E-commerce and brand managers will soon have to rely on first-party data — the data you collect directly from customers yourself.

Not just to stay compliant with privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, but because a first-party data strategy can enhance your revenue, provide value internally for your business, give you better customer data, and ultimately help you build a relationship with your customers. 

Chapters:

1. What is first-party data?
2. How to use first-party data
3. How to collect first-party data
4. First-party data e-commerce strategies
5. Examples of first-party data strategy in action
6. Maximize your first-party data

What is first-party data?

First-party data is customer information and data that you collect yourself — directly from your audience. Nobody else owns this data except you. It cannot legally be sold or shared, it doesn’t follow users outside of your website, and it’s made up of two different “types” of data.

1. Declarative data

Declarative data is the data that your audience self-reports, such as their name, email address, location, and more. It doesn’t just have to be rote demographic data, however. It can also be data such as their income level, the number of pets they have, and more. It’s especially useful for understanding consumer behavior and finding out what triggers buying behaviors.

Example: A customer informs you that they have pets: two cats. This information comes directly from the customer.

2. Behavioral data

Behavioral data is data based on the activities of a site visitor. This type of data is often collected via the use of a first-party cookie or tracking pixel. This cookie is unique to your site and your site only, and never follows the user across the web. Tools like Google Analytics are commonly used in conjunction with behavioral data to analyze site performance and user behavior, giving marketers and managers granular details about what parts of their website are performing and what parts need improvement.

Example: A customer likes several cat pictures and pages on Instagram but does not explicitly tell a business they have any cats. It’s up to the business to make that inference.

How to use first-party data

Before you start on your first-party data strategy, there’s some housekeeping and tactics that will need looking at first.

Align with stakeholders on what first-party data you’ll collect

First, you need to align with stakeholders on what first-party data you’ll collect. This way, you have buy-in from everyone on your team, and everyone’s needs are equally represented. Because this first-party data will become your only data source, it needs to be as robust as possible, while still keeping within regulations.

Aligning with stakeholders requires some prep on your end. Before meeting with the different stakeholders in your organization (managers, executives, legal, IT), come up with a list of metrics you’d like to track. Some common ones include sales interactions, emails, phone numbers, site behavior, purchase history, and common demographic information, such as age and location.

Next, you’re going to want to run this list of possible data points by your stakeholders, justifying why you want to collect each data type and how you’re going to do it, so there isn’t any friction between departments over what data is collected and how it’s being used.

Update to the latest Google Analytics data model

Google Analytics version 4 includes new ways to segment and track users, is GDPR and CCPA compliant, and is built to take on first-party data by utilizing AI to fill in data gaps that third-party data would ordinarily have filled.

The ever-popular analytics tool specifically addresses issues with the retirement of third-party data and inconsistencies in cookie consent options by using AI to fill in missing customer information, meaning you can still collect and analyze user data even if you don’t have a complete user profile.

Additionally, Google Analytics 4 helps you easily find and delete user data upon request, which means you can stay compliant with “the right to be forgotten.”

Looking to get started with a site implementation? Google has some valuable resources and a step-by-step guide to implementing Google Analytics 4 properties on your website’s analytics property.

Build new personas and segment your audiences based on first-party data

Because you’ll be using first-party data moving forward, you need your personas to be as accurate as possible; working with inaccurate or baseless buyer personas is a huge waste of time and resources. But you can’t keep relying on third-party data to build your buyer personas. Ask any marketer how accurate their third-party data is, and you’ll probably get back a “not very.” Survey data collected by Deloitte unearthed some startling facts about first-party data’s ugly cousin:

• Over 66% of respondents said that the third-party data about them was zero to 50% accurate as a whole
• Around 71% of all third-party data was deemed inaccurate after a review by survey respondents

As part of a first-party data strategy, personas based on first-party data are crucial to providing a personalized e-commerce marketing and advertising experience. Buyer personas based on first-party data have a number of benefits, including a 10–20% reduction in marketing and sales costs, a 20% higher customer satisfaction rate, a 10–15% increase in sales conversion rates, and a 20–30% increase in employee engagement.

Start by leveraging all the first-party data you can to build your personas. This might include data like location, age, purchase history, audience research, CRM data, or user account information, all of which can be consensually collected without the use of third-party data or cookies.

How you divide your customer base is entirely up to you. But some common shopper segmentations include: 

• Shared characteristics and behaviors
• Common interests
• Demographics
• Region
• Purchase or browser history
• Frequent shoppers or buyers
• New customers
• Recent cart abandoners
• Browsing or buying habits
• Engagement levels
• Average AOV (e.g. big spenders, sales hunters, etc.)

Build a data governance strategy that keeps you compliant

Data governance is the process of ingesting data and managing that data’s lifecycle from creation to storage to deletion.

Both the GDPR and CCPA have clauses that allow users to request their data be deleted — “the right to be forgotten” and “right to erasure.” Data governance strategies play a huge role in both of these clauses — you can’t comply with a data deletion request if you can’t easily find and manage that data in the first place.

Failure to govern your first-party and third-party data in accordance with regulations could put you in regulatory hot water. The GDPR imposes stiff fines for companies who fail to comply. Amazon was hit with a massive $887 million fine for not complying with the GDPR.

Failure to govern your first-party and third-party data in accordance with regulations could put you in regulatory hot water.

Building a data governance strategy requires you to consult with two teams: legal and IT. Legal will be able to tell you what needs to happen to the data you have from a governance standpoint. IT will be able to help you find a solution to managing your data.

Start collecting first-party cookies in place of third-party cookies

You may have seen those popups on some websites asking to place cookies on your browsers while also offering you the chance to opt in or out of data collection. That’s how first-party cookies are placed in a way that’s compliant with regulations — and it’s a crucial aspect of your first-party data strategy. There’s a few key ideas at work here:

• Customer information gathered from first-party cookies is gathered consensually
• This data is being used on this site and only on this site and will not follow the user across the web

Ordinarily, companies use third-party cookies — cookies that have been placed on users’ browsers by third-party sites — to gather customer data. These cookies are placed without the consent of the user, directly violating the GDPR and CCPA, which prohibit the non-consensual placement of third-party cookies. How do you start collecting first-party cookies?

You can do this manually by consulting the different teams in your org about how you’re going to implement a first-party cookie strategy. Design the language and copy, then take your plan to legal, and finally to IT, who can implement a first-party cookie solution. 

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, services like Cookiebot can help you set up collection popups. Larger organizations can rely on tools like OneTrust to do this at scale.

Value exchange

Value exchange is a tactic used to entice customers into exchanging their personal information for high-value content or services (you might recognize this as giving your email in exchange for an e-book or a discount from a company). Value exchange is consensual data collection that’s compliant with the GDPR and CCPA, and it’s mutually beneficial to your business and the customer. It’s a win-win that provides some great, long-term benefits.

Common value exchange tactics are to offer discounts, which help you gather emails, and loyalty programs, which can improve your bottom line and your brand’s relationship with your customers. You get their data and earn their trust, and the customer gets a valuable piece of content, item, or service.

Additionally, it represents your commitment to user privacy and data transparency. You’re being upfront about what you’re collecting, why, and what the customer is getting in exchange for their data. This type of approach is great for building goodwill with your customers and helps you stay compliant with regulations.

How to collect first-party data

Collecting first-party data starts with building users’ trust, gaining their consent, engaging the customers in ways that prompt them to volunteer information, and having the right tech to gather first-party data in place. Here are some tried-and-true methods of collecting first-party data:

Be transparent about the data you do collect. Customer trust is built on transparency, but one in five consumers still believe businesses don’t care about privacy. Separate your business from the pack by explaining how you’re going to use the data you do collect and how it’s being collected in your cookie consent popup.

Ask for reviews from customers. Asking for customers to review products in your e-commerce store is not only a great way to improve your sales performance but also gain access to customer data consensually.

Offer quizzes to your customers in exchange for personalized recommendations. Customers like personalized product or content recommendations — 35% of Amazon purchases come from product recommendations, and 75% of Netflix watches come from recommendations based on customer data. Learning a buyer’s likes, dislikes, and interests is a great way to improve the customer experience, your ROI, and consensually gather first-party data.

Let customers make accounts in your e-commerce store. Accounts are a veritable treasure trove of first-party data. By letting customers volunteer information via user-created profiles, you give them an incentive to return to your e-commerce store and can also mine their accounts for useful bits of data.

Reward repeat customers with a loyalty program. Building a successful customer loyalty program provides you with a dynamic source of customer data — a data source that is constantly evolving and is updated by the customer — as well as better sales numbers and increasing your brand loyalty. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Ask users to participate in surveys. Customer satisfaction surveys are an excellent way of improving your products and services. Surveys can also function as a source of first-party data, giving you the ability to tie interactions back to specific customers so you can identify points of friction within your e-commerce store or customer journey.

First-party data e-commerce strategies

Follow these best-practices for using first-party data to drive e-commerce growth.

Retarget hesitant shoppers

Retargeting is a super effective way to use first-party data to reach customers who have shown interest in your products but haven’t completed a purchase. Use data from website visits to create targeted ads that remind them about their viewed or wishlisted products or items left in their carts.

This subtle-yet-not-so-subtle nudge brings reluctant customers back to your site and also nudges them to complete their purchases.

Generate personalized product recommendations and promotions

With 91% of consumers more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations, implementing this strategy into your e-commerce marketing plan is a no-brainer. Utilize purchase and browsing history to tailor offers and product recommendations that are most likely to appeal to each customer.

These can be displayed on product pages, in email campaigns, and even during the checkout process, and should include related or complementary items that encourage upsells and cross-sells to increase average order value.

Enhance the shopper journey

Strengthening customer relationships is paramount for any e-commerce business’s growth. The stronger the relationship, the greater the trust. And the greater the trust, the deeper the loyalty — which just so happens to convert to higher online revenue. 

Analyze your first-party data to identify any pain points and areas for improvement. This will allow you to optimize the customer experience by reducing any friction throughout the conversion funnel. For example, your first-party data might highlight that many of your customers make their exit during checkout after they see limited payment options.

So then you could add more payment methods, such as buy now, pay later.

Strengthen your loyalty program

A recent study found that 79% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand because of its loyalty program, which translates to increased customer retention and revenue. Your best approach for making your loyalty program a reason that shoppers seek out your business?

Begin by using your first-party data, such as shopper preferences and previous purchases, to tailor your rewards to each customer. 

And with third-party data going away, loyalty programs are going to be more important than ever when it comes to customers actively sharing their information. With a well-executed, personalized loyalty program, you can increase your customers’ lifetime value, drive repeat purchases, and create champions for your brand.

Target shopping cart ditchers

Customers often leave your site and abandon their full shopping basket with no intention of ever returning to complete a purchase. While this might seem like a waste of time, it’s actually a great opportunity to build connections with online consumers you might never have heard from again.

First-party data can identify those who have recently abandoned shopping carts, and you can then send targeted email reminders or offers to encourage them to complete the purchase. This strategy is proven to work well, especially when an incentive like a limited-time offer is included. 

Looking to catch cart abandoners before they leave your site? Machine learning tech (like Bazaarvoice) can use first party data to identify when a shopper is likely to abandon, and intercept before they’ve made their exit.

Implement dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing can help you maximize revenue by charging different prices to different customers at different times, optimizing based on each consumer’s willingness to pay. Determine whether this hyper-personalization strategy could benefit you by looking at first-party data like customer preferences, buying behavior, and historical purchases.

You’ll also want to take a look at competitor pricing to ensure you’re not over (or under) reaching. From here, you can adjust prices based on your customer segment and offer discounts to customer groups who would benefit from them most to encourage purchases.

Create personalized campaigns

A large part of your marketing budget is likely going toward advertising. Take your wealth of first-party data, including purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographics, and use it to create highly targeted campaigns that spark interest in your segmented groups.

For instance, a furniture retailer may target a group that has all purchased the same sectional with ads featuring a matching chair or ottoman, along with a limited-time discount if they buy it within a set time frame.

Don’t forget to test your strategies

Testing different strategies and messages based on first-party data is paramount to determining what resonates best with your audience.

