Why You Need To Start Using Zero Party Data

Since day dot marketers have been talking (badly) about making comms feel more personable.

You only need to Google ‘personalisation’ to be hit with 1000’s of articles repeating the same generic advice about using merge tags to input first names and segmenting customers by location. None of these will move the needle.

But there are two things which will: segmenting by interests and purchasing intent. Which is where zero party data comes in.

Unlike third party data which relies on external sites to capture customer info, the zero kind gives you complete ownership of what you collect and how you use it. And it can be game-changing for personalising comms.

Here's how to make the most of it for pre and post purchase parts of the lifecycle.

Pre-Purchase

Go onto most websites and you’ll be hit with a generic, off putting pop up which hits you with ‘Get 30% Off’. Apart from being irritating, it also misses a massive opportunity to collect info on people. Here’s how to change that.

Before asking for emails/phone numbers, ask an interest or purchasing intent based question. Here are a couple of examples for you…

Interest Based:

Question: What type of skin do you have? Answers: Oily - Dry - Red

Purchasing Intent Based:

Question: Are you buying flowers a) As a gift b) For Yourself

Why are these so good? a) They reiterate to the prospect they’ve landed on the right site (if you get Q&A correct) and b) you can send this data over to your ESP, attach it to customer profiles, and send messages based on their answers.

Now, because this is it’s worth testing different strategies here. Some things to think about:

- The number of stages/questions you ask (all our tests show a big, big drop off point post 3rd stage - exceptions being one SKU stores and/traffic coming from a high intent source)

- The types of questions you ask

- When you introduce the offer

- When you introduce SMS

The next step is to split off your welcome series depending on people’s answers. The more you personalise the email the better your results. But if time/resources are an issue, even using a different image and/or header will yield better results.

Post-Purchase

When people talk about zero party data, they often mean pre-purchase, but it’s also an amazing way to improve your customer comms.

Why? Getting a clear understanding of who your customers are is vital if you want to create a comms set up that really hits home. There’s nothing like a perfectly crafted email to make a newbie feel all warm a fuzzy - likewise, a badly worded, badly timed message can put people off you brand.

So how do you do it? Two main ways:

1. Send out surveys from 3rd party sites

Asking questions about everything and anything is the perfect way to make sure your comms are on the right track. And there are a lot of different platforms to do this on (long gone are the days where Survey Monkey ruled the roost). For Klaivyo users, we tend to use Typeform, as it allows for advanced customisation (colours, images, branding etc.) and integrates well.

All you’ve got to do is make sure you send the data back to your CRM (or, if you don’t have an integration set up for this, do it manually).

2. Ask questions in the email/SMS message

If you only want one or two answers you can ask them in an email and use someone’s click as proof. When it comes to adding this info to a customer’s profile, depending on your ESP, this will most likely involve setting up a separate flow and tagging people based on their answers.

Once you’ve done either of these options, you can segment emails based on people’s answers. And the best thing about it? You can automate the whole process and send follow-ups to non-answers.

Personalised emails on autopilot. Perfect.