Personalize products and services without cookies and 3rd party data

How important will the protection of personal data be for companies in the future? The fact is that new legislation (such as GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, etc.) will make compliance and data protection mandatory for all companies.

The consent (Consent or Opt-In) of every user and every customer must be proven and, above all, respected. This makes data-driven marketing and campaigns more and more difficult to implement, as they are usually based on personal data that is collected and processed by a third party (3rd party data) and the opt-in rate for these services is in a very manageable range.

That’s why our customers are asking: how can you personalize your own products and marketing communications in the future without cookies and 3rd party data at all?

In order to target products and communications to customer groups, you need enough information about each individual website visitor. Today, this information is obtained from cookies and 3rd party data. This means that information is available on how a particular target group behaves on a website, what their basic interests are and what appeals to them.

If this data is no longer available due to lack of consent, there is no option for personalization. Marketers are therefore usually not very enthusiastic about the restrictions of the GDPR because from their point of view, personalized targeting becomes impossible.

To personalize nonetheless you have to rethink the topic and the data sources. There is valuable customer feedback beyond event-based data, such as from emails, the ticketing system or product reviews of the online store, which allow conclusions to be drawn about customer wishes and interests.

However, since this information is usually available as unstructured text, it cannot be easily summarized and analyzed. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), however, aggregation is easily possible, as is a quantitative evaluation of the most important data sources.

This analysis can then be used to personalize communications and the company’s own products. However, this would require a rethink within the company and the establishment of new processes.

The big advantage is that this unstructured data is usually collected by the company itself (1st party data) or is already available in large quantities in the company. However, most companies do not know how to turn the data into practical actionable insights.

You can find a summary in this video by Korbinian Spann.