When it comes to third-party customer data, the cookie will crumble, but not quite yet! Google has delayed third-party cookie deprecation on their Chrome browser until 2024, but the time for third party data is running out, and marketers really need to start switching their strategy towards using first and zero party data, as well as using data from different marketing channels to compliment each other and create a stronger strategy.
We recently ran a webinar with our SEO and PPC team, alongside Kate from eFocus Marketing to discuss how marketers can utilise their SEO, Paid and Email marketing data more effectively. This is what they discussed…
SEO & Data Segmentation
With the absence of third-party cookies, there are still ways we can better understand what users are looking for.
SEO-optimised content: SEO will become more reliant on first-party data sources, such as on-site analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, email marketing data and user interactions within owned platforms.
Segmentation & demographic data: You can use data from email segmentation to understand your demographics and then create website content for them. One demographic might ask questions on Google in a completely different way to another demographic, so having that information from previous email campaigns is beneficial.
PPC & Data Segmentation
Remarketing: If you already have an email marketing list, you can input that information into Google Ads and create an audience of very raw data. It’s all anonymized so there’s no risk there in terms of privacy, you just have to tell Google that the data was collected with consent. Once you’ve uploaded this basic list, you can then remarket to that audience.
Audience Expansion: Google is in the process of sunsetting ‘similar audiences’. Usually we’d have an audience for remarketing, as well as being able to create a look-alike or similar audience so Google can advertise to people who share the same attributes. That started changing from May this year and instead of similar audiences Google’s introducing audience expansion which is very similar. You can use the data that you’ve got in two ways: straightforward remarketing and audience expansion to go after that similar look-alike demographic or audience.
Segmentation: When you’re email marketing you then get the opportunity to create lists within whatever system that you’re using that shows you who has opened your email and you can segment it down like that. You can then create a much more focused list from your email marketing campaign and people who have engaged with the content that you’re sharing.
Growing your audience with audience expansion: In terms of using audience expansion, you can then create a much bigger campaign. It’s not just, you know, ‘we’ve got 500 people here that we know we can go after because that’s the size of the list’. We’ve got to go after that and also include audience expansion, that could be several thousand people that you’re getting in front of as well.
What your audience want and need
- Relevant offers/ content
- To be remembered
- To feel listened to & understood
- To be in control
Email Marketing: Know your audience to know your data
By bringing the following types of data together, you can identify markers that allow you to discover the type of prospect they are, what they need from you right now and how you can best help them to move forward.
There are five main types of data in your data pyramid, each representing certain information you may be accumulating in your business. As we move up the pyramid, the data becomes more and more valuable. Let’s start at the bottom with known data and work up to purchase data…
- Known Data. This is data that is collected directly from asking the subscriber, including details such as their preferences and demographic information. Be careful with known data – the reason it’s at the bottom of the pyramid is because it’s the information most of us have, but it is also the most unreliable in the long term (especially preferences around short term things like weddings, holidays, renovations etc) and actually one of the most valuable in the short term.
- Cultural data. This involves a much wider database of information and depends on what kind of connections you want to make. For example, if you want to connect different products together (by category, type, relevancy, or upsell/cross-sell options for example), you would need to have this learning mapped in your database.
- Contextual data. This looks at where a person is and what devices they use and will most likely require a third-party system to track this type of information, although some ESPs will be able to do this, such as targeting by device.
- Behavioural data. This data is found using on-site cookies, tracking, email analytics etc and looks at what actions people take, what they click, how long they stay on a page, whether they come back etc.
- Conversion / Purchase data. This data is gathered during the purchase process and through analysis of order data. Ensuring your eCommerce platform is tracking, recording and feeding through all available data for use in your ESP is really important here.
Content & Personalisation: SEO
Reusing Content: If you’re already sending newsletters and email campaigns, then using the content that’s already being produced for those newsletters and publishing it on the website will benefit your SEO. An SEO agency can help with that by optimising content specifically for Google. Because it might need improvements if it’s going to go on the website as its own fully-fledged piece of content.
Keyword Research: SEO could also benefit email marketing because an SEO agency would be doing keyword research as part of SEO, so that would help in terms of understanding what people are searching for and then using that data to tailor your emails for those audiences; there might even be audiences you don’t already know about.
Historical Data GSC: If you’re already doing SEO then you’re going to have a lot of historical data that you can pull from places like Google Search console. So, again, you can use this to understand what it is your audience is searching for and tailor your email content for that.
Using page visit data to inform email links: You will better understand your audience because you’ll know what they’re already searching for and what pages of the website generate the most engagement from an organic perspective so you’d then know where to link to from your email content because if those pages are already working really well, then they’re probably going to work well if you send traffic to them from email.
Local SEO and email: Having that additional channel to draw data from can be really beneficial from a location and local SEO perspective. If your business operates in a specific location, then if we can understand where users are coming from on email, because some email platforms do provide you with location data, then we’d know to optimise more for certain local audiences.
Content & Personalisation: PPC
Consumers want honesty. 80% of consumers expressed concern about online privacy. What can businesses do to increase trust and engagement?
- Ensure the data you collect is safe
- Be transparent about the data you are asking for and collecting
- Offer controls beyond basic permissions – easy opt out and sharing
- Make it useful
74% of consumers considered it important to have a relationship with a brand.
