Personalized Marketing Starts with Zero-Party Data
• 4 mins read
In the realm of digital marketing, the term zero-party data is increasingly gaining attention. Coined by Forrester in a research study.
Definition:
Zero-party data are those data that a user intentionally and proactively shares.
These data differ from other types (first-party, second-party, and third-party data) because they are voluntarily provided by the customer and are not explicitly related to necessary activities, such as e-commerce transaction data. They are the information a customer wants a company to know and do not have the invasive nature that some forms of data collection might have.
How do users provide these data?
For example, through responding to surveys or filling out fields required by opt-ins. It's the case of a user expressing consent to be added to a mailing list.
It's a principle of exchange: the user offers their data in exchange for valuable content of an informative and/or commercial nature. In this way, the brand obtains email addresses, phone numbers, and information useful for profiling.
Why are zero-party data important?
Zero-party data are crucial not only because they fuel permission-based marketing but also because they enable brands to contextualize and personalize their marketing strategies, enhancing the effectiveness of efforts to personalize customer/user experiences.
It's a win-win logic: zero-party data help brands focus and reduce waste in marketing activities and, at the same time, facilitate and improve the experience of the customer/user interacting with the brand.
The Role of Communities
In this context, communities - brand-owned social networks - offer advanced tools to collect structured zero-party data and promote products and services more coherently and contextually with dedicated promotion and marketing automation tools.
They offer a wide variety of tools, including:
Explicit data: such as posts, comments, likes, connections, follows, surveys, etc.;
Implicit data: such as interests, social graph, membership in a specific cluster, etc.;
Data related to user experience continuity,
which allow the brand to collect relevant information to offer personalized user experiences and promote products and services more coherently and contextually with dedicated promotion and marketing automation tools.
SelfCommunity: Enabling Brands to Build Their Own Communities
SelfCommunity is a platform that enables brands to create and develop their own communities and provides all the tools necessary for brands to enhance their business using data intentionally and proactively shared by users and consumers.
The platform allows users and clients to interact within the social community through all the common and advanced functionalities of a social network.
All activities and moments of interaction are organically and structuredly tracked by the platform, providing the brand with a complete set of relevant data and KPIs to support them in building and optimizing their social community and marketing strategy.
