First Party Data Strategy
December 18, 2024The topic of first party data strategy is increasingly important to marketers because it allows them to get insights into how their customers interact with them across channels. We asked CDP industry leaders for their insights on successful strategies. Here are their responses.
Collecting First Party Data
It is important to collect customer data across touchpoints. Departments need to work together to make sure all teams can access and use the data effectively.
“Focus on collecting first-party data at key customer journeys touchpoints, like onboarding, checkout, or post-purchase interactions. Gather preferences during registration or insights on satisfaction after a purchase. Strategic data collection minimizes friction while ensuring accuracy and relevance, enabling a complete customer view to drive personalized, effective engagement strategies,” recommends Janet Jaiswal, Global VP of Marketing, Blueshift.
“A successful first-party data strategy requires breaking silos by fostering cross-department collaboration (marketing, sales, IT), a customer-first culture, and robust change management. Key steps include executive buy-in, stakeholder engagement, training, and mindset shifts, ensuring employees adopt data-driven decisions aligned with customer-centric objectives,” says Guus Rutten, Managing Director, GX.
“The most forward-looking companies treat data as a product by prioritizing reusability and uniqueness, which makes data investments more valuable. Start by understanding what your stakeholders need to solve—not pipelines or SQL, but real business challenges. Great data products deliver solutions seamlessly, whether as reports, alerts, or synced data, focusing on outcomes over tools,” explains Tejas Manohar, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Hightouch.
“We expect an even greater focus in security and privacy next year. And if enterprises want to effectively leverage their first party data, they need to have a cohesive tokenzation strategy that uses a CDP to maintain a central token for each customer and connect the rest of the marketing tech ecosystem via the same,” notes Subra Krishnan, CEO, Lemnisk.
“First-party data strategy has been treated as a requirement for a CDP project, but as we have seen through the years, building a Customer 360 view is a use case of its own that requires the involvement of all the IT and business units in the company. It’s a topic that CDPs have brought to the light and helped the market to focus on, as it will be also the basics for all the incoming AI,” says Andrea Belletti, Head of Customer Data & Activation, BitBang S.r.l.
“Owning your first-party data is the best way to future-proof your business for AI. Tools like AI Decisioning, built to automate personalized marketing at scale, need high-quality, accessible data to work. If your data is stuck in a CDP’s infrastructure, you’re limiting your flexibility. Owning your data keeps you in control and ready to make the most of AI-driven marketing,” notes Tejas Manohar, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Hightouch.
“First-party data is messy – and becoming messier. There is a greater need for data stewardship that tracks the lineage of changes, especially for householding and edge cases. CDPs that offer tunable, transparent identity resolution are better suited to handle edge cases and break-aparts, a feature that will become more important as first-party data continues to become more unwieldy,” says Steve Zisk, Product Marketing Principal, Redpoint Global.
“The most powerful first-party data strategies integrate a mix of declared, implicit, and synthetic data. Declared data gives voice to customer intent, implicit data reveals hidden behaviors, and synthetic data fills in the blanks. Together, they create a rich, multi-dimensional view of customers that drives hyper-targeted personalization and fuels smarter decision-making,” explains Cory Munchbach, CEO, BlueConic.
“Empowering customers to willingly share data is key to a successful first-party data strategy. Businesses can create value exchanges through interactive experiences, such as preference centers, gamified surveys, or personalized product finders. CDPs then unify and activate this data in real-time, enabling tailored interactions that drive loyalty and measurable business outcomes,” says Megha Singh, Senior Content Marketing Manager, Algonomy.
“The biggest gap that we see most [e]nterprises have is an inability to link their customer’s online behavior with their offline behavior because they keep their digital data acquisition (tagging) program separate to their first party data program. There must be a stream of tagging work focused on ensuring that every visitor can be assigned an ID that can be associated with their customer profile,” notes Damian Williams, CTO, n3 Hub Ltd.
First Party Data Sharing Benefits for Consumers
Companies need to show that their customers not only benefit from sharing their data, but also that they will focus on protecting privacy and security when using their data. Benefits to customers can include richer loyalty programs and more useful personalization. Data privacy considerations must include regulations and safeguarding.
“Build transparency and trust through value-driven data exchanges by showing customers the benefits of sharing their data, like personalized experiences, relevant offers, or exclusive content. Offer transparency and control over shared