctly positioned message at the right time that is likely to motivate purchase (or any other engagement), identifying and defining segments are prerequisites.
To build efficient segmenting based on data, businesses must develop a continual iterative process that follows these main steps:
The process of centralizing, unifying and delivering data may represent an operational challenge for companies without access to marketing technologies that enable a 360 view of their customers.
These operations may be realized using reverse ETL (which stands for “extract, transform, load”), a process enabling the copying of data to a central warehouse so that they can be synchronized with an operational data system (ERP, CRM, media platforms, etc.).
To learn more about this topic, take a look at our article about reverse ETL.
To fulfill the needs of teams in marketing (and B2B sales), segmentation models must take into consideration the company’s objectives as well as the data available on customers. For this reason, every organization will have a unique data segmentation model.
A number of models have demonstrated the effectiveness at maximizing customer retention. To maximize the utility of a segmentation strategy, it’s important to combine a variety of models and adapt them to the needs of each business.
Here are a few examples of segmentation models:
Segmentation strategies are unique to every business. It’s important to remember that your evolving thoughts on the matter must allow for the maximization of financial and human resource investments by companies.
All that remains is to (re)discover the model that works best for you, one that will allow you to forge lasting relationships with your communities in this post-cookie era, where customer retention has emerged as a determining factor in obtaining a competitive advantage.
To learn more about the benefits of successful segmentation, the different aspects of various models and the execution process for achieving customized segmentation for your business, watch our free video of the webinar “Improving customer retention through email marketing” (in French only).