How Retailers Can Obtain Zero Party Data

Every e-commerce brand wants to increase conversions. With changes to data collection policies over recent years, it can be quite a difficult challenge to increase sales with new customers in a cost-effective way. 

Until now… Zero-party data is one of the best ways to bring in warm visitors, and give you more consumer insight to help increase e-commerce sales. Historically it’s been quite hard for brands to really engage their visitors without putting them off or overwhelming them.

But there are a few ways to collect zero-party data that will help you increase conversions.

What is Zero-Party Data

Zero-party data is data that comes directly from customers when they submit it. This is possibly one of the best forms of collecting data for both brands and their customers. 

For customers providing certain data to brands, they’ll benefit from better product recommendations, discounts and more. For brands, they’ll be offering an interactive experience for their customers whilst gaining valuable insights as to what their customers are looking for.

Customers are very open to providing you with information if it helps you understand their preferences and needs. 

Of course, understanding more about your consumers is a significant benefit of zero-party data. Consider what else marketing using zero-party data achieves:

• To enhance conversions, you need to know more about your clients. However, zero-party data provide clean data to brands that do not violate laws and new user privacy changes. 
• More engagement with your customers will allow you to adjust your website and marketing strategies based on the data your customers provide.
• Being able to build trust with your customers is an important part of increasing conversions but also turning those one-off purchases into lifetime customers.
• You’re not collecting data without consumers knowing. 

There are many more benefits to using Zero-Party data and there are a few different ways that your e-commerce brand can use zero-party data.

How Brands Can Use Zero-Party Data?

E-commerce brands can utilise zero-party data within their own marketing channels.

This includes paid channels as the use of zero-party data will help greatly reduce acquisition costs.

Here are some ways e-commerce can use Zero-Party data to increase conversions:

• Build personalised email flows to nurture quiz applicants 
• Provide insight into content creation so you can develop more tailored content for your followers
• Deeper understanding when A/B testing to create personalised landing pages and unique popups
• Increase conversions and reduce acquisition costs by developing more precise audiences. 

With the information provided by your customers, you can change things up within your store and offer products that are relevant.

How Brands on Shopify Collect Zero-Party Data

Shopify Quizzes

Quizzes are a great way of driving visitor interaction, it’s a great strategy for getting visitors involved and interacting with your brand. 

As users are filling out their own information and they know that the data they’re providing is going to benefit them, they’re much more likely to fill out their details.

For example, a skincare brand could develop a quiz to find out more about visitors’ skin concerns such as dry skin or if they have oily skin. This will allow brands to recommend the best products for them.

We use Octane AI’s quizzes, allowing clients to sync the results with other providers such as Klaviyo or Attentive to personalise marketing.

Conversational Pop-ups on Shopify

At all levels within your brand and the way you communicate with customers is crucial and you’ll tend to find that customers prefer to be communicated with naturally.

Rather than just having a popup that collects emails, lean towards your copy and make it more conversational, almost like a personal check-in. For example, ‘Find everything you needed?’ ‘Need help finding something?’

Social Media Polls

On Instagram or Twitter, a poll is probably one of the easiest ways a brand can interact with its customers and obtain Zero-Party data.

Looking back on the results will help you decide things such as products and what you can be posting about and promoting next. 

Post-Purchase Surveys

Understanding what your customers were drawn towards when placing a purchase with your brand is one of the best ways to increase conversions in the future, this is because you’ll now know how to promote to a specific customer and you can change things up within your marketing strategy to appeal to more customers matching that buyer persona.

This can be done with a post-purchase email survey. To make these really successful you should consider offering an incentive for successful completion, for example, a percentage off their next purchase. 

Competitions

Who doesn’t love a competition? It’s a great way for a brand to gain exposure and for a customer to potentially win something.

The prize doesn’t have to be big, but if you’re offering something in exchange for customer data then customers are very likely to get involved.

New Account Creation

Getting users to create an account can be difficult these days. With users thinking more about what data they’re providing and it being so much easier to checkout as a guest, could Zero-Party data be your saviour here?

Offering an incentive to create an account with your brand is one of - if not THE - best ways to get customers into your eco-system and use the zero-party data they provide to personalise marketing to them.

This could be something as simple as their name on an exit-intent popup. Customers are much more likely to open an email that’s addressed to them personally.

Once you start to build more of an effective funnel, you can start to add in more personalisation techniques to your zero-party data collection such as birthdays later down the line, their favourite products and more.

Getting to grips with Zero-Party data on Shopify

The days of third-party cookies have become a distant memory. With more brands in similar spaces competing for the same customers, it has become increasingly difficult to land yourself in front of your perfect customer without having to spend more money.

Zero-Party data offers users a safe way to provide the data they want to the brands they want to buy from. From a brand’s perspective, it’s a much more genuine interaction as you’ve engaged with your users in some capacity, whether it’s a vote on an Instagram story or their email on your quiz.

Ready to start taking advantage of Zero-Party data and start lowering your acquisition costs?