Make sure to continuously refine your marketing and personalization strategies using A/B testing, and experimenting with different messaging, offers, and channels.

You can then use first-party data to measure the impact of these changes on key metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and average order value.

Examples of first-party data strategy in action

First-party data is used like any dataset to improve your products, services, revenue numbers, or processes. In the following examples, you’ll notice a common thread throughout: a strong first-party data strategy is in place, and best-practice data collection techniques are used to do a lot more than just target customers for ads or remarketing.

B2C — The slipper store

An e-commerce store selling fun and stylized slippers severed its ties with its data vendor in order to build a first-party data strategy. Upon visiting its website, users are greeted with a prompt asking for their email and phone number in exchange for a 20% off coupon. The user fills in the form and collects their discount.

During checkout, the user is then prompted to create an account to speed along the transaction and manage future purchases. The customer creates an account, enters their shipping and billing information, and completes the transaction. The e-commerce store now has some data points it can use to help improve its products or services.

But that’s not all: first-party data can be used to retarget and nurture leads during the sales process.

B2B — Applicant tracking software vendor

An applicant tracking software (ATS) has a new website and a blog it’s using to capture organic leads. Employees notice that while the blog itself is attracting a fair number of leads for the company, once users navigate to the rest of the website, they bounce within seconds, most never completing an action beyond clicking through a few pages.

The company’s first-party data strategy helps uncover the problem. Using a first-party data cookie and Google Analytics 4, the vendor can see the users coming in via the blog, attempting to schedule a demo with the CTA link on the homepage, and then bouncing. Upon analysis, the vendor realizes that the form isn’t opening when users click the “schedule a demo” CTA. They re-work the form but have another problem on their hands: the vendor has no way of remarketing to leads who didn’t convert.

They turn to first-party data to help. The vendor creates high-quality e-books and assets and then gates them at the bottom of their highest-performing blogs, asking for some basic customer information, such as their email and phone number. Now the vendor can send personalized email content to their leads, educating them on the benefits of ATS in their business and qualifying them for a sales conversation.

Maximize your first-party data with Bazaarvoice

E-commerce managers and brand managers who don’t embrace first-party data are living on borrowed time. Regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, in conjunction with unanimous motions to quash third-party data and cookies, have put additional pressure on businesses, that often don’t have the time or resources to prepare for third-party data’s retirement.

An easy solution is insights and reports tools from Bazaarvoice. Rather than waste time hiring third parties, the tools help you analyze customer behavior and sentiment, build your brand, and source more reviews to diversify the voices in your first-party data strategy.

Chapters:

1. What is agile marketing?
2. Benefits of agile marketing
3. Best practices for adopting agile marketing processes
4. Examples of agile marketing
5. Work with collaborative tools and vendors that support agility 

E-commerce marketers and leaders are taking cues from product teams to adopt leaner, more agile techniques for their marketing campaigns. In one report, 41% of marketers said they currently use agile tactics. 51% of marketers who don’t use agile tactics plan to start doing so, and most plan to adopt them in the next year.

If your team is looking to cut back on excess resources, be faster and more responsive, and cater your product and offerings to your target market, agile marketing is your answer. Let’s explore how agile techniques will change your marketing impact.

What is agile marketing?

Agile marketing is a dynamic approach that thrives on flexibility, adaptability, and iterative progress. Unlike traditional linear marketing tactics, agile marketing breaks down complex strategies into manageable, bite-sized tasks that are executed in short cycles.

This method values collaboration, open communication, and quick decision-making, ensuring your e-commerce team swiftly responds to changing market dynamics, customer feedback, and emerging trends. 

E-commerce leaders are leaning toward agile marketing tactics because they make it easier to streamline processes in a fast-paced market. Agile marketing fosters a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement that allows teams to refine their strategies based on real-time insights from their marketing campaigns. 

How agile marketing works

The agile marketing approach enables e-commerce teams to navigate competitive digital marketing landscapes with responsiveness and efficiency. There’s several components and characteristics of agile marketing that make this happen. 

• Task breakdown: Marketing strategies are divided into smaller tasks that can be completed within short timeframes, often referred to as sprints. These tasks are prioritized based on their importance and potential impact

• Sprints: These are short work cycles where teams focus on completing specific tasks and fostering collaboration and adaptability. Each sprint is a focused cycle, typically lasting one to four weeks. During a sprint, the team concentrates on completing just one specific project or task, aiming to deliver tangible results by the end of the cycle 

• Regular check-ins: Regular check-in meetings keep your team aligned. Each member provides updates on their progress, highlights any roadblocks, and discusses their immediate goals. Regular meetings ensure team alignment, quick adjustments, and open communication

• Iterative approach: Agile marketing encourages iterative processes. After each sprint, the team reviews the completed tasks and gathers insights from the data and feedback. Teams learn from their successes and failures, which helps inform planning for the next sprint and allows your teams to adjust their approach based on actual results

• Data-driven insights: Agile marketing relies heavily on the constant collection and analysis of data, feedback, and trends to guide decision-making. Performance metrics, customer feedback, and market trends are monitored closely to guide decision-making and optimize strategies throughout the process 

• Responsive to change: Agile marketing embraces change as a natural part of the process. It empowers teams to be proactive in addressing shifts in the market, customer behavior, and internal priorities

By embracing the components of agile marketing, e-commerce teams give themselves more opportunities to improve their products and campaigns. The iterative nature of agile marketing tactics leads to campaigns and projects that are constantly being refined, resulting in more effectiveness and better results over time.

The ability to respond promptly to market shifts ensures that e-commerce teams remain at the forefront of their industry, delivering impactful campaigns and driving business success. 92% of fully agile marketing departments say their team effectively contributes to the success of their business. This number decreases to 76% for teams that are partially agile. 

Benefits of agile marketing

Agile marketing isn’t just a buzzword — it’s a game changer. By embracing agile marketing tactics, your teams will reap several benefits that will help you make a bigger impact with your campaigns.

Adaptability to market demands

Customer demands are constantly changing, and sometimes, it feels impossible to keep up. This is where agile marketing helps. Agile marketing’s core strength lies in its adaptability. If unforeseen challenges arise, your team can quickly adjust their strategies during the next sprint rather than waiting for a major planning overhaul. 

Agile marketing creates adaptability by breaking down marketing strategies into manageable tasks that can be adjusted during sprints. When teams can adjust as needed, they’ll be able to quickly pivot their efforts in response to changing market dynamics, customer behaviors, or competitive pressures.

Plus, with your daily check-ins and regular evaluations, you ensure team members stay aligned and informed about shifts in trends or consumer preferences.

Faster delivery of marketing campaigns

Getting marketing campaigns out to the public quickly is important when demand is constantly changing and competition is high. When you can quickly launch campaigns, your e-commerce teams can seize timely opportunities and respond to current trends, capturing consumer interest when it matters most.

Agile marketing achieves faster time-to-market by emphasizing the delivery of campaigns during short sprints. E-commerce teams prioritize executing and launching core elements of a marketing campaign quickly.

This approach allows teams to gather real-time feedback and insights from initial releases, leading to refinements and enhancements in all subsequent iterations.

Increased competitive advantage

Because agile marketing promotes adaptability and speed, it helps teams adjust their campaigns accordingly to resonate better with customers. Teams that engage with their audiences and incorporate feedback into their strategies create offerings that align precisely with customer needs.

This customer-centric approach boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty, helping the business stand out from all the competition. 

Best practices for adopting agile marketing practices

Agile marketing is flexible — you can start small, and you don’t have to overhaul all your marketing processes and procedures at once. Instead, use these six best practices to get your team started with agile marketing. 

1. Identify goals and areas needing improvement 

Clarity is key to delivering successful marketing campaigns. When you start by identifying clear goals and pinpointing areas that need improvement, you’ll lay a strong foundation for agile marketing success. 

Set your goals before you begin to employ agile marketing tactics. When you need to pivot or take a new approach, you’ll always be striving to meet the same common goal. 

Knowing your goals and improvement areas helps you allocate resources effectively. Agile marketing often involves short cycles of work, and having a clear idea of priorities ensures that the entire team is investing time and effort where it matters most.

Evaluate your current marketing strategy and performance. What are your strengths? Where do you notice gaps or underperformance? Look for bottlenecks in your processes or systems. For example, if there’s a certain step or stage that the team gets caught up in and delayed, identify what you could change or adjust to make things move more quickly and efficiently. 

Next, set SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound — for your campaigns. Whether you want to boost website traffic, increase conversions, or engage a certain target audience, defining these goals and recognizing areas that need improvement help your team gain a clear sense of direction. Agile marketing tactics should then be tailored to directly address these goals and areas, making your efforts more focused and impactful.

2. Foster cross-departmental collaboration

Different departments within your organization — such as product, sales, and customer service — all have valuable insights to help create and deliver the most impactful campaigns. Collaborating with these teams ensures that your campaigns are aligned with the latest product updates, feature releases, and customer needs.

Ongoing regular meetings are key to an agile process. You should create a schedule for meetings, establish clear channels for communication between all teams, and regularly share updates, insights, and objectives to make sure everyone is on the same page. 

During these regular meetings, gather input from other teams, like sales and customer support. These teams interact directly with customers and provide insights into customer pain points and trends. You should also use these regular meetings as brainstorming sessions to generate innovative campaign ideas that leverage insights from different areas of the business.

3. Prioritize delivering value early (and often)

The goal of agile marketing is to launch campaigns or components quickly to provide value to your audience rather than trying to make everything perfect before you release it. 

Waiting for perfection can lead to delays, missed opportunities, and excessive resources spent on minor details. With an agile approach, you’ll prioritize launching versions of campaigns sooner and more frequently, so you can engage with your audience right away and implement feedback faster.

This approach not only prevents the waste of valuable assets but also enables you to pivot in case a campaign doesn’t resonate with your intended audience. 

The first step in delivering value early and often is identifying the essential elements of your campaign that provide value to your audience. These could be key messages, unique features, or benefits that you already know resonate with your target customers.

Then you can work on developing a minimum viable version of your campaign with these core elements. Remember, it doesn’t need to be perfect. Instead, focus on delivering the most value to your audience with your messaging, visuals, and benefits.

By delivering value early and often, you’re continuously learning from your audience’s responses. This knowledge informs your decisions, allowing you to improve your campaign for the next iteration. 

4. Perform iterative testing 

The goal of iterative testing is to refine and optimize a campaign over time. It involves distributing the campaign, analyzing the results, learning what resonates with your target market, and making incremental changes in any newer versions. Each iteration builds upon the insights gained from the previous one.

Iterative testing involves testing multiple components within a campaign — such as messaging, visuals, and user experience — and adjusting them based on feedback. Consider starting smaller rather than testing across all platforms, channels, and mediums right away. You could start by testing copy and visuals on two or three social media platforms. Once you’ve mastered iterative testing on a smaller scale, gradually expand to other platforms and channels.

The iterative cycle of agile marketing ensures that campaigns evolve quickly so you can capitalize on trends, preferences, and customer demand before you lose relevance.

5. Create a process to collect ongoing feedback 

In agile marketing, your strategies and campaigns need to evolve alongside changing market dynamics and customer preferences. Feedback is your compass, guiding you toward what works, what doesn’t, and what your customers truly want. 

Agile marketing thrives on data-driven decision-making, and feedback is the most direct source of data you can tap into. It offers invaluable insights for making informed adjustments, optimizing campaigns, and ensuring that your marketing efforts genuinely resonate.

Make sure your business owns your listings on sites like Yelp and Google so you can collect reviews and ratings. You should also collect feedback from social platforms and online forums like Reddit or Quora. 

Once you’ve established easy, convenient places for your customers to review your products, you have to encourage them to actually leave a review. You should send out post-purchase surveys after a customer makes a purchase or interacts with your brand. Ask about their experience, satisfaction level, and areas where you could improve their journey. 

You can also try incorporating rating scales in your communication touchpoints. These could be in email signatures, on your website, or in post-purchase follow-up messages. Customers can quickly rate their experience on a scale, providing you with valuable quantitative feedback.

6. Use data to implement effective changes

Using both quantitative and qualitative data empowers you to navigate the evolving e-commerce landscape with precision. It’s about transforming assumptions into certainties, intuition into strategy, and reactions into responses.

