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Marketing Leaders Must Refocus on First-Party Data to Personalise in Risk-Averse Environment

The demise of third-party cookies, heightened consumer sensitivity to messaging, and tightening of marketing budgets have restricted personalisation opportunities, according to Gartner, Inc. 

Because of this, marketers need to rethink their personalisation tactics to better navigate the current recessionary environment. They must refocus on first-party data: the data their company has collected directly from their audience.

In Gartner’s 2020 CMO Spend Survey, only 14% of respondents reported personalisation and testing among the top-three capabilities they see as vital to supporting the marketing strategy. 

This low level of prioritisation suggests marketers are ill-prepared to capitalise on personalisation. As a result, Gartner predicts that one-third of marketers will reduce spending on personalisation as a line item in the marketing budget by 2021.

“Marketers must obsess less over personalising across the widest range of data sets, and instead leverage their immediately available first-party data sources,” said Evan Bakker, research principal in the Gartner Marketing practice. 

“This will allow marketers to improve the customer experience across sites, apps and email in order to capitalise on an expanding digital audience.”

Gartner tracked and analysed over 1,000 brands for personalisation trends and identified four key findings that marketers should keep in mind as they refocus their efforts on first-party data:

1. Capture meaningful data at sign-up – While collecting less data can limit future targeting opportunities, form fatigue may result in lower sign-up rates, confining most brands to customer names and emails. Marketers should consider segmenting their customers through newsletter sign-ups by offering content preferences, a practice that brands in the pharmaceutical industry often excel at.
2. Gather and utilise explicit data after login – Account sign-up usually leaves brands with limited immediate data points for personalisation, however, the post-login account customisation stage can help brands collect richer information about their customers. In fact, all brands studied in Gartner’s report, “Activating Explicit and Implicit Data to Personalise at Scale,” collected some form of segmentation data at the customisation stage, compared to only 65% capturing such data during sign-up.
3. Personalise at scale with implicit data – Prioritise the incorporation of data sourced from session behaviour to personalise sites for account and non-account holders at scale. An analysis of sites covering brands ranked as Genius or Gifted in Gartner’s Digital IQ Indexes showed that best-in-class brands most often apply these principles to cross-sell on the product page.
4. Leverage account data to target via email – Brand marketers must extend their site personalisation approach to email, leaning on the implicit and explicit data gathered to send targeted communications. For example, insurance brands frequently use data gathered from prospect quote submission forms or existing policyholders to target users via email across different stages of the customer journey to increase online conversion rates.

Additional detail is available to Gartner for Marketers clients in the report: Aim for Efficiency with Available Data to Personalise Under Recessionary Conditions.

About the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo

Gartner analysts will provide additional insights during Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, which takes place virtually, December 1-3, 2020. The conference provides marketing leaders actionable advice about the trends, tools and emerging technologies they need to deliver business results. Gartner analysts address the biggest opportunities, challenges and priorities marketers face today, including data and analytics, customer experience, content marketing, customer insight, marketing technology (martech) and multichannel marketing. Follow news and updates for the event on Twitter at #GartnerMKTG.

About Gartner for Marketers

Gartner for Marketers provides the objective, expert advice and proven tools that CMOs and other marketing leaders need to seize the right opportunities with clarity and confidence, and to stay ahead of the trends that matter. With in-depth research and analysis, Gartner for Marketers helps you focus on the opportunities with the greatest potential to deliver results. More information on Gartner for Marketers is available online at www.gartner.com/marketing.

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading research and advisory company and a member of the S&P 500. We equip business leaders with indispensable insights, advice and tools to achieve their mission-critical priorities today and build the successful organisations of tomorrow.

Our unmatched combination of expert-led, practitioner-sourced and data-driven research steers clients toward the right decisions on the issues that matter most. We are a trusted advisor and an objective resource for more than 14,000 enterprises in more than 100 countries — across all major functions, in every industry and enterprise size.

To learn more about how we help decision makers fuel the future of business, visit gartner.com.