With the future of third-party cookies uncertain, the need for retailers to collect and nurture accurate first-party data about their customers has never been more essential.   

Jamie Hoey, country manager, Australia, with Wunderkind, says the importance of first-party data cannot be overstated. “If you know who someone is, you’ve got their details; that’s very powerful.”

First-party data allows customers to be segmented into groups that brands can tailor relevant, timely promotions to – no more emails promoting children’s clothing to bachelors who have only ever bought menswear from you, for example. 

Hoey says that if a brand wants to become more mature in its digital strategy, the more first-party data it can collect around an individual, the better it can target its communications. That could be as simple as a name, an email address, or a phone number. However, understanding the activity, the interests and the life cycle of an individual allows retailers to enrich that data. 

“I look at it from a perspective that there is identifying it, then capturing it, then nurturing it. Ultimately, your first-party data is your customer, and you should be able to talk to them in a more personalised way. The power of your first-party data is not only how much of it you can capture but how relevant you can make it.”

Wunderkind leverages first-party data and its proprietary means of identifying anonymous website traffic, then works alongside brands, using its marketing engine to convert leads into sales through owned channels, including email and text. Hoey describes this identity resolution process as “all about taking anonymous people on a website and being able to de-anonymise them”.

The company’s Identity Network – a proprietary database recognising 9 billion devices and 1 billion consumers and observing 2 trillion digital transactions annually – allows brands to deliver the most impactful offers to their target audience at the right moment and on the right channel. Wunderkind’s Autonomous Marketing Platform integrates seamlessly into a brand’s existing email service provider to boost performance across email, text and advertising channels.

Converting anonymous users into customers

“If we can identify more people that come to a retailer’s site in real-time, we can determine if that person has consented to receive communications. We can do this without relying on a recent cookie or the need for the customer to log in. Then, we can help brands to retarget those customers in a one-to-one, triggered way, based on their on-site activity, all while being privacy-centric and fully GDPR compliant.”

Wunderkind’s ‘bread and butter’ is helping companies address online shoppers’ cart abandonment. “If a customer puts something in a cart and abandons it, and they are not within a 30-day cookie window or have not provided an email address, under the law, you can’t send them an abandoned cart email. 

“Many brands can target only 10, maybe 15 per cent of the people who abandon their carts because the rest are outside those parameters,” explains Hoey. Wunderkind’s identity resolution software works to identify individuals when they visit a site and how to communicate with them. This also expands beyond abandoned carts to areas like SMS solutions, catalogue modules, low-in-stock reminders, price drop promotions – “anything that has a level of intent behind it”. 

The company delivers more than US$5 billion annually in directly attributable digital revenue for brands worldwide, making it a top revenue channel for clients including Fantastic Furniture, Camilla Australia and RM Williams. 

Australian omnichannel bicycle retailer 99Bikes drives 6 per cent of its total digital revenue from Wunderkind’s identity resolution service. 

Third-party cookies

While the long-term fate of third-party cookies in Google’s Chrome browser is still up in the air, they have not been eradicated, which Hoey says gives marketers and brands more time to look at alternative solutions instead of constantly relying on cookies.

“That’s where we are seeing more growth in first-party data strategies, where marketers are looking at how they can replace cookies. Most people will already have some type of strategy to reduce their dependence on third-party cookies, and I don’t think there’s quite as much reliance on them as before.”

Building first-party data is not getting more challenging, even in an era when consumers have heightened concerns about their privacy and who is sharing their data. But Hoey says brands need to be more thoughtful about how they do it. 

Five or 10 years ago, many online retailers did not use pop-ups to capture consent or data. Nowadays, if they do not, they’re almost the outlier, says Hoey. “But I think many retailers are now thinking about how you can be more relevant from a user or customer experience perspective. The simple entrance and exit capture experiences aren’t enough to build your data capture strategy around.”

By monitoring online behaviour, Wunderkind’s team helps brands determine the best time to show pop-ups so as not to impact bounce rates or irritate consumers. Hoey believes most online retailers are now doing a good job of capturing information from visitors – first-timers or regulars. 

“The difference is between doing it good and doing it great. That’s where brands need to get smarter.”

Getting it wrong can damage the customer experience

He warns brands to balance obtaining information from visitors with overdoing the communications. 

“If someone declines an email capture pop-up on entrance, and then you’re showing it again, that’s going to lead to high bounce rates. If someone is making 10 or 12 purchases a year, you want to be able to identify those people so that they are not seeing an offer of 10 per cent off their ‘first order’. If you’re unable to track that, it’s a huge problem because that’s not a great user experience.”

In contrast, a mattress brand might see a customer once every four or five years. “You want to do everything you can to capture their data because they might not return for a long time. There are different strategies and ways of looking at it, so each brand needs to think about its own strategy rather than just trying something and seeing how it works. It needs to be tailored, and that’s where working with an expert partner like Wunderkind provides an advantage.”

If a retailer fears a risk of cheapening their brand value by offering an incentive of 10 per cent off a purchase price, they can consider a competition or another form of incentive. “That’s where testing the right messaging becomes pretty important, as well as knowing what works.”

One of Wunderkind’s luxury clients successfully tested a sign-up pop-up inviting visitors to receive news on new product releases rather than a discount for first-time purchases or a competition around a sporting sponsorship campaign. 

“Fundamentally, you are offering something of value – or at least trying to tap into what your audience wants.”

• Learn more about identity resolution and how brands can reduce reliance on third-party cookies in this webinar from Wunderkind, Shaping the Future of Identity Resolution & Privacy, which you can watch on demand here.