By analyzing patterns, trends, and insights, you can pinpoint exactly where your efforts are paying off and where improvements are needed. This approach provides a solid foundation for iterative testing and ensures your strategies are aligned with audience preferences and market shifts.

After you’ve collected quantitative and qualitative data — from reviews, online discussions, industry research, and more — analyze the data to identify recurring trends, patterns, and correlations. Then you can prioritize the data and insights. Rank feedback and other data points based on their impact and relevance. Focus on insights that align with your marketing goals and objectives.

For example, if you have constant feedback about your slow site speed and also notice that a high percentage of people tend to leave the site after just a few seconds, you should prioritize making your website load faster. 

Create a plan that allows your teams to constantly implement the appropriate changes based on data and insights. Remove bottlenecks like inaccessible knowledge or a lengthy approval process so your team can make improvements quickly and continuously. 

Examples of agile marketing 

Many companies have successful agile marketing stories that your team can learn from. These examples showcase how brands have harnessed agile tactics to navigate challenges, streamline processes, and ultimately elevate their market impact. 

Mozilla embraces agility for predictable growth

Mozilla, an open-source web browser, needed a way to make its marketing initiatives more impactful with less guesswork and inconsistency. It faced a common dilemma in marketing — lots of ideas and projects stuck due to the absence of effective processes and systems. To address these challenges, the team began working in an agile way, implementing lean practices similar to those used in product or engineering teams.

Mozilla’s adoption of agile marketing allowed it to overcome the unpredictability that often plagues marketing efforts. By implementing agile practices, it transformed its marketing team into a well-coordinated and adaptable force, enabling them to predictably contribute to business growth and respond effectively to changing market dynamics.

Fresh quickly pivots to UGC to build awareness 

Fresh, a natural cosmetics brand, faced a significant challenge in raising awareness and fostering engagement among its customers both online and offline. The company collaborated with Bazaarvoice to embrace agile marketing tactics that would reshape its customer engagement and enhance its impact.

Using Ratings & Reviews and Retail Syndication, Fresh created an enticing shopping experience while leveraging user-generated content. By capitalizing on the power of authentic feedback and visual content, Fresh improved its online engagement and customer satisfaction.

Fresh’s partnership with Bazaarvoice to adopt agile marketing tactics enabled it to overcome challenges and achieve substantial results. By emphasizing authentic user-generated content, agile decision-making, and strategic review syndication, Fresh redefined its marketing impact, enhanced customer engagement, and witnessed a remarkable revenue impact of $1.48 million.

Work with collaborative tools and vendors that support agility 

To truly harness the potential of agile marketing, it’s crucial to leverage collaborative tools and vendors that support this mindset. By adopting solutions like ratings and reviews and retail syndication offerings, you’ll streamline your processes, drive customer engagement, and scale your marketing efforts efficiently.

Bazaarvoice also has a team of experts who are here to be your personal champions. Our Client Success Directors partner closely with you, developing tailored strategies, sharing expertise, and ensuring your business achieves its goals.

With 24/7 global support, white-glove implementation, and managed services, we offer a holistic approach to help you fully capitalize on agile marketing’s potential.

FEATURED RESOURCE

A guide to user-generated content for lean marketing teams

Read here

People spend a lot of their time shopping online. And, they need your help along the way. Shoppers seek inspiration, good-quality information, and the perspectives of real people to help them feel comfortable making purchases. 

The best way to improve customer service and offer the level of support shoppers crave is by responding to ratings, reviews, and other user-generated content (UGC). When you respond to UGC, you help your consumers feel confident they can get the help they need. Having a strong UGC response strategy helps you build relationships with consumers, which can improve consumer confidence in their purchase decision.”

To help you build impactful UGC programs (and create deeper and more efficient customer engagements in the process), Bazaarvoice and Zendesk have partnered for a new integration. 

As the leading UGC provider, that works with a large network of retailers, brands, and shoppers, Bazaarvoice offer Ratings & Reviews, Questions & Answers, and other UGC solutions. While Zendesk is a customer service platform connecting over 100,000 brands with hundreds of millions of customers across email, social channels, review sites, and more. 

“Bringing together the power of Bazaarvoice and Zendesk, we are making it easier for our clients to be customer-centric,” says Mark Drosos, SVP of Global Partnerships at Bazaarvoice. 

“This integration is a game-changer, enabling businesses to seamlessly gather and harness valuable customer insights while delivering exceptional support. By uniting two industry leaders, we empower brands and retailers to build stronger relationships, drive growth, increase lifetime value, and elevate the customer experience to unprecedented heights.”

How the Bazaarvoice + Zendesk integration improves customer service 

The Bazaarvoice + Zendesk integration enables you to build an efficient, effective UGC program that delivers high-quality customer experiences and improve customer service across the shopping journey.

You’re easily able to integrate your Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews and Questions & Answers data into the Zendesk platform. Here’s how the Bazaarvoice + Zendesk integration can help you improve workflows, enhance your brand reputation, and improve customer service: 

• Build robust customer profiles: The UGC you collect helps you keep tabs on what consumers are saying about you and your products. You can also discover new customer profiles that aren’t already in your CRM 

• Manage brand reputation at scale: Whenever a shopper leaves feedback or asks a question, thousands more are paying attention. You can prioritize high-impact reviews and questions with alerts and deploy a response interface that your team already knows well 

• Increase productivity: The integration lets you centralize customer interaction through your Zendesk platform. This helps maximize the workflow management your response team has already built, which drives efficiency and saves valuable time

• Learn about your customers: Reviews (negative and positive) provide a wealth of information about your shoppers. You can learn about their pain points, where customer service is lagging, and any issues they’re having with your products. You can also identify gaps in the market, where you could innovate and improve

• Drive top-notch customer experiences and retention: Leverage your UGC to create informed, personalized customer support and increase the lifetime value of your customers. Improve customer satisfaction by responding to reviews and questions quickly and seamlessly tracking consumer correspondence in the Zendesk platform

• Give consumer voices a boost: UGC is a true asset. Consumers who interact with UGC are 2x more likely to convert. Bazaarvoice’s Ratings & Reviews tools let you collect authentic ratings, reviews, photos, and videos from consumers 

Helping you respond to negative and positive reviews

UGC plays a huge role in consumers’ purchasing decisions, with 89% always or mostly consulting reviews before buying anything. Shoppers value any and all reviews, both negative and positive. They also expect you to respond to their reviews and answer their questions. 

Review management is a key part of a successful UGC strategy. Letting reviews simply flow in isn’t always enough. But, your response to all those reviews is everything when it comes to boosting your brand reputation, gaining consumer trust, and just giving shoppers what they want. 

While negative reviews might seem like a turn-off for shoppers, they’re actually much appreciated. 60% of shoppers consider negative reviews equally important as positive feedback, as they can provide just as much (or even more) information about your products. However, most shoppers expect you to respond and address the issues that they mention. 

Responding to reviews makes shoppers feel valued. Even replying to positive reviews — which can be easy to take for granted — establishes trust and shows your customers that you care about what they have to say and are dedicated to ensuring the highest level of customer service. 

The Bazaarvoice + Zendesk integration makes responding to customer reviews and questions more streamlined, giving you the opportunity to join the conversation with the native content on your own site. It’s as simple as logging into our portal, where you can track and manage questions and reviews across the Bazaarvoice Network. You can choose how and when to receive notifications, so you can respond to consumers at the right moments.

Improve customer service with the Bazaarvoice + Zendesk integration 

Our integration with Zendesk enables you to easily and efficiently respond to customer reviews and questions at scale, helping you turn customers into repeat buyers. 

Ready to boost your UGC strategy, build smarter shopping experiences, and take your customer service to the next level? Learn more about the Zendesk integration here. Or get in touch directly below to get started.

Interested in becoming the next Bazaarvoice partner? Visit our partner page to learn more.

Chapters:

1. What is marketing automation?
2. Benefits of marketing automation
3. How to implement a marketing automation strategy
4. Examples of successful marketing automation strategies
5. Prepare for big changes

The only constant in life is change — or in the e-commerce industry’s case, total digital transformation.

Marketing automation is an essential conductor of a huge range of digital operations required to meet consumer demand and the latest industry standards. Companies know they need to adopt marketing automation strategy, but many don’t know how. 

According to the McKinsey Global Survey, there’s an increase in the number of companies using automation technologies (70%), “yet few of these companies have achieved automation’s full potential.” Most respondents agree they can implement automation for some of their organizations’ tasks, but less than 20% have applied it more extensively across departments.

It will take a mindset shift and concerted effort for companies to widely introduce marketing automation. The ones that do will improve customer and employee satisfaction and ultimately grow their business. The survey respondents who had the most success with automation were the ones who made it a business priority. So, to borrow another trope, you have to go big or go home. 

Find out how to craft and execute an effective marketing automation strategy that will make your business run more smoothly, efficiently, and successfully.

What is marketing automation?

Essentially, marketing automation performs marketing tasks based on triggers. Software designed for these purposes manages tasks and stores the customer data necessary to execute and measure them. 

It’s a way to mechanize, streamline, and expedite targeted, data-driven marketing campaigns. Marketing automation can take over mechanical and repetitive day-to-day tasks from individuals, such as:

• Data visualization
• Content creation
• AI powered personalization
• Managing and segmenting email lists
• Manually launching individual social media campaigns
• Running paid ads campaigns

Automating tasks like these gives marketers and other team members space and time to focus on other priorities (that are likely a better use of their time ). 

Marketing automation is a crucial tool for delivering personalized content to customize the online shopping experience for your e-commerce site and app users. It does this by generating messages and notifications based on consumer data like website activity and purchase history.

It also provides real-time insights based on campaign results, so you can quickly and easily adjust and optimize targeting, messaging, and other details of your strategy as needed. 

Benefits of marketing automation 

Allowing digital tools to complete sometimes tedious yet impactful tasks has many benefits. Perhaps the most obvious is that your team doesn’t have to do them. You have to set up the tasks and monitor them, but the software does most of the work — and fast. Because time is money, this means the technology investment is definitely worth the saved operation costs and increased team productivity in other areas. 

Automation also enables personalized campaigns, improved targeting, lead generation, better customer experience, higher average order values (AOV) and conversions. And it provides rich customer data on demographics and behavior. 

The following chart shows the top benefits of marketing automation observed by global marketers who integrate it into their strategies. 

Regardless of these coveted outcomes, marketing automation is becoming more of a necessity for e-commerce brands and retailers to keep up with current trends and stay competitive. If you’re not automating, you’re not going to be as quick and nimble as the other guy.

How to implement a thoughtful marketing automation strategy

Before you enforce marketing automation as quickly and vigorously as possible, make a plan first. It might be tempting to forge ahead at full speed, but you need to be intentional about where and how to focus your automation efforts for the best results. 

1. Define the goals for your marketing automation strategy

Any good marketing strategy starts by defining what goals it wants to achieve, and the tactics should align with those goals. To identify your automation goals, start with the weaknesses and unmet needs in your current marketing program. That will guide all the actions you take to overcome those pain points and meet your goals, including what campaign types and channels you lean on for automation.  

Setting the goals for your marketing automation strategy will provide the “why,” which is where the real value is. This will also help you orchestrate your strategy. Orchestration means intentionally setting up the steps for automation, including the specific action that triggers each task.

Creating bandwidth and reducing task overload to prevent employee burnout is an example of a primary goal for your automation strategy. You could further refine that goal by thinking about what in particular your team is spending time on that’s keeping them from doing their best and most fulfilling work. This is already a leading goal for 78% of marketers who welcome the chance to hand off tasks to digital tools so they can devote more time to other priorities.

The need to provide online shoppers with a more personalized experience could be another important goal. In that case, you could consider automated personalization tactics — think targeted product recommendations and review request emails that feature product info and reviews based on shoppers’ website activity. 

The uses of marketing automation extend beyond marketing too, so other departments should collaborate on the best ways to leverage the tools you have. For example, SMS marketing and live chat are two automation possibilities that can provide significant support to your customer service team.