Content engagement: You can create lists for paid media based on how people engaged with your email marketing and where they went to in terms of content. So again, there’s a way of segmenting that, breaking it down and creating small and more focus lists. You can then upload that data or point Google ads in the direction of those different audience types and you can serve them better qualified or more relevant content.
A good example would be if you’re sending out email marketing and there’s two links on there, one is to information about Google Analytics and the other one is information about keyword research. You can then maybe look at the audience who engage with the Google Analytics content, you can use that audience list in the PPC and then you can deliver them and that says, Hey we’re Google Analytics, experts do you need, GA4 and updates implementation, whatever it might be, and you can deliver it to that to that audience as well.
Using Google Ads insights for email campaigns and SEO on-page improvements: Lots of the campaigns that we run within Google Ads return some useful data insights about audience behaviour and audience history which can be useful for SEO and content marketing. When we look at the insights information or data around a specific keyword and that audience, we can actually find out what they’ve been searching for as well as the keyword that we targeted. So we can almost kind of trace their behaviour back to the top of the funnel and we can see what questions they’re asking before they use the keyword we’re targeting.
You can do several things with that, you can turn it into useful email marketing content and campaign ideas. If people are asking those questions, you can then answer them using your email marketing. Or you can focus on SEO and organic traffic. Say there’s 10 questions here that are generating lots of interest on the back of the paid activity that we do, maybe that could be some new organic content that we can populate on the website through new landing pages or updating current website content.
Factors Used to Personalise Email Content
Using dynamic content, dynamic fields, triggers you can offer personalisation in your content. Personalisation can be based on:
- Name
- Birthday
- Past email interactions
- Location
- Past purchases or donations
- Expressed preferences or interests
- Past website interactions
- Member or reward status or points
However, you need to know when to suppress personalisation. E.g. if you’re sending an email out about ‘your local shop’ but the shop is a 3 hour drive from the customer’s location.
Automation
That’s all great…
But it’s EVEN BETTER when you automate!
Send the Right Message,
to the Right Person,
at the Right Time,
through the Right Channel
Automation: SEO
First party data: Collect first party data via your CRM in a compliant way.
Customise content: Based on your first party data, for example a logged in user, personalise the experience to them.
Increasing Subscribers: Driving more traffic to the site to increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter is a major benefit of doing SEO.
Remarketing: Remarketing with segmented audience data perfectly lends itself to automation.
Automation: PPC is Changing
Optimised Targeting: Based on the data you provide, automation will build real-time personas of people likely to convert
Audience Expansion: Using automated audience expansion widens your reach without the need for first party data as a starting point
Customer Match Lists: Google will find people likely to convert based on your first party data.
Developments in AI: Custom Segments and Signals
Automation: Email Marketing
Having found you, the subscriber now needs to be educated, inspired and helped to make the right purchase decision for them. Consider the categories of products/services or the specific items they are browsing on your website, the blog posts they are viewing and the other pages they are navigating to.
For example, if someone is viewing your FAQs or delivery information, they are telling you they are looking for more information to help them make their decision, related to how your company operates.
Browsing multiple products in the same category (for example, lots of skirts within women’s clothing), tells you that is the product type they require but they haven’t yet found the perfect one for them.
Browsing different types of blog posts tells you they are looking for inspiration, and looking at multiple in the same topic area also gives you more insight.
In this stage, you will also have more specific behaviour such as searching for certain products, registering for back-in-stock notifications or adding items to their basket and then not going on to purchase.
Campaigns sent to prospects at this stage may include communications to a subscriber that hasn’t purchased within a specific number of days after signing-up but has shown certain behaviour on site. You will also send regular promotional emails and newsletters to educate and inspire subscribers, following up on-site behaviour such as browsing a specific product or category with a targeted series of emails to help them make the decision to purchase, or support an abandoned basket action with a reminder to purchase and other related product recommendations.
Automated Campaigns plan emails around the customer journey
- Acquisition – Developing an optimised Sign Up Process and Welcome Series of emails (organic social, PPC, SEO and social ads can draw people towards email acquisition).
- Consideration – Set up regular BAU manual emails; an Abandoned Basket series; an Abandoned Browse series; a Back in stock email / alternatives; a Weekly Round up. Your Google Analytics data can be really useful here. It could also be wise to involve Organic Social, PPC Retargeting, Social Ads Retargeting, Content Marketing and even SMS at this point.
- Purchase and Experience – You could set up a Post Purchase Cross-sell/Upsell automated email, Post Purchase follow up (e.g. survey), Transactional emails should always be automated so they arrive quickly e.g. receipts, and you could even create a product & brand education series (how to use the product you’ve bought etc.)
- Loyalty & Advocacy – to create loyalty and increase the customer lifetime value you could set up a Birthday email, a Loyalty Programme, a 1st to 2nd Repeat Purchase Programme, a recommend a friend series, a replenishment series (subscribe & save), or gift reminders.
- Win Back – for customers who haven’t bought for a while or who have stopped opening emails, you could set up an automated reactivation email, an inactive customer win-back series, or a registered not purchased series.
We hope that the information from this webinar has got you thinking about how you could use your marketing data differently, or use data across different channels to strengthen them all. If you want to find out more about how eFocus Marketing could help you, then get in touch with Kate and her team. Or, talk to us about your SEO and PPC requirements.
