Collecting Zero Party Data With Sitecore

Building and maintaining trust between a business and its customers is crucial to customer engagement. Sitecore as a CMS has made bold efforts over the years to ensure that personalization is seamlessly made available to businesses to improve customer experience and engagement. By partnering with multiple DXP companies and platforms, Sitecore helps you deliver well-optimized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys through zero party data collection.

Although third-party data has powered digital advertising for many years, it is now fading away. Companies now need to depend on first-party or zero party data to pursue better personalization.

What Is Zero Party Data?

According to Forrester, zero party data is information that a customer voluntarily and knowingly gives to a business. It may include purchase intents, preference center data, personal context, and how customers want the brand to recognize them. Today’s marketers frequently discuss “zero party data.” Zero party data has been cited by experts as a critical factor in personalization initiatives and campaigns in 2020 and beyond.

Zero party data is purely permission-based, as customers have to give out their information to a business willingly. Using this data for segmentation, personalization engines, or product suggestion tools is transparent for businesses due to zero party data.

You can think about zero party data as conversational data: what would you learn from a customer if you were chatting with them about their preferences, choices, and opinions? Some examples include: your customer’s marital status, date of birth, favorite food, gender identity, and so much more.

Zero party data can boost your business. With zero party data, you should expect bigger purchase orders, greater customer engagement, higher customer retention, and even reduced acquisition costs by giving your consumers a more personalized experience.

However, while there are many benefits of zero party data for the business, the customer should remain the priority in collecting this data. Trust and respect must be the foundation for acquiring such personal details from customers, as doing so to boost personalization and improve business results is crucial; companies should communicate the benefits to the end user as well.

A generic statement about data being used to provide more personalized offers and recommendations might suffice in some cases, but providing more concrete examples, such as the added privacy it offers (since customers only share what they choose to), compared to other data collection methods, or the opportunity to receive premium offers should be highlighted.

Zero Party Data vs. First Party Data vs. Third Party Data

First-party data is information about a company’s customers that is gathered using the company’s software and systems to compile customer information. This data collection involves site-wide, app-wide, and on-page behaviors and interactions from customers. Examples include scrolling, hovering, attention span, session context, and how customers engage with personalized experiences.

Third-party data, on the other hand, has to do with information purchased from data aggregators and advertisers or by running ads with big social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Demographic data, firmographic data, buying signals, and other data from CRM, POS, and call center systems are all examples of third-party data utilized in personalization.

Regarding personalization, zero party data is “gold” due to its privacy factor, as it enables and encourages customers to share information about themselves willingly. This gives way to a certain level of trust between the business and customer, unlike the first-party and third-party data.

Why Companies Are Leveraging Zero Party Data

Personalization is important when it comes to creating a better customer experience. Companies can give their customers a satisfying buying experience by utilizing the information the customers offer willingly and tailoring the company’s home page and other browsing sites to their customers’ tastes.

Personalization is fast becoming a crucial part of an improved customer experience, and companies are embracing it to change the retail experience for customers.

Increase in Digital Interaction

Consumers are registering for accounts, checking in to digital sites, and participating online more than ever before, whether to save time, make it easier to find goods or services, or avoid going into a brick-and-mortar store. This activity is a fantastic chance for companies to solicit preferences, discover more about consumers, and provide better experiences.

According to Statista, more than five billion people used the internet as of April 2022, making up 63.1% of the world’s population. This is to say that now and then, people are constantly engaging in online activities, and this would be a better time for companies to utilize zero party data to provide the best customer experience.

Transparent Relationships With Customers

Customers want businesses to understand their particular tastes and preferences and interact with them as individuals instead of as generic customer types or market groups. A transparent customer relationship is born by providing customers with individualized messaging, offers, and products.

In Mckinsey’s Author Talks: Building consumer trust with Google’s Neil Hoyne, the author pointed out that customers are willing to share their data with a business. Still, the first issue is they want to have trust in the business they are sharing the data with before anything else. If businesses can make solid efforts towards personalization for customers, there is an increased chance of gaining customers’ trust.

Furthermore, marketers have used inferred data sources for years to create customer segmentation and power personalization efforts. Due to this, there was a significant decline in customer trust as well as poor conversion and retention. The trend toward zero party data is a good step toward transparency and trust between businesses and customers.

Access to Better Quality Data

When businesses use strategic questions to collect customer data directly, they have access to all the necessary information needed to perfect personal suggestions, plan future brand developments to align with the customer base, and develop targeted marketing efforts that feel individualized while appealing to the broadest audience.

How to Collect Zero Party Data With Sitecore

Sitecore is completely intentional about increasing business value and offering some of the best solutions and advantages, such as scalability, safety, and improved site performance, to help businesses provide the best customer experience, increase customer engagement, and boost revenue.

With Sitecore CDP, you can say goodbye to data silos and disjointed customer profiles. Sitecore CDP allows businesses to capture, unify and activate omnichannel data.

Sitecore has also partnered with several companies like Cheetah Digital to provide the best-personalized experience for customers.

Other useful tools from Sitecore that help with zero party data include:

• Customer Data Management

• Personalization and Testing

• Marketing Automation

Best of Sitecore and Oshyn to Improve Your Personalization Efforts

As a Sitecore partner, Oshyn collaborates with brands to develop breathtaking digital experiences. You can redesign and execute the Sitecore digital experience platform with the aid of Oshyn.

Beyond installing and maintaining a Sitecore system, we have a thorough understanding of Sitecore. We can assist you in utilizing the DXP’s full potential to create personalized experiences at scale while utilizing AI and rule-based customization.

Please check out our case study NEA Member Benefits Sitecore Site Development to find out more about our services and to get a first-hand picture of our personalization abilities.