2. Decide what automation types and channels to leverage

Once you’ve established your goals, drill down on the channels that will produce the desired results. Below shows the current top channels used for marketing automation worldwide. Let’s dig deeper into the use-cases of some of these top channels.

Email marketing  

Email marketing is the top channel for automated campaigns worldwide, probably because it’s a main driver of customer acquisition and retention. Despite of what maybe some marketers think, email is still a versatile tool for sending targeted and relevant automated campaigns to customers. There’s many triggers you can program to deploy a variety of different emails. 

A big one is abandoned cart emails, prompted when a customer adds items to their online shopping cart but doesn’t follow through with the purchase. Email is also effective for generating product reviews that will encourage other shoppers to make purchases. These types of emails can increase product review volume by a whopping 4–9x. You can set a review collection email trigger for when an order has been delivered or a few days after, for example.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is critical to the success of digital brands and retailers. Leveraging marketing automation in conjunction with social media will supercharge its results. There’s many reasons to focus on social as an automation channel. Those include: 

• Making tasks more efficient and manageable
• Increasing engagement
• Gaining more awareness of mentions and feedback about your brand
• Analyzing campaign performance

Social automation tools allow you to manage all of your different accounts in one dashboard. You can schedule posts on the days and times when most of your followers are active on each channel. You can easily follow mentions, keywords, and hashtags to find opportunities for engagement and discover customer insights about your products. And you can access analytics to measure your KPIs, like follower growth, reach, and engagement.

You can also automate certain social commerce functions to strengthen connections with your customers on social. For example, if a customer clicks the Like2Buy link in your Instagram store, you can collect their contact info to retarget them with relevant emails featuring products and promotions they would be interested in.

Certain social commerce tools will also segment your current customers on social into categories and identify new audiences based on the qualities of your current email list. 

Landing pages

The primary purposes of landing page automation are lead generation and lead nurturing. First, you build a landing page for a specific purpose, like to attract shoppers to your rewards program, monthly subscription option, or new product collection. Then, you integrate that landing page with your automation platform. Finally, you assign actions to certain triggers, for example:  

• Collecting zero-party data when a customer fills out a form
• Segmenting customers based on the product or service they’re signing up for 
• Adding subscribers to an email list 
• Adding leads to a customer relationship management (CRM) platform 
• Sending a review request email, like a welcome or FAQ email

Cross-selling and upselling

Cross-selling and upselling are fundamental marketing automation strategy tactics for increasing AOV and conversions across your e-commerce site. Product recommendations labeled with calls to action (CTAs) like “you might also like,” “people also bought,” and “based on your past orders” are examples of cross- and upselling. 

These automated prompts appear to your website visitors based on triggers like a product page visit, adding an item to a shopping cart, or a checkout page visit. Another example of an automated upsell is a CTA encouraging customers to add more to their cart to reach the minimum amount for free shipping. 

Live chat

Chatbots are a way to automate live chat on your e-commerce site and messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Originally, the latter two were meant for personal use, but as we all know, they’ve scaled much larger to become major marketing tools for brands. An effective conversational commerce strategy can have a big business impact for e-commerce brands. 

Automating live chat gives customers and shoppers access to a chat option literally anytime since it doesn’t require a human operator. With live chat, you can provide answers to common customer questions, direct customers to the right pages according to their needs, upsell and cross-sell, and a variety of other actions.  

Automated chat is a helpful option for e-commerce companies to leverage during off-hours and to support their customer support teams. 

Quiz funnels

Marketing quizzes on your e-commerce site – a.k.a. quiz funnels – are a fun and interactive automated lead generation tool. You can create quizzes as a website pop-up or landing page to learn more about your customers, collect first-party data, and include product recommendations to increase conversions.

Some different types of quiz funnels include:

• Personal style quizzes – fitting for beauty, apparel, and interior design brands
• Product discovery quizzes for to help customers decide which products are best for their needs
• Consultation quizzes for specialized health and beauty products 

3. Select the right tools for your marketing automation strategy

Just as you need to align your automation channels to your goals, you need to match the tools you use to each channel. That will likely require using a variety of different tools with different functions. According to Gartner, the number one automation mistake is “falling in love with a single technology.” Instead, they recommend building a “toolbox of technologies that provide a more comprehensive set of capabilities to align to a flexible range of business outcomes and redesign approaches.”

Do the necessary research to find the tools that are the best fit to execute your strategy. For example, if you want to offer live chat on your e-commerce site, make sure your website platform has a chat option. If you want to focus on email and SMS marketing, you may consider a specialized tool that can do both. 

When assessing the performance of your automation tools, focus on whether or not you’re meeting or making progress toward your initial goals. Are these tools and processes delivering their intended outcomes? If not, you should modify or optimize your strategy, which is often the case when testing new technologies. 

A built-in benefit of whatever marketing automation tools you use is insights and analytics. These features allow you to track the performance of your automation campaigns. You can access a wealth of sophisticated data depending on which reporting platform you use, from customer sentiment to competitor analysis, conversions, content gaps, subscriber growth, and more.

Leverage a Bazaarvoice partner for added insight. Working together with Bazaarvoice and Movable Ink, marketers can leverage real-time ratings and reviews within email in an automated way to create a relevant shopping experience for each user, and influence more purchases.

Examples of successful marketing automation strategies in action

SMBs and enterprise companies alike are finding ways to automate areas of their marketing for better efficiency and ROI. Each of the following examples demonstrates how different types of brands identified challenges that automation could solve.

Those areas of opportunity include improving online customer support and experience, simplifying processes, and scaling their business. 

Luxury retail brands and conversational commerce

Before all the chatter about digital transformations and the metaverse, luxury retail brands relied heavily on the in-store experience. Now, they have to increase their investment in online channels, and three iconic luxury brands show how to deftly wield the power of conversational commerce. 

• Louis Vuitton’s automated Virtual Assistant takes a tactful approach that’s natural, easygoing, and welcomed by its visitors. The experience guides shoppers to a quicker and more confident purchase decision by providing unique value. It’s also transparent, making it clear that it’s AI-powered while giving the user the option to connect to a real agent. 
• In addition to live website chat, Burberry offers a texting option on WhatsApp. We’re officially in the next era of customer service. Its virtual shopping assistant Lola often initiates conversations to determine the needs of each customer, then passes the mic to sales associates who can help with product recommendations, sizing advice, etc.
• Another luxury innovator in conversational commerce is Prada, which is an early adopter of WeChat to serve its Chinese market. Prada cleverly uses WeChat as a channel to share engaging video and photo content, practice social commerce, and offer the option to live chat anytime with the Prada team. 
• HSN’s marketers know how important it is to celebrate major milestones. In this campaign, HSN used their 41st birthday as an opportunity to promote app downloads via an email communication. Once the customer downloaded the app, the same creative appeared in their in-app messages promoting the exclusive app-only deals.

Minted and paid ads

Paid ads are another primary marketing channel that performs well with marketing automation. For one agency, implementing automation for paid campaigns was a “breakthrough moment.” The agency leveraged Google’s automated, cross-channel campaign dashboard, Performance Max, for the home decor and gifts company Minted. 

By automating elements of its ad strategy, the agency experienced a 55% increase in ad spend ROI, which led them to scale the same approach to other clients. Overall, managing multiple automation campaigns and tracking their results all in one place enabled them to focus on “simplifying account structures to consolidate performance data and free up more time for strategic thinking” across the agency.

Beko and email automation

Customer reviews are instrumental to the success of Beko, a leader in European home appliances. Without a reliable collection of product reviews, the brand wouldn’t have been able to successfully expand into new global markets. 

Beko’s review strategy focuses on acquiring native reviews on its main e-commerce site and then catapulting that content to retail partners. Syndicating its reviews to retail partners, especially in new markets, has resulted in “exponential sales growth.”

In order to syndicate a large volume of authentic customer reviews across different retail partners, the company needed a solid base to pull from. That’s why its native reviews are so important. Out of the 8,000+ reviews the company has accumulated, “most [are] from review request emails sent to customers after registering their appliance.”

Big moves mean big changes. Prepare accordingly. 

The more comprehensive your marketing automation strategy is, the more ROI you’ll see. The automation leaders identified in the McKinsey Global Survey “are making sweeping (rather than incremental) process changes part of their automation agenda.” That means applying automation to a diverse range of business functions across departments, not just marketing. 

Such far-reaching changes require people in different teams in the organization to adapt to new systems and processes. Your teams will need training on these technologies. In order to manage new tools effectively, they’ll need to be adept at analyzing data and insights, as well as project management. 

This shift also means refocusing efforts beyond the laborious tasks that will no longer be necessary. A top benefit of marketing automation is the freedom for employees to take on higher-level tasks and responsibilities. They’ll need the necessary support to succeed, whether that means more learning and development opportunities, a redefining of roles, or whatever will best benefit your team.

These are all important factors to consider when planning to implement a marketing automation strategy, but they’re all manageable and achievable if you prepare for them. And one way to ease the transition is with the best tools for the job.

Bazaarvoice specializes in marketing automation tools and provides the guidance and attention needed to support customers throughout the implementation process. Just saying.

Working together with Bazaarvoice and Movable Ink, marketers can leverage real-time ratings and reviews within email in an automated way to create a relevant shopping experiences for each user and to drive more purchases. Get in touch below to learn more.

What is single-sign on (SSO)?

Single sign-on is a form of identification that allows users to log in to multiple applications and websites with a single password. Users simply create a password that then works across multiple web applications like Salesforce, Workday, Coupa, and even our very own Bazaarvoice client portal.

With single sign-on, logging into different websites becomes a breeze because you only need to remember one password. It’s also much more secure for organizations to manage user access to these apps.

Challenges of SSO

Single sign-on does come with its own set of challenges. For starters, organizations need to keep a watchful eye on maintaining strong password policies. After all, convenient access shouldn’t mean compromising security. SSO providers also need to ensure high availability with minimal downtime because they’re the gatekeepers to critical applications.

And let’s not forget about the importance of offering multi-factor authentication as an extra layer of defence against hacking attempts.

Benefits of SSO

While there’s challenges associated with SSO, the benefits tend to outweigh those.

The first (and main) benefit of federated single sign-on is that it makes life far more convenient for users. 68% of employees switch between ten apps every hour, so migrating to a single login can save businesses considerable time and money.

Without the need to manually juggle a bunch of different usernames and passwords you can say goodbye to access issues and endless help desk tickets for forgotten passwords — according to Gartner, over 50% of all help desk calls are due to password issues.

Not only do all of those help desk tickets cost organizations significant time, they also often cost significant dollar. Migrating to single sign-on will save you money by removing much of this burden on the help desk.

On the IT side, single sign-on gives teams the power to control user access to specific applications. It’s like having a magic wand to enable, track, and monitor who gets access to what. And when someone leaves the company, you can simply edit or disable their access with a few clicks.

So, if we can agree that SSO, managed properly, provides a secure balance between additional convenience and increased productivity, wouldn’t it stand to reason that organizations would want their personnel to be able to leverage these same benefits when they access the client portals?

Federating single sign-on

That’s exactly why from May 2023, Bazaarvoice is offering ‘Federated’ access to eligible clients. What does that mean? It means clients can seamlessly integrate access to the client portal with its SSO-enabled apps. No more separate usernames and passwords to manage.

It’s all about extending productivity, efficiency, and top-notch security from Bazaarvoice to our clients and their teams. And there’s no reason why your business can’t do the same. Get in touch here to learn more.

By focusing on direct to consumer marketing, you can collect customer data, engage directly with customers, offer personalized marketing, launch and test new products easily, provide an omnichannel experience, and stay nimble in the e-commerce environment.

Chapters:

1. What is direct to consumer marketing?
2. Why all brands should have a direct to consumer marketing strategy
3. How brands can compete in a saturated market
4. How traditional brands are adopting a D2C marketing strategy
5. Own your brand with D2C marketing

What is direct to consumer marketing?

Direct to consumer marketing, or D2C marketing, is a strategy used by brands that skip traditional distribution channels and sell their products directly to consumers.

About a decade ago, the line between direct to consumer (D2C) and retail brands was clearly drawn. Brands either had retail partners that sold their products, like Pringles. Or they exclusively sold, fulfilled, and shipped their own products directly to customers, like Blue Apron.

