5 Trends Impacting Data Strategies and How Top Brands Use Data

As brands prepare for a cookieless future beginning in 2023, in addition to Apple iOS changes that now require companies to ask consumers’ permission to track them across the web, brands have some important decisions to make about how to access and activate customer data to continue to generate meaningful business results.

For example, deploying the right data infrastructure can help brands make sense of and effectively use customer data. Or, developing the right best practices for consented data collection can provide a highly personalized customer experience. These data decisions matter because they play a big role in how a customer experiences and ultimately, trusts a brand. It can mean the difference between a brand that people trust or not.

We examined how our clients–some of the world’s best-known brands–are using their customer data and wrapped the findings in our 2022 State of Customer Data Report. Here’s what we uncovered:

5 Trends in Customer Data

• Greater Privacy Concerns – A reported 88% of customers want consent over their data usage. We expect this number will increase. Only 7% of consumers know how their information is used once they have given consent. Customers are more likely to opt into data collection if they see the enhanced value.

• More Data Available – Marketers have more data available than ever before. In the last two years, 90% of the world’s data was created. The more data that’s available to marketers, the more personalized campaigns can be, thereby increasing their effectiveness.

• Lack of Confidence in Usage – Many marketers struggle with a lack of data integration between technologies or data sources. This gap translates into difficulty turning actions into insights and ultimately proving ROI.

• Heightened Customer Expectations – Our report found that if brands aren’t utilizing their customers’ collected data, they probably also aren’t meeting their minimum expectations for a personalized experience.

• Value Exchange – Zero-party data collection, when done right, is about collecting data to exchange value with the customer.

How Our Clients Use Data

Our clients are responding to these trends. We found that among the top-performing brands, third-party data collection (cookie tracking) is becoming obsolete because of looming consumer privacy protections to be enacted by Google. These forward-thinking brands are collecting their own data directly from their customers (first-party data) or using data that customers intentionally share (zero-party data).

Our report also found that these brands are able to effectively leverage large amounts of first-party and zero-party data to create personalized campaigns that exceed customer expectations and generate higher conversion rates.

The top 40% percent of our zero-party and first-party data-reliant clients had campaigns that performed 2.9x better. Clients in the top percentile of campaign performance use 2x more data points per campaign, integration, and segment. Each additional data point led to an average of a 3% increase in a campaign’s performance.

In other words, the more data points brands leveraged in any given campaign, the better that campaign performed. Not only that, but they have mastered data usage to create personalized campaigns, campaigns that achieved higher conversion rates

Key Takeaways

Our 5 takeaways from the 2022 State of Customer Data Report are:

• Own data collection and prioritize consented data provided by the customer.
• Being able to make sense of and use data will become table stakes.
• Brands that can maintain transparency can make better use of consented data.
• Directly collected data combined with shared information will balance personalization with privacy.
• Technology is only one piece. Brands need best practices of data usage to succeed.

Simon Data’s CDP answers these challenges by helping brands unlock this data to create exceptional and impactful personalized experiences that exceed customer expectations. To learn more, please visit https://www.simondata.com/resource_types/case-studies/.

To view the full report, visit the 2022 State of Customer Data Report.