Sally runs an E-Commerce website for her hand-made clothes. Almost 80% of Sally’s entire consumer base was built on the existence of third-party cookies. In 2024, she is now scrambling to retain a small number of her customers as she did not prepare adequately for the dissolution of third-party cookies. This scenario is unfortunately a reality for many businesses who depend on cookies for their client base. To help you avoid a similar fate, check out the following steps you can take to thrive and adapt in a cookieless world.
Identity mapping
- Creating a customer base is an integral part of your journey without cookies. Here, you can invest time and resources in collecting data from several widely used databases like LinkedIn, Facebook etc.
- For instance, if your business is catering to large companies about your HRM software, then your database could be drawn from LinkedIn, and your persona base could be human resource members of different organizations. Similarly, if you operate an online fashion website, then your customer information could be drawn from Instagram’s hashtag section to view who all have interacted with a certain kind of fashion.
- On top of this, automation could be of immense use here. Web scraping is a bot that mimics a human but systemically cinches data that you require. Programming it to collect customer data from multiple public domains can allow you to access a wider pool of the customer’s likes and dislikes, hence specifying your target audience.
First-Party Data
- Implementing first-party data collection will involve you investing in rigorous data collection mechanisms that target websites, mobile applications, and any social media platforms your customer is a part of. This information is consented and an ethical way to retrieve data, while maintaining your customer’s privacy.
- For analysis of this data, accepting server-side tracking as a replacement of cookies provides you with greater control over your data and compliance. To further manage user identities and permissions and ensure data privacy and compliance, you can always implement customer identity and access management solutions.
Tracking Data through Other Methods
First-party data is not the only way you can collect data. This type of collection can often be a little less exhaustive than the various other methods available to you. These are:
- IP Addresses: this could be used to decode the location of a user, hence sending them region-specific content,
- Device Fingerprinting: could be used to collect data directly from the servers, which stores a user’s data fingerprint,
- Hashed Emails: using hashed emails means protecting the email addresses of your customers, so that you can still send them content but also protect their data from third party exploitation,
- Mobile Ad IDs: MAIDs can be used to track your customer’s interactions with your marketing content, while also protecting their identity, and
- Device IDs: can be used to detect app installations and uninstallations to view how satisfied a customer has been with their app-experience, without uncovering any personal data.
Marketing Mix Model
Getting started with MMM is quick and easy. You can begin by collecting historical data on marketing spend and performance across all the channels on which you have ongoing marketing campaigns. Here, what MMM does is quite different from cookie-based data collection. Where cookies collect user data and history, MMM collects campaign data and analyses it in terms of the growth of your business. This will also help you bypass cookie restrictions and help you make data-driven decisions, hence strengthening your survival in this cookieless world.
In conclusion, identity mapping, first-party data and market mix modelling can help you not just sustain, but also grow your business to new levels. Overall, with the demise of cookies comes a new path for you to keep your footing within the business world.