The divide was likely because D2C marketing was a new business model with a totally different approach to traditional retail. The emergence of D2C shifted the focus away from brick and mortar, bringing it to e-commerce and cutting out any middlemen. After D2C trailblazers like Bonobos and Warby Parker arrived on the scene, hundreds of others followed. And more seem to be popping up daily.

The high-profit potential explains a lot about the wave of new D2C brands. The growth rate of D2C revenues measured over five years is four times higher than retail brands.

In today’s digital marketplace, brands don’t have to choose one or the other. By investing in a direct to consumer marketing strategy, all retail companies can have more control over their brand, be more flexible, and build stronger relationships with their customers.

Discover the top five advantages of a direct to consumer marketing approach and how any type of brand can thrive in today’s saturated market.

Why all brands should have a direct to consumer marketing strategy

Whether your brand is one of the many D2Cs to pop up recently or it has yet to make the shift from traditional retail, it’s helpful to know how the strategy can benefit you. These are the top objectives of direct to consumer marketing that any type of company can aspire to.

1. Stronger connection with customers

D2C marketing allows you to interact directly with your customers at every stage of the relationship. Brands that only use other retailers to sell and market their products surrender that relationship to their partners. To grow your business, it’s no longer enough just to have a quality product. You need to also build a community around your brand.

In a study of more than 1,000 consumers, 64% expressed they wanted a brand to connect with them by sharing values that align with their own and understanding their interests and needs. The majority of respondents also reported this connection leads to improved brand loyalty. Brands can only achieve this connection if they have access to their audience through their own channels, particularly on social media.

Brands with their own D2C platforms can guide the customer experience from start to finish. In the discovery phase, they can drive awareness with their own social media and search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. In the consideration phase, they can engage with customers on social media and with email. And in the decision phase, they can provide their own customer service and e-commerce experience.

When your brand can craft its own narrative and engage directly with customers, you have more opportunities to instill your story, values, voice, and personality. Being open and transparent with your audience fosters connection and conveys authenticity.

Authenticity is another route to brand trust and loyalty. As Juan Woodbury, EVP, branded content and entertainment at FCB, explained to Adweek, “We need to be able to communicate with our consumers in an authentic way to where they can have brand loyalty. Consumers nowadays want to have more of that personal and intimate connection with the brand that they’re consuming.”

Customers need to trust the authenticity of your products in addition to your brand. According to a Forrester European study, consumer trust in the authenticity of products is one of the top reasons for purchasing from DTC beauty and home goods brands. This is especially true for more exclusive, high-end products.

An important part of building connections with customers is providing your own customer service instead of relying on partners or third parties. When you offer customer support, customers can ask you questions through direct messages, emails, chatbots, or questions and answers features. This way, you can answer them quickly, resolve issues, and put your own personal touch on the conversations with your customers.

Customer feedback guides brands to do more of what works or fix what doesn’t — from how they market their products to the products themselves.

The direct to consumer fitness apparel company Outdoor Voices has cultivated a loyal fanbase through their marketing. They encourage their customers to share content about their fitness and OV products using the #DoingThings hashtag. They actively engage with their community on social media and in real life with OV-sponsored events.

2. More flexibility and commerce touchpoints

With a direct to consumer marketing model, you’re free to experiment and pivot whenever and however you choose. Many D2C brands are digitally native, meaning they operate exclusively online. Some choose to expand beyond their own e-commerce channels to retail partner sites or open physical retail stores. Or all of the above.

Casper is an example of a digitally native D2C brand that had massive success and went on to develop partnerships with major retailers like Target and Nordstrom. Later, Casper signed on with one of the traditional retailers that they disrupted: Mattress Warehouse. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Your own e-commerce site is essential for brand awareness and product discovery whether or not your brand sells through retail partners. Browsing search engines is the top source of inspiration for online shopping, followed by social media, so you need to have a site with rich, optimized content about your brand and products so shoppers can find you.

According to Forrester, “A brand’s own DTC presence will very likely be a research source even when consumers end up purchasing from a brand’s retail partners.”

That DTC presence can also extend to your social media beyond just community building. With social commerce, you can sell products right on the platforms where you’re interacting with customers and creating fun, experiential content.

In Shopify’s Future of Ecommerce report, Étienne Mérineau, Heyday by Hootsuite’s Senior Director of Marketing, emphasizes the important role of social commerce in direct to consumer marketing. “It’s key for brands to develop their own DTC strategy and model to be able to build a strong, independent brand. Social commerce is definitely an opportunity for brands to reclaim their destiny by owning the customer experience and the relationship with customers, versus selling on Amazon, where price is king and your brand is an afterthought.”

Allbirds is a D2C shoe brand with a strong omnichannel strategy. They sell their shoes and clothing on their e-commerce store, at their own retail shops, and on social media with shoppable content. Allbirds also uses each of their marketing channels to promote their commitment to sustainability, which is largely what the brand has become synonymous with.

3. Acquire and market user-generated content

Your e-commerce site and social media are major platforms where you can leverage the power of user-generated content (UGC). Social media is where people share images, videos, and testimonials about their experiences, including the products and brands they love. UGC provides great content to use for marketing — not to mention free and sincere promotion.

On social media, you can repost UGC on your own accounts and make it shoppable by tagging products from your catalog. On your e-commerce site, you can feed that UGC from social media to your product pages and other places throughout your site with visual galleries.

Your e-commerce site can house customer reviews on your product pages, category pages, home page, and anywhere else. These reviews give other shoppers the confidence and convincing they need to purchase. Based on research from the Bazaarvoice Network of retailers and consumers, the majority of shoppers trust reviews even more than personal recommendations, and reviews increase conversions significantly.

Isabella Oliver is a DTC ethical maternity wear brand that primarily sells their products online. They added UGC galleries to their e-commerce site to show what their clothing looks like on real customers, not just in professional photos. Their product pages show all the UGC images and customer reviews associated with the corresponding product. When customers interact with their galleries, Isabella Oliver’s conversion rates increase by 120%, average order values increase by 10%, and time on site is 3x higher.

One type of UGC that many brands use to their advantage is influencer marketing. Influencers can make all the difference when generating buzz for your products and services, especially for new brands. Take the popular D2C bed sheet company Brooklinen. Part of their early success was due to partnering with prominent home and lifestyle influencers to showcase Brooklinen products in their homes.

4. Ability to collect customer data

D2C brands and those with DTC channels have a distinct advantage over traditional retail brands: internal data about their customers’ shopping behaviors. There’s a lot of valuable and informative first-party data you can collect with a direct to consumer marketing strategy. That data includes what your audience reports through surveys and contact forms, website behavior, purchase history, and social media activity.

• Quantitative data is mostly found using website and social media analytics, first-party cookie trackers, and e-commerce platform insights
• Qualitative data to assess customer sentiment can be sourced from customer reviews, customer satisfaction surveys, and feedback from loyalty programs and subscription members

Advanced tools like customer data platforms and Bazaarvoice’s Insights and Reports can gather comprehensive data from multiple customer touchpoints.

This goldmine of data can help you attract and retain customers, develop or improve products, and modify your marketing strategy. As Harvard Business Review puts it, “Brands should actively use the resulting insights to spur innovation, strengthen the value chain beyond the initial transaction, and deliver satisfaction at every possible touchpoint.”

Data is the foundation of personalized marketing, which is one of the best ways brands can innovate and provide value to customers. In practice, this looks like creating customized emails according to customer segments and offering promo codes and product recommendations on your e-commerce site.

The D2C outdoor stove company Solo Stove demonstrates how to collect data and offer personalized recommendations on their e-commerce site. In the first example, they offer a discount in exchange for the visitor’s email address. In the second example, they give shoppers a quiz on how they would use the stove and recommend products based on their answers — a tactic for collecting data and personalization.

5. Easily launch and test new products

Managing your own D2C marketing presence allows you to stay nimble and respond quickly to ever-changing and growing consumer interests. If you want to quickly launch a new product or test out a beta product or service, you can easily do that through your own DTC channels. You don’t have to guarantee a product-market fit or get buy-in from retail partners.

You can choose to launch or test products on a smaller scale, only releasing a limited amount of inventory initially to better gauge its reception. New and test products will also have a faster time to market, and you can analyze customer feedback and adjust marketing and product features accordingly.

A product sampling program, right, is a hyper-focused way for DTC brands to release products to a select group of shoppers. With product sampling, you can target sampling recipients by demographics and VIP customers.

In exchange, you can ask recipients for detailed feedback to help modify or improve the product. You can also ask them to share their opinions and experience via reviews and visual UGC, like photos, videos, and live demos.

Rael is a small, independent DTC women’s health and skincare company that used targeted product sampling to launch a new line of products. Partnering with Bazaarvoice, Rael sent samples to consumers whose interests, demographics, and shopping behavior match that of their target customer. In return, they received thousands of customer reviews to populate product pages with, a ton of UGC from social media, and unexpected insights to inform their strategy.

Without any intermediaries in the way, you can also offer customized product packages as a type of new product or service whenever you want. Subscriptions, in particular, are a popular — and effective — choice among DTC brands. Subscription-based DTC companies like Stitch Fix, IPSY, HelloFresh, BarkBox, and The Farmer’s Dog have solved the customer retention puzzle. If done successfully, the subscription model can lead to lower customer acquisition costs and higher customer lifetime value.

Subscriptions provide an outlet for brands to release exclusive, limited, or new products to a controlled group of subscribers. Part of the subscription appeal is the expert curation. Some subscription programs give customers the option to pick what’s included. Others can be totally up to what the brand decides to include, which can not only be a fun surprise but also a way for brands to experiment.

How D2C brands can compete in a saturated market

In the early days of the D2C model, just being one of those brands that offered something new and improved was enough to succeed. But as more D2C brands jump in the ring, it’s becoming harder to win market share and attention. For continued growth and advancement, D2Cs need to reconnect with the same challenging spirit that propelled their early success and build on it.

D2C brands need to focus on how they can form connections on the social platforms where their shoppers are. They need to embrace the power of short-form video on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. They need to bring their e-commerce strategy to social media by making shoppable content that seamlessly fits into the feeds users scroll through to explore products.

On top of this, D2C brands also need to reexamine their strengths over traditional retail brands and, conversely, the reasons why a customer might choose a big, third-party retailer over them. Then, they should double down on their strengths and find creative solutions for their perceived weaknesses. For example, brick-and-mortar stores charge large markups for in-person shopping perks, like being able to physically test or try on a product. But there’s many different ways D2C brands can counter that value-add with their own policies.

Just take cues from some of the most successful D2C brands in the game:

• Casper offers a generous return policy with their 100 night trial for mattresses
• Warby Parker’s Home Try-On service sends five different frames for customers to try out for five days, free of charge
• Beauty, apparel, and home goods brands leverage augmented reality marketing to offer virtual product try-ons

How traditional brands are adopting a direct to consumer marketing strategy

If your brand has primarily sold and marketed products on retail-partner or third-party sites thus far, that doesn’t mean they can’t expand to their own channels. Many traditional brands are adopting D2C marketing strategies to help them compete and grow in today’s market.

For example, Frito-Lay launched their own e-commerce site, snacks.com, to sell and deliver their brands, like Tostitos and Ruffles, directly to customers. This ensures shoppers can always find their products, especially when retail stock can be unpredictable, like at the beginning of the pandemic.

Nike is an example of a brand with a very strong identity and customer community that also maintains partnerships with retailers like Foot Locker and Dick’s Sporting Goods. However, in the past year, Nike cut ties with many of their retail partners. Instead, they focused more on their D2C business, directing more customers to their Nike stores and online shop.

Ben & Jerry’s, true to their unconventional ways, takes a different approach to D2C marketing. Although the ice cream brand is a subsidiary of their parent company, Unilever, they have their own website and board of directors to promote their products and progressive brand values. In addition to their many retail partnerships through Unilever, they also have their own Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Shops. Their social media acts as their D2C hub, connecting their audience to their brand and driving business to their own D2C scoop shops.

All of these retail brands show how they diversify their portfolios to gather customer data, build their own brand presence, and develop their own D2C channels and initiatives.

