Are you making the most out of your first party data?

First party data is the future of digital publishing. It’s what allows us to prove to commercial partners the value of our engaged audiences and it allows us to market ourselves more effectively to those audiences and provide them with the best possible experience.

First party data was the focus of our latest webinar (‘10 top tips for extracting the most value from your first party data’, presented by Affino’s Markus Karlsson).

Here are four things that I took away from the webinar:

1. Sign-up is the be all and end all. If your visitors are not signed up / logged in, then you can’t find out who they are and start to build a relationship. To that end, Markus advises brands to do away with ‘guest checkouts’: “the loss of data and loss of relationship building far exceeds the loss of revenue”.
2. You need a centralised CRM. If you use multiple audience platforms (not a great idea in itself), they must regularly feed into one CRM. A key data point to consider is ‘last touch’ because this determines the age of the data.
3. Devise an end-to-end taxonomy. The tags you apply to your user base are critical to its subsequent usability. If your sales, editorial and marketing teams all refer to different audience segments in different ways, then “your funnels are just not going to work”. Your tags need to be standardised, thoroughly thought through, organisation-wide to help with cross-fertilisation and regularly reviewed, because “language changes”.
4. Don’t hold onto old data. Publishers can be data hoarders, but data storage is expensive, and inflated databases can mask shortcomings. You think your database is 100k, but is it really?

Your first party data is your ticket to future publishing success, but it needs to be intelligently managed.

If you registered for the webinar, then you will have received a link to the recording. If you haven’t yet registered but would like to hear what Markus had to say, then please register here and you will be directed to the recording.

(Finally, we are putting together the mailing list for the September / October issue of InPublishing magazine, which includes a special extended feature (sponsored) on ‘subscriber retention’. If you’d like to be added to the free mailing list, then please register here.)