Is There a Way Out of the Cookie Apocalypse?

While the demise of the 3^rd party cookies is knocking on the door, marketers are exploring new options for optimizing targeting and segmentation methods, profiling consumer behaviour and investing in a much better customer experience. The inevitable answer seems to lie in a combination of new and old methods, employed in an orchestrated way: a.k.a Loyalty as a 1^st party data collection, enrichment & activation method!

3^rd party cookies were a targeting and segmentation identifier for brand marketers for a very long time. Using “other people’s data” was an easy, well-accepted and a proven methodology for everyone to reach out to new leads, follow up on existing prospects and customers. Unfortunately, not anymore…

As we have pointed out in Labrys Modern Marketing 2.0 Framework, savvy marketers need to start working on “Big Data for Advertising & Marketing”.  Brands shall start building up their own data, targeting and omnichannel experience strategies from scratch. Audience targeting must start with first party data of advertisers, but not with “other peoples’ data” as they are used to.

As a driver of this strategy, modern & connected loyalty and sales promotion methods & technologies will provide an important kick start for these efforts. It is important to note that it is long gone the days of complex and expensive loyalty softwares that may require complicated infrastructures as well as a load of dedicated marketing personnel. Modern loyalty approach provides agile solutions to act on both online and offline frontends, i.e., by connecting the divide between e-commerce sites & apps with physical points of sales. This is true for both data collection and redemption activities. This would definitely open up new venues to strategize and collect all available data and be able to segment, bond and form a long-term relationship with customers. It will also allow marketers to activate these functionalities to orchestrate an omnichannel customer experience. Insight driven from these first party data sources would be used to increase efficiency in advertising targeting and segmentation efforts, as well as provide priceless input for a true customer 360 dataset.

According to “The Loyalty Report, State of Loyalty, 2020”, by bond, in partnership with Visa, 64% of consumers modify their spend amounts with respect to relevant offers provided. What’s more, the overall experience accounts for 76% of what drives engagements, leading into a conclusion that a true omnichannel experience has a high probability to drive engagements between a brand and a consumer. Another important perspective would be the effect of personalization in orchestrating omnichannel experiences, which includes advertising and point of sales transactions as well from Labrys perspective. It is found by the same study that loyalty programs achieving high levels of personalization along the member lifecycle experience drive spend by 6,4 times & tailored offers on member behaviours and needs receive 8x more positive response and drive members to these offered choices rather than their initial preferences.

From another perspective, according to McKinsey’s “The big reset: Data-driven marketing in the next normal” report, “Between March and August 2020, one in five consumers switched brands, and seven in ten tried new digital shopping channels. The retail sector experienced ten years of growth in digital penetration in a matter of months.” With all these facts in place, brands now are under huge pressure to provide seamless digital experiences for their customers right now. Therefore, it is at utmost importance to create a “trusted data relationship” between brands and customers and channel this relationship into more personalized experiences with an omnichannel approach. Hence, loyalty and personalized sales promotion programs would be a very important data source, activation platform and a milestone for achieving a true omnichannel experience for customers.

Therefore, cookieless world is clearly not the end of advertising as we know it! But it is the beginning of a new era for marketers to tap into new skillsets to benefit from new generation AdTech & MarTech. Gathering insights from first party data sources like loyalty and sales promotion programs and using these insights in creating better advertising and customer service experiences as well as providing more and more personalized offers would enable marketers to maximize returns from their investments.

Labrys provides data-driven marketing consultancy services as well as a loyalty & sales promotion engine, along with a connected martech & adtech stack for marketers. Click here now to get in touch with a consultant to revamp your marketing transformation efforts today.