Take ownership of your brand with D2C marketing

While the D2C model certainly is profitable, you’re missing the larger point if that’s your only thought. A D2C marketing strategy allows you to completely own how you present your brand, how you connect with customers, and how you operate.

So whether your brand is large, boutique, digitally native, or exclusively sold in stores, there’s plenty of opportunities to implement D2C tactics and enjoy all the benefits.

Not sure where to start? That’s where our Expert Services team of Client Success Directors comes in. We can create you a custom direct to consumer marketing strategy to fill in the gaps of your current marketing plan and find opportunities for impactful growth. 

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According to our research, 75% of consumers said that if they notice a fake review for a product on a site, it would impact their trust in reviews for other products on the same site. This is why we at Bazaarvoice work so diligently to screen out negative reviews before they are even published. 

After years of experience moderating content, we as consumers know that it can be simple to discern fake reviews by their content. According to our survey of 10,000 global shoppers, respondents said the top ways they spot fake reviews are:

1. Multiple reviews with similar wording (56%)
2. Review content doesn’t match the product (53%)
3. An overwhelming number of 5* reviews (36%)
4. Grammar errors and misspeling (35%)
5. Only a rating with no written review or imagery (31%)

These can all be indicators of a content’s true nature and give you a heads up that something may be suspect. However, text review alone is not enough to catch all fake reviews. Because of this, we use both text patterns and data signals to monitor behaviors similar to what you would see with financial transactions.

Using text and data signals

Often, fake reviews are identified by much more than what’s said or how it was said, but with what information that can be gathered using other data signals about a person and the review/s they left. When moderating content, we look for what patterns or behaviors do not belong.

For instance, if the same person reviews an item in two different countries, that may not be suspect on its own. But if we see they are leaving them in rapid succession when they couldn’t possibly be in two places at once, then we know they’re trying to provide false information. So we’ll take their content down and block them.

This isn’t unlike the technology used to ensure credit card usage and purchases are made by the true owner. This is an extra level of machine moderation that goes beyond the human moderation that we also use, in which we have hundreds of people manually moderation reviews as well.

This additional layer of security helps tremendously in our ease in efficiency of validating reviews, simply because of the sheer amount that we receive, and because nefarious actors who leave fake reviews are constantly innovating.

The digital pattern of fake reviews 

Because fraudsters are continuously evolving, we never consider our moderation tactics to be final. We’re always working to educate ourselves while working with the most innovative vendors to identify new trends. What’s probably the biggest pillar of modern review moderation is that fraud is cumulative. 

By this, I mean that one review won’t look like much or appear out of place. One review will also rarely skew a star rating or the overall perception of a product. Unless it is the first review ever left for that product — and even then, it won’t be for long.

We’re focused instead on finding the kind of fraud that creates widespread unfair understanding about the product shoppers will be receiving. And typically one random spare review won’t do that. 

Moderating sponsored content

When consumers are looking at user-generated content such as ratings, reviews, and customer photos and videos, they’re right to assume the content comes from shoppers just like themselves, with no agenda or stake in the brand or product’s performance. They should be able to assume that what they’re reading or seeing is unbiased, not paid for, and from a neutral third party.

These assumptions allow shoppers to know they’re getting an authentic, genuine, and accurate description about someone’s opinion or experience. 

This is exactly why influencers are legally required to disclose that a product they post about or review is an #ad when sponsored by a brand. Now, authoritative bodies are imposing these same regulations on everyday consumers posting reviews.

In said reviews, consumers expect brands to disclose any relationship that could influence a reviewer’s ability to be impartial. This includes circumstances such as:

• When the poster received an incentive to leave a review. This includes free products, discounts, an opportunity to be part of a sweepstakes, or other potential items of value in exchange for an honest review. Really anything that would drive a consumer to write a review when they likely wouldn’t have on their own accord 
• If the poster has material relation to the brand. This might mean they are an employee, partner or vendor of the brand, or someone whose livelihood is dependent on the product or brand’s success
• If the poster has a close personal connection to the brand. While you don’t need to disclose if your husband works in-store for a big retailer from which you bought the product, you’d need to disclose if he husband is the CFO of the brand that sells the product

When in doubt, more disclosure is better. 27% of consumers think brands with fake content should be fined up to 30% of their revenue. So it’s certainly something shoppers are thinking about — and dislike.

How brands should be moderating sponsored content

The most important aspect is that brands need to be clear and conspicuous about their sponsored content. All disclosures should be obvious to a consumer. They shouldn’t have to do the same amount of sleuthing to find a review disclosure as say, when they’re “researching” about someone they met online that they’re about to go on a first date with. It should require no additional clicks beyond where they saw the original review. 

For example, even if the review is long and is at risk of being cut off with a “see more text” option, all disclosures about that review need to appear before the text cut off. Do you have a cute name for your rewards or sampling program through which shoppers submit incentivized reviews? Don’t assume a new consumer knows what that cute name is or means and use it in the disclosure (“This reviewer is a *CuteSamplingProgramName* Member!”).

Be obvious about how the review is incentivized. This is relevant to reviews on product pages as well as all social media posts.

One thing that unfortunately isn’t immediately considered iwhen it comes to disclosing sponsored content is ADA compliance. When including images or videos, make sure your disclosures are clear and specific, while also being written in addition to auditory. 

Work with the right content moderating partner

Incentivized reviews are not less valuable than organic ones, but they are less trusted if they’re not properly badged with obvious and understandable disclosures. To make sure your shoppers know that your content is authentic and trustworthy, you need to be as transparent as possible. Including disclosures on incentivized reviews is not only one of the best ways to achieve that, but has become legally required, as well. 

Not all fraud looks like fraud at first. But once it’s discovered, at Bazaarvoice we’ll remove all content associated with the user and block future submissions as best we can. Additionally, we’re very selective about who we partner with to make sure any content partners align with our values.

The Bazaarvoice Authentic Reviews Trust Mark is the gold standard seal of approval to prove your content is genuine.

Learn more about Bazaarvoice moderation and authenticity here.

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In this Long Read, we’ll discuss what zero-party data is, why it’s essential in a privacy-first world, and how you can use it to create personalized customer experiences.

Chapters:

1. What is zero-party data?
2. Understanding the difference: zero-party data vs. first-party data
3. How to collect zero-party data
4. Know the weaknesses of zero-party data
5. Protect your zero-party data
6. Zero-party data examples
7. Make the most of your zero-party data

Data collection can be a tricky subject and at a time where data is increasingly-protected, it can be even trickier to source and collect. But it’s important because personalization is how you reach consumers. The fastest-growing companies drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization. That’s the beauty of zero-party data collection — it’s a personalization powerhouse for e-commerce.

Without zero-party data, you’re like a salesperson in a shop trying to guess someone’s needs just from their looks. With zero-party data, you’re talking to the person to form a complete picture of them and then offer the perfect solution.

What is zero-party data?

Zero-party data is information a customer willingly shares with a business. Examples include communication preferences, interests, and product feedback.

Zero-party data has a low legal risk and is generally more accurate than other types of information as it’s collected directly and with consent from the consumer. (Zero-party data does have some flaws, which we’ll get to later.)

Examples of zero-party data is information collected through:

Understanding the difference: Zero-party data vs. first-party data

Not so long ago, there was no distinction between zero- and first-party data. But shifting consumer expectations around personal data collection and privacy have created a need for a more granular classification of the types and methods of data collection by corporations.

Zero-party data is what someone tells you. First-party data is what you infer from someone’s actions and behavior. Understand the exact definitions of each term, their differences, and why these data types are becoming increasingly important.

First-party data

First-party data is information collected from customers’ interactions with a business, such as website visits, purchase history, and customer service conversations.

You collect first-party data with cookies on your own channels and platforms, so it’s as reliable as zero-party data since you’re the source. First-party data carries a slightly higher legal risk since customers may be unaware you’re collecting this information about them.

Head over to the section Start collecting first-party cookies in place of third-party cookies in our article “Privacy regulations: How to build a first-party data strategy” for more details on how to get started with first-party cookie collection.

Examples of first-party data is information collected through:

• Website visits
• Past purchases
• Product analytics
• Marketing campaign metrics
• Customer response time (on marketing outreach or customer service interactions)
• In-store data (like how much time a customer spends in a store)

The increasing importance of both data types

Accurate and extensive customer data is essential for creating personalized marketing and excellent shopping experiences. Stricter privacy regulations mean zero-party and first-party data are the only viable sources of information for such initiatives.

Regulations like the GDPR and CCPA, plus Google and Apple’s phasing out of third-party cookies, are forcing companies to turn to zero- and first-party data.

Gartner estimates that by 2023, 65% of the world’s consumers will have their data protected by regulations. They also found that 82% of marketers have access to zero-party data, but only 42% know how to put it to good use.

How to collect zero-party data

Planning is essential when collecting zero-party data. You must have the right tools and privacy policies. But it’s also necessary to understand the weaknesses of zero-party data and what information you need to achieve your business goals.

Collect data intentionally

First, know what information you want and why. Without this intention, you may not get the data you need. Or worse, hoard info you don’t use or aren’t allowed to store.

Create a plan to figure out what zero-party data you need and where to get it by following these steps:

1. Identify the points in your customer journey that can benefit from personalization. For instance, if conversions in your shop’s checkout are satisfactory but you lose many new customers during onboarding, then focus your personalization efforts there
2. Determine which data you need for such personalization. Which information would help create a better experience at the point you selected in the customer journey? In the onboarding example, this could include the types of products your customer is interested in or their familiarity with your company and services
3. Plan when and how you can ask for the required information. Look at the customer journey again and determine the best places to ask for data. Sometimes this is the same as the point of personalization. In other cases, asking for the data a step earlier may be more effective, for example, through a welcome email campaign, which then personalizes the subsequent onboarding experience
4. Ensure all stakeholders agree with your plan. Stakeholders from all areas of your business should review and approve your plan, such as Legal, Product, and Customer Support. They may identify potential issues you overlooked or need to authorize the use of properties they manage.
5. Avoid collecting and storing data you don’t need. Doing so reduces legal risks and makes finding, analyzing, and using the information you need more straightforward and cheaper

Pick a collection method that suits your goals and audience

Deciding how to collect your zero-party data depends on two factors: the type of information required and the format customers are most likely to respond to, like surveys, quizzes, or sweepstakes.

For example, surveys are well-suited for gathering detailed information, while quizzes are good for extracting general preferences quickly. But young people might prefer a fun quiz over a long survey. And someone on a laptop might have more time to complete a survey than a person doing a quick visit to your site on mobile.

You need to consider all these factors when deciding on the best collection method. Here’s a list of the most critical aspects to take into account, each with an example:

1. Where you’re asking for the information. Typing a lot of text can be cumbersome on mobile
2. The age and interests of your customers. Younger people may be more likely to play a game than older customers
3. Your brand’s style and tone of voice. A playful quiz isn’t suitable for a formal, corporate business
4. The type of information you need. Surveys are more effective than other methods for gathering detailed information
5. The available time. A happy customer may be more willing to spend time filling out a questionnaire than an unhappy one when providing feedback
6. Familiarity with your company. Loyal customers are more likely to trust your brand and share information
7. The need for incentives. New visitors or customers who have churned may need incentives, such as discount offers, to provide information
8. The ease of data analysis. Analyzing data from multiple-choice questions is easier than from open-ended ones

Have the right tools to collect zero-party data

Collecting zero-party data requires tools that are both capable and compliant. Capable means you can get the data you need in a way that customers are comfortable with. Compliant means the tools adhere to privacy regulations, creating an auditable trail of how information was collected and allowing customers to delete their data.

To make sure a tool is capable, check whether it has:

• The functionality to collect the data you need
• Integrations with the rest of your tech stack, like marketing automation and analytics platforms
• A straightforward and smooth user experience for your customers, and accessibility options for customers with disabilities
• The flexibility to customize its look and feel for your band and audience.
• An easy implementation process

To ensure a tool is compliant, audit its security and privacy features by asking:

• What data encryption and access control mechanisms does the system provide?
• Are there audit logs to track who accessed data, when, and how?
• Does the platform comply with applicable privacy regulations?
• Does it offer customers control over their data, including the ability to delete their information?

