Struggling with GDPR and third-party data bans? Explore how zero-party data and gamification can revolutionize your marketing strategy, helping you collect valuable customer insights while building trust and engagement.
In an increasingly cookie-less world, with GDPR data protection regulations and a move to ban third-party data collection, marketers need new methods to collect information from their target audience.
Zero-party data is the type of data capture that a user gives freely. The clearest example of that is entering an email address into a website form to subscribe to a newsletter. It’s data that you as the brand own and can use to tailor your marketing strategy and deliver a personalized experience for users.
But a simple email newsletter form isn’t the only way to ask users for their valuable data. People are increasingly hesitant to give over data and know just how valuable it is to brands. Now, brands need to work harder to incentivize users to part with it – and one way to do that is by leveraging marketing gamification.
Zero-party data is a crucial ingredient to help you improve and tailor your marketing strategy so you reach the right people.
When you learn more about who your customers are, you can make data-driven business and marketing decisions that deliver what customers want and expect from you.
Not only does it help you reach your target audience, but it also helps you personalize any communications you have with them via email marketing or paid ads or any other online marketing channels you might be utilizing. This can go a long way toward building customer trust, engagement, and sales.
The most popular method is to collect information through a form. But getting your potential customers to fill in a form about themselves can be tricky. They often need an incentive, like playing a fun game, participating in a competition, a free download, a discount, or exclusive offers in exchange for their information.
Another way to collect zero-party data – still very underutilized – is to use metrics from gamification campaigns. With Playable, you can collect metrics from games like personality tests, polls, and surveys to gather insights about your target customers to tailor your marketing strategies.
You can pair up both methods for collecting data, for example, use a poll to collect insights about customer needs and then follow that up with a registration form for a discount.
But, the most important thing before thinking about HOW, is to think about WHAT! What do you need to know about your audience? Identify each data point and then put a strategy in place to collect these data points. Remember the right strategy will include multiple campaigns that each aim at collecting a different data point.
Let’s say you run a wine company, and you are looking into collecting new marketing permissions and getting to know your audience better in terms of wine preferences as well as wanting to know the birthday of your audience to send them a birthday gift and boost customer loyalty.
You could follow these steps to collect zero-party data:
Get marketing permissions via a paid social media ad sharing a new competition or luck game.
Collect preferences from subscribers by inviting them to take a personality test to find out their wine preferences via email. Add an incentive to your email subject line that catches attention like a discount.
Collect more data like birthdays to share special offers or discounts for customers. You could send a follow-up email with a new campaign such as a online wheel of fortune game with the chance to win a discount and ask users to input their birth date. When it’s their birthday, offer another discount to encourage a sale.
Use the collected zero-party data to drive sales by reaching out with personal recommendations from the personality test. For example, if a user prefers sparkling wine, send an email following up letting them know about sparkling wine offers.
By planning a strategy like this and providing clear incentives to your audience, you can collect the right data you need and use it to prompt people to become loyal customers.
Want to learn more about these tips? Take a look at our article on data enrichment best practices!
Zero-party data is an invaluable tool to use in your marketing strategy. The more you know about your customers, the better you can serve their needs and tailor your strategies, offerings, and customer interactions to what they need.
For more information, download our guide on mastering zero-party data, which is packed with insights and strategies to help you understand the different types of data, how to collect it, and what to do with your data to drive results.