Third-party data has been in such demand over the past ten years that the race to produce it and harvest it has outpaced its strategic utilization. Leveraging third-party data efficiently and effectively means understanding the data you are acquiring, the business challenges it will help solve, and the pathway through which it can be integrated.
Over the past several years, Merkle has been broadening its partnership with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company founded in 2012. As the first data provider to enable data append via the Snowflake Data Marketplace, Merkle has invited marketers to seamlessly enhance and bolster their first-party data with accurate and predictable third-party data, resulting in powerful customer experience marketing.
Why Third-party Data Matters
It’s no secret that the pressure and demand to generate positive customer experiences between marketers and consumers is currently at a fever pace. The winners of such strategies stand to gain profitable and long-term customers for many years to come. Enhancing current first-party data with diverse and vast third-party data, widens an organization’s lens, enabling the understanding of the many dimensions of the consumer. Third-party data attributes such as demographic, financial, psychographic, transactional, interest-based triggers, and even curated promotional history elements, make predicting for next best actions, preferred channel, next best product, and even optimal offer a reality. While brand engagement has evolved over the past few years, the need to generate loyal long-term customers has remained consistent. Leveraging the right dynamic data is the foundation for generating the type of customer experiences that will foster brand advocates.
Leveraging Third-party Data in your marketing strategy
It is easy to see the many use cases that third-party data can help solve. Best practice calls for identifying the most essential use cases and then crafting a testing plan that prioritizes impact and effort. This helps the organization secure a data utilization win, begin to recognize the enterprise wide value, and work to advance adoption across the organization. At Merkle, we typically see clients leveraging data to solve for customer segmentation, marketing investment, next best product or action, media mix modeling, site personalization, attrition prediction, and long-term (lifetime) value calculation. Often, the appending of third-party data to first-party data evolves to inform customer acquisition targeting, thus, helping the brand generate positive consumer experiences with potential customers. This results in acquiring better customers, translating to stronger customer experiences and longer brand loyalty.
Acquiring Third-party data
Partnerships such as the one between Snowflake and Merkle make acquiring and testing third-party data more efficient than ever. Snowflake’s secure sharing platform enables brands to seamlessly append their data with assets such as Merkle's DataSource product, without the cumbersome and time-consuming process of setting up additional secure portals that support personally identifiable information (PII) data sharing. “The More You Know”, a once famous PSA, is as true today as it was decades ago. When it comes to producing the best customer experience marketing campaigns, having both wide and deep knowledge on your customers is a mandate. Marrying first-party data and third-party data has proven to be the best way to “know more”.
Interested in learning more? Snowflake clients can access a free trial of our data product, DataSource, on the Snowflake Data Marketplace here. Partners can now take the expanded third-party data into their environment, appended to their first-party data, and evaluate the data’s efficacy and impact on their customer experience efforts.