See the table in the previous section for specific tool suggestions, such as for running online surveys, sweepstakes, or quizzes. We also recommend Google Analytics 4 for collecting first-party data. To learn more about setting it up, read the “Update to the latest Google Analytics data model” section of our first-party data article.

Use your first-party data to start collecting zero-party data

Strange as it may sound, you often begin collecting zero-party data by using first-party data. For instance, you could send out a survey via email using contact info from their account. Or you launch a chat window with a question triggered by a product someone viewed on a webpage.

Analyze what first-party data you have to use for collecting zero-party data. Common sources include:

• User accounts to collect contact details, communication preferences, and interests 
• Email marketing opt-ins to send emails for promotions, discounts, gathering feedback, and other marketing initiatives
• Social media interactions to gain feedback and insights into what content (topics) customers engage with
• Customer service conversations and support tickets to ask questions and identify common issues customers are having
• Mobile app push notification opt-ins to send mobile promotions, polls, and other short requests
• In-person or phone interactions with customer service or sales representatives to collect feedback and preferences

Use data to follow up or personalize immediately

Don’t let data sit idle once you have it. When customers see the information they provided benefits them immediately, they’re more likely to share even more data in the future.

A popular approach is sending people a discount or reward straight away, like access to exclusive content. You can also personalize product recommendations or the shopping experience itself, say by hiding or highlighting specific sections of your website or app based on people’s answers to a poll or a question you ask during onboarding.

Other options are to personalize search results, emails, and even prices based on the zero-party data you collect from people.

Complement zero-party data with first-party insights

Zero-party data is what someone tells you, while first-party data comes from people’s actions. Action sometimes speaks louder than words, and words might occasionally speak louder than action. But mostly, actions and words together speak loudest.

Combining first-party data with zero-party data can provide more context about customers’ behavior and actions. Generally, zero-party data gives more insight into why people do things, and first-party data helps you understand how and what people do on your platforms.

Say you notice customers abandoning their shopping carts. In that case, you can use web analytics (first-party data) to see what pages they visited and how long they stayed on each before leaving. To understand why they left, you can use a survey (zero-party data) to ask what made them abandon their cart.

Know the weaknesses of zero-party data

We’re big fans of zero-party data because it’s usually more accurate than information collected in other ways. Still, recent research suggests zero-party data can be prone to various flaws you need to be aware of.

Zero-party data relies on people telling you about their own behavior or thoughts. Decades of social and cognitive studies have shown that the way you ask questions affects answers and that people often struggle to understand the true motivations behind their actions.

Typical causes for inaccurate zero-party data include:

• Careless responding. People often respond randomly toward the middle or end of a long survey. Even short questionnaires can lead to incorrect responses. Accepting privacy policies without reading them can also fall into this category
• Vague questions. Ambiguous wording may cause people to give different answers because everyone understands the prompts differently; vague questions generate vague answers
• Uncommon words. Brands should use widely known words when collecting data, and non-native English speakers have an even higher chance of being unfamiliar with unusual words
• Faulty scales. Multiple-choice questions with not enough answer options can lead to inaccurate data. For example, not having a “Don’t know” option can force people with no opinion to make a choice that doesn’t reflect how they feel. ( For a comprehensive overview of answering options for different types of questions, use article on survey answering scales)
• Desirability biases. People may give answers they think are desirable rather than their true preferences. This phenomenon is known as social desirability bias
• Affective forecasting. Studies on “affective forecasting” show people are poor at predicting their future choices and emotions. This finding is significant for brands and retailers collecting zero-party data. Answers about future desires and behaviors give limited insight into what consumers will want, like, and do in the future

Protect your zero-party data

You must protect your customer information from cyber attacks, data breaches, and other external threats. But don’t forget to pay attention to what happens inside your company. Rules for your employees on accessing and storing data are also critical.

E-commerce companies can start to protect themselves from these threats by taking these three steps:

1. Implement a security program with strong authentication, encryption, and access control for all customer data
2. Monitor networks and systems for suspicious activity, like abnormal login attempts or data leakage
3. Educate employees on the importance of data security and the steps they can take to keep customer information safe. Such precautions include using strong passwords, being aware of phishing emails and unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and not sharing customer data via email or instant messengers (even internally)
4. Establish operational procedures for when an attack or breach does happen

Finally, explain how you use people’s data and your procedure for deletion requests, a right many consumers have under privacy regulations like the GDPR and CCPA. Doing so can help you avoid potential legal issues with customers.

Zero-party data examples

Many businesses use zero-party data to improve the outcomes of their marketing and sales efforts. Here are two e-commerce brands that do it well.

Quotatis uses zero-party reviews to enhance its services and customer satisfaction

Quotatis connects homeowners with construction professionals, so its customers can easily find the ideal tradesperson for small to medium-scale home improvement projects.

At the end of each assignment, Quotatis sends customers an email asking them to share their opinion of the construction professional through Bazaarvoice’s Ratings & Reviews solution. To get more zero-party data (i.e., the number of collected reviews), Quotatis has added SMS as an additional channel for collecting feedback.

A team at Bazaarvoice moderates all submissions to ensure that only customers who have purchased an installation package can leave a review. Once collected, Quotatis publishes the reviews on their platform and on the affiliate website where tradespeople offer product installation services.

When a service gets a score lower than four out of five, Quotatis customer service contacts the customer and tradesperson to investigate the problem.

The Quotatis algorithm uses customer ratings to identify the ideal professional for a particular assignment. The company also chooses their “Tradesperson of the Month” based on these zero-party customer reviews.

Read the entire case study here

Oak Furnitureland collects zero-party product photos to boost sales and engagement

Oak Furnitureland is a furniture retail chain with 75 locations in the UK. In these stores, customers can inspect the product quality by trying items like sofas and dining chairs. However, creating the same experience online was a challenge for the retailer.

So the brand partnered with Bazaarvoice to find a solution. They began collecting zero-party data in the form of pictures taken by customers of the furniture in their own homes, which they sent to Oak Furnitureland. The company used these images on its Instagram page to create social proof for potential customers by giving them an idea of how the furniture would look in their homes.

“We find that UGC is just a lot more relatable for our audiences,” said Laura Quigley, head of PR and communications for Oak Furnitureland. “It provides inspirational content that they can see and they can engage with. Real pictures in real settings show how our furniture blends seamlessly into customers’ everyday lives, where you’ve got dogs jumping on the sofa and children chucking their school bags in the hallway at the end of the school day.”

Bazaarvoice’s Galleries makes it easy for Oak Furnitureland to curate pictures customers share quickly. Instead of spending hours selecting photos manually, they can now have an attractive gallery with the best images online in minutes.

The conversion rate from Oak Furnitureland’s social program has doubled since they started using zero-party pictures in this way. Customers who interact with their website galleries also have a 21% higher average order value than others.

Read the entire case study here

Make the most of your zero-party data with Bazaarvoice

Stop relying on first-party data — or worse, third-party sources! — to personalize your e-commerce experience and marketing. With Bazaarvoice’s suite of products, you can collect, analyze, and use zero-party data confidently while keeping your customers’ data secure and compliant with privacy regulations.

• Through Product Sampling, our community of engaged shoppers can try out your offerings, give feedback, write reviews, and make recommendations to others
• Ratings & Reviews helps you collect authentic ratings, reviews, and product photos. Displaying these on your product pages can help convince other shoppers to purchase
• With Questions & Answers, you can quickly answer customer inquiries with automated alerts, question routing, and Salesforce plugins. The tool also makes it easy to uncover seasonal trends, track sentiment, and monitor mobile traffic. This data allows you to adjust product page messaging and boost sales

Click each link to learn more. Or get in touch with us directly below to get started.

Chapters:

1. What is proactive customer service?
2. The proactive customer service advantage
3. Best ways to implement proactive customer service
4. Examples of proactive customer service in action
5. Equip your brand with the right tools

Imagine you found the perfect pair of shoes to complete the look for a special event coming up. You ordered them online in enough time before the occasion, but the delivery window has come and gone. You check your email and texts to see if you missed a shipping delay notification, but there’s nothing there.

Then, you have to track down a customer service representative to find out the status of your order. They tell you because of supply chain issues, the order won’t ship for at least another week, which will be too late. Not cool. You leave a negative, frustrated review.

Now, let’s say in an alternative scenario, the company notifies you as soon as they learn about the delay. They explain the situation, apologize, and say if it’s something you need right away (it is), one of their local retail stores has the item currently in stock, and they can hold it for you to pick up. As a consolation for the inconvenience, they offer you a generous discount on your next order. You leave a glowing review about how great their customer service is.

What’s the difference between these two situations, other than one leaves you pissed off and one satisfied (if mildly inconvenienced)? The first is an example of poor, reactive–even negligent–customer service. The second is an example of proactive customer service. 

Brands that consistently practice proactive customer service will elevate their reputation, lower operating costs, and increase customer lifetime value. Find out what it means to deliver proactive customer service and examples of brands that have expertly accomplished it.

What is proactive customer service?

Proactive customer service is letting customers know about a problem and offering a resolution before the customer is even aware of the issue. However, it isn’t always about problem solving — nor should it be. Proactive customer service can also be notifying customers about updates and ways that could improve their customer experience.

This approach diffuses issues when they’re manageable before they get out of control. It also establishes preventative measures to set expectations, clarify, answer questions, and offer enhancements before purchases are even made. 

On the flip side, reactive customer service is only addressing a problem once the customer is forced to bring it up. At this point, the customer is likely stressed or upset about the issue, which puts more pressure on the customer support department and can lead to lower customer loyalty. 

The proactive customer service advantage

There’s a big potential for brands that practice proactive customer service. The ones that do will have a distinct competitive advantage. According to a Gartner survey of over 6,000 customers, a mere 13% claimed to have experienced any proactive customer service from brands they recently interacted with. Delivering proactive customer service will make you a leader in your industry.

Higher customer satisfaction

Not providing proactive customer service is a huge missed opportunity. The same survey above found that the customers who did receive some form of proactive service significantly preferred it. Key customer service metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), Value Enhancement Score, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) improved by a full percentage point across the board.

In addition to these score increases, 85% of customers rated the experience as valuable overall.

Lower business costs

Gartner’s Senior Director Analyst, John Quaglietta notes, “Shifting from reactive to proactive conversations is a game-changer, delivering nearly effortless experiences, reducing cost and increasing customer lifetime value.”

Some savings from this strategy include reduced customer support calls, thus lowering labor costs. On the other hand, proactive customer service encourages higher customer engagement with self-service channels and resources to help themselves

Stronger customer loyalty

Customer service directly impacts customer retention. Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service Report found that 90% of consumers say a brand’s level of customer service is an important factor in their choice to become a customer. Furthermore, 58% of customers surveyed claimed they would end their relationship with a brand after a poor customer service experience. 

Keeping your existing customers happy turns them into loyal customers, which has various benefits for your business. Even when you increase customer retention by 5%, your revenue increases by 25-95%. Loyal customers keep returning and become advocates because they feel valued by their brand of choice.   

Ways to implement proactive customer service

If you haven’t fully (or even partially) implemented proactive processes and procedures yet, don’t worry. There’s specific actions you can take to transition your customer service team from reactive to proactive and outperform your competition. 

The Gartner customer survey shows the top use cases for proactive service are:

• Resolving an issue (30%)
• Educating customers on a new feature (20%)
• Introducing a new product (18%)
• Renewing a purchase (12%)
• Informing about new contact methods (10%)

Here’s our top five proactive customer service best practices for retaining customers.

1. Enable self-service

Providing the information and resources that allow self-service makes it easier for the customer and the customer support team to solve issues. Customers also consider it just as valuable and impactful as assisted service. 

One essential part of self-service is developing and maintaining a robust FAQ page on your e-commerce site. A successful FAQ page has all the major and minor questions that come up throughout your customer’s journey. It should also include a search function for a convenient user experience. It’s helpful to organize your FAQ into sections for each type of concern, like shipping, order issues, order updates, product details, returns and exchanges, etc.

You can take your FAQ page a step further by expanding it to a comprehensive knowledge base. In addition to FAQs, a customer knowledge base includes links to in-depth customer support articles, instructional videos and tutorials, and detailed contact information in different departments. According to Zendesk research, most Gen Zers and half of millennials go to help centers first to get answers to their questions and resolve issues themselves.

Collaborate with your customer service representatives to create your FAQ page and knowledge base. Identify the most common and pressing issues to provide preventative solutions for. Another way to supply the most relevant and helpful information is to refer to data from your conversational commerce channels, social media interactions, customer satisfaction surveys, and questions and answers features.

2. Offer live chat

Whether you use a chatbot or a real customer service agent, offering a live messaging feature on your e-commerce site is an effective proactive support method. This service can answer customer questions, refer customers to helpful resources, and guide them through the buying journey.

We’re in the era of instant gratification. Fortunately, these channels can efficiently answer questions and troubleshoot issues for customers. The cost of not offering real-time support could be losing customers altogether. Up to 87% of online customers claim they’ll abandon a purchase if they don’t receive quick answers to their questions.

However, the gains of live chat include a “15% incremental growth in new business revenue,” according to an Intercom study. If the customer’s questions are straightforward and easily answered, the chat feature can send them to your FAQ page or the most relevant landing page with the information. If it’s a more complex question about a specific product or order issue, that’s when a human agent should step in to message, email, or call the customer.

3. Mitigate issues with proactive customer outreach

A primary function of proactive customer service is contacting customers first about complications before they have to contact you. So, as soon as an issue is detected or anticipated, you should notify the customer and recommend the next steps. You can resolve the issue by offering an alternative product or service, issuing a refund, or providing a promo code or discount on a future purchase.

It’s essential that any proactive outreach is purposeful and addresses a specific issue. In Gartner’s survey, 90% of customers found proactive service valuable to resolve a problem or educate them on a new product feature or service. However, that percentage dropped to 56% when the reason for contact was unclear. So, whatever the reason, ensure your communication has a clear message and benefit for the customer.

Predictive analytics is a sophisticated tool that the customer service team and other departments can use to forecast upcoming problems and help respond to inquiries. This type of AI uses signals to detect customer sentiment and behavior changes, shipping status, and more. It identifies at-risk customers to help prioritize outreach. This allows you to get ahead of issues and have the correct answers to questions and concerns as they arise.

4. Utilize customer feedback 

Key customer touch points like customer satisfaction surveys, ratings and reviews, and social media conversations are great tools to create a positive customer feedback loop. These insights can improve and inform proactive customer service practices and other parts of your business. Analyze your negative reviews and suggestions from surveys to find out what customers didn’t like about their purchase or service.  

These resources can help develop self-service channels and identify and fix current problems, from packaging to product detail information and delivery service, to name a few. They can also contain valuable information about the products themselves to tweak and improve them. 

Learn more ways you can leverage customer insights to elevate your marketing strategy.

5. Make relevant recommendations

A key aspect of proactive customer service is making it a part of the online shopping experience with personalization techniques. This way, you anticipate your customers’ wants and needs and add value as they navigate your e-commerce channels.

You can program your personalization software to recommend complementary products, services, and upgrades based on their website activity.

For example, if a customer adds a home desk from a furniture brand to their cart, the brand could recommend an office chair or supplies to go with their purchase. They might also offer an assembly service if the item has a lot of different parts. In addition to making helpful recommendations, this is also a way to increase your average order value. 

Examples of proactive customer service in action

Many innovative, resourceful, and disruptive brands have already seen great success from implementing proactive customer service. Take notes from these brands that have integrated a variety of tactics into their processes based on what’s most impactful for their business and customers. 

Electro Depot

European home appliance and electronics brand Electro Depot uses insights gained from their customers to improve their products, reduce the customer service team workload, and lower product returns. They leverage Questions and Answers to offer helpful self-service for their customers, which reduces calls to their customer service department.

They also use details found in customer reviews to fix flaws in their products. For example, in a review left by a customer they discovered that one of their speakers would not operate while charging. So then they were able to rectify the problem.

And based on reviews for a different product, they learned that one component of a mixer was easily breakable, which they were able to strengthen thanks to this insight. Listening to, and acting on, customer feedback prevents future customer service issues and improves overall customer satisfaction.

MeUndies

The innovative direct to consumer underwear subscription brand leans heavily on customers’ user-generated content to address customer service issues and proactively prevent future ones. 

Instead of avoiding negative reviews, the MeUndies team tackles them head-on. They analyze recurring issues, get to the root of why they happen, and prevent them from happening in the future to eliminate the problem proactively. 

They also find opportunities to resolve customer complaints they find in any one to three-star reviews. Some of these problems are quickly and easily remedied, like a customer receiving the wrong size or color. Not only does this fix the current issue, but it shows other shoppers referring to reviews that MeUndies is on top of their customer service game. They can also get clarification on specific product questions that come up in reviews.

These reviews directly shape and improve product development, as well. The product team has come to rely on the feedback from negative reviews to learn about changes customers want to see. The team that manages customer reviews collaborates with the product team, automatically sending them negative review reports that they can implement into their process.

MeUndies uses a clever proactive customer service tactic by mobilizing their employees to leave product reviews. Their team is already familiar with and knowledgeable about their products, so they leave their own descriptive reviews to provide clear expectations for shoppers. These reviews are designated as staff reviews to ensure transparency.

Another way MeUndies leverages UGC for customer service is by repurposing their Questions and Answers exchanges for product page optimization. They add the Q&As to each product page they correspond with so other shoppers can learn from previous inquiries. This proactive method results in increased conversions and decreased customer service tickets.

Billabong

Billabong, the parent company of beloved sports and swimwear brands like Roxy, Quicksilver, and DC Shoes, and your favorite brand when you were 14, guides customers through each stage of their online shopping experience with personalized product recommendations. 

Harnessing AI, they use customer data to serve relevant recommendations at each major customer touchpoint, including the home screen, product pages, and shopping cart page. The recommendations are based on the customer’s browsing history on the e-commerce site and what specific page they’re currently viewing. 

For example, visitors will see different home page views depending on whether they’re first-time or returning visitors. First-time visitors will see top-selling product recommendations and existing customers will see recommendations based on previous purchases, products viewed, and categories viewed. Customers will see recommendations for similar products or complementary accessories on individual product pages.

This makes the shopping experience more convenient and personalized for the customer so they can find what best suits their unique needs and interests. The results of this strategy for Billabong include a 15% conversion rate on product recommendations, and an over 500% increase in overall conversion rate from product recommendations.

Stitch Fix

Stitch Fix is a subscription-based apparel brand with a highly personalized product that generates custom style recommendations for each customer. They have an extremely high-tech, sophisticated machine learning program to deliver this service on a large scale. One component of their AI is predictive analytics to make the best style matches and product recommendations for their customers.

The technology considers order history and customer feedback to tailor style recommendations for their next subscription shipment. A human stylist reviews the machine’s selections and sends it to the customer. When the order is finalized and delivered, the customer provides their feedback.

According to Stitch Fix, “There is a symbiotic relationship between her and Stitch Fix, and she gives us very insightful feedback that we use not only to better serve her next time, but also to better serve other clients as well.”

Their business model offers a continuous cycle of customer feedback and service refinement. This built-in system allows them to improve their service for each customer and pass that knowledge on to other customer relationships. Their predictive analytics anticipates the needs of their customers so they know how many new styles to design and have in stock at any given time.

Equip your brand with the best tools for proactive customer service

Your customers are already telling you how to serve their needs best — you just need to know where to look. Mine your customer reviews, customer satisfaction surveys, and social media interactions to uncover the nuggets of insight to improve your customer experience.

If you lack that content, learn how Bazaarvoice’s Ratings & Reviews and Questions & Answers tools can boost your resources. Nestle Canada did exactly that when they wanted to increase customer satisfaction. How did it go?

You can read the full case study here. Or if you want to learn how to streamline your response strategy when customers provide feedback, join Caroline Macmillan, E-commerce Product Content Merchandiser at Arc’teryx, below, as she outlines the necessary tactics.

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Arc’teryx’s: Acquiring and responding to customer feedback

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Brands and retailers have realized the importance of user-generated content (UGC) on product pages, on social channels, and even in-stores — featuring UGC can increase revenue per visitor by 162%. That’s why many have built out a UGC strategy that includes partnering with a trusted user-generated content provider.

But how do you know your potential user-generated content provider is to be trusted? Understanding how a provider handles authenticity and content moderation, respects privacy, and behaves ethically can help you feel confident that you’re working with a trustworthy business.

What to ask your user-generated content provider

The Bazaarvoice moderation team works tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure all UGC across the Bazaarvoice Network is authentic and trustworthy. Based on what we see on a day-to-day basis, these are the questions we recommend you ask before signing that contract with your new content provider.

1. “What protections do you have in place for client and consumer privacy?”

Whether you’re asking for star ratings on your products from customers or are collecting written and visual reviews, you necessarily will obtain personal information from your customers. And as a business, you’ll have your own confidential information that you won’t want being publicly shared.

Understanding the security processes a content provider has in place can give you confidence in how they’ll approach data protection.

2. “How do you moderate content?”

Content moderation is a fine art – as a business, you want as much content as possible on your pages, but you also want it to be inoffensive, factually accurate, and authentic. Your content provider’s moderation practices can not only impact your content quantity and quality, but also your brand’s reputation.

Selecting a provider with thorough moderation processes is key to protecting your brand and getting your customers the information they’re looking for. Whether they’re fully manual, automated, or a combination of both.

3. “What are your authenticity practices?”

Similar to moderation practices, authenticity helps your customers attain the information they need to make their purchasing decisions. While moderation is often focused on things like reviews matching the product the review is for or that the review is topical, authenticity looks at whether the review is fraudulent or not.

Fake reviews are incredibly harmful for your business. But a content provider with top-notch authenticity practices will have methods of detecting fake reviews and patterns of fraudulent behavior.

4. “What are your standards for rejecting or accepting content?”

Not only do you want to know that your content provider has the highest standards for authenticity and moderation, but you need to understand what goes into those standards and what type of input you can have on behalf of your business.

Your provider should be able to share some of the rules in place for accepting and rejecting content. For more sensitive industries, work with your regulatory team to tailor some of those standards to better serve you.

5. “Do you badge or otherwise disclose incentivized reviews?”

While sampling, discounting, and cashback are all ethical, honest business practices, consumers prefer to know when a review has been incentivized. Or when there’s material connections to the review. That way, they’re able to consume content with that caveat in mind. Good follow up questions here would be asking what automatic badging processes they employ and what guidance they give to consumers for self-disclosure and to inform their content. 

Badging and disclosures create trust with consumers when review origins are displayed, too.

6. “What kind of support can my team expect after our service starts?”

A good company supports you through the sales process, implementation, and checks in regularly throughout your contract. A great company supports you through all of that and becomes a trusted strategic partner that helps you take your UGC program to the next level.

Look for a content provider who will give you a dedicated point of contact, analyze the success of your UGC program, and provide insights to help you understand how your business compares to others in your industry. 

7. “Are your policies up to date with current global privacy laws?”

Whether your brand predominantly does business in one country or multiple, your provider should be well-versed in global privacy laws to keep your business in good standing, no matter where your customers are located. 

The same goes for consumer protection legislation and product health and safety legislation.

8. “What does your company stand for?”

Last but certainly not least. The content provider you hire is an extension of your brand. Understanding a provider’s mission, values, code of ethics, and best practices can give you better color as to how they do business. Not just how they say they do business. Every business has a level of corporate social responsibility — guarantee your provider is matching yours. 

For example, Bazaarvoice proudly shares its code of business conduct and ethics on our site. You can view it here.

Work with the right content provider

The right user-generated content provider can take the worry and hassle out of your content strategy for you. You can sit back knowing that your partner is working hard behind the scenes for you to ensure your UGC (and branded content) is authentic and trustworthy. And particularly relevant to current times, they also drive your business growth during an economic downturn.

And if you are going to choose a content provider to work with, why not work with G2’s #1 user-generated content platform on the marketplace.

Did you know, 82% of shoppers said they would avoid using a brand again if they lost trust? Learn what threatens trust and how you can deploy strategies to protect it in our webinar below.

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