The market challenge

How will you fuel your consumer-first strategy with personal preference data? 92% of marketers believe using first-party data is critical to their growth, allowing them to build direct relationships with consumers, and in turn, better personalize their marketing efforts. The relevance and accuracy of data that is driving marketing strategies is essential to be able to provide a truly excellent personalised experience and achieve higher ROI from digital marketing campaigns. Having access to consumer's name and email address on its own isn't enough, marketers are looking for tools that will enable them to better understand motivations, intentions, interests and preferences of their consumers.

Now when we understand the challenge, it would be good to talk about the types of data marketers can collect about their consumers. Let's start with the first party data. First party data is collected through a direct relationship with a consumer through forms, surveys, quizzes, transactions and more. The advantage of first party data is the ownership, relevance, compliance, accuracy and level of detail that will help you create custom audiences. 

Second-party data is a type of data you have access to typically through partnerships and sponsorships with Google, Facebook or Media publishers. It can greatly enhance your own first-party data set and improve accuracy. The downsides of relying on second-party data are related to compliance issues and the limited control over how and what data is being collected. 

Third-party data is typically a large data set that is compiled by data vendors from many sources - often publicly available ones. Because of its nature, the biggest strength of third-party data is scale, while accuracy, relevance and compliance will be the biggest weaknesses. 

The product-focus

For years, Cheetah Experiences has been promoting and sharing knowledge on the importance of first-party data, over the use of third-party data aggregators. There are a few key reasons why being in control of the data you collect is important to marketing organizations:

• Ownership – when you collect first-party data, you have a complete ownership. If you have sufficient user permissions, you can manually export data in csv file, you can also use our Export API or we can offer direct integration with your other system and transfer data in a real-time to you.
• Relevance – marketers can fully customise data capture forms in the Cheetah Experiences Experience Platform, making sure the data they collect are what they need. You can keep it simple with the essential, or customise form fields such as dropdown, radio-choice, free-type text field.
• Compliance – Cheetah Experiences is GDPR compliant and data protection, secure processing and transferring has always been in the forefront of what we do.
• Accuracy – Cheetah Experiences only collects data that people willingly share and therefore the data is highly accurate.
• Custom audiences – to sum it up, because marketers gain a real understanding of their audience, it enables them to really personalise an experience, product, service or further marketing communication accordingly.

Reaching your audiences where they really are

Third-party data is also hugely desktop dependant as cookies are not being tracked on mobile devices so browsing activity cannot be tracked. With more Google searches being made on mobile device in 10 countries including US according to Google’s Internal Data, marketers are looking for new ways to collect data from mobile-first audiences. And it’s no surprise that in the past few years there has been a huge shift of marketing spend on social channels such as Instagram and Snapchat towards mobile. Instagram Mobile Ad Revenue is predicted to hit nearly $7 Billion in 2018 (Statista) and with Facebook’s research stating that advertising featuring social stories has an 18% higher click-through rate, Cheetah Experiences has decided to focus its efforts on creating beautiful experiences that are specifically designed to engage mobile consumers.

The solution 

We have launched NextGen (Micro) Experiences with data capture forms that are optimised for seamless completion on mobile, allowing marketers to incentivize engagement, gain a valuable insight in consumer’s preferences and to collect actionable first-party data with marketing opt-ins.

To really enable marketers to drive engagement and data capture to power personalization we have focused on enhancing the radio option design and functionality. With enhanced design controls and animations, you will turn impersonal forms into entertaining user experiences people will enjoy. Let’s look at the latest enhancements.

Micro Sign-up with radio choice set to vertical layout with an image and background video.

Navigate to the Experience Library to NextGen Experiences tab and select any experience to start building your first experience. There is a guide that will take you through the main steps, but let’s focus on the form field that will help you understand consumer preferences the most - the radio choice. First of all, ask your audience a question of interest and pre-define possible answers. The options can be text or text & image based and every single response will be recorded and available to you on a data export so you can really customise the follow-up conversation with your audience.

How to set up radio-choice:

1. Drag & drop radio choice in the desired space in your experience and click on Edit;
2. In Settings tab, customise your question as well as values for your radio choice:
   
   

1. In Design tab, define the look & feel:
• Select a template - layout of the answer options;
  
  
  
  
• Select a tile style - how each the answer options will appear.
  
  
  
  
• Decide about an image size if relevant to the selection of your tile style.

Save your changes, publish your experience and voilà. You are ready to fuel your strategy with real-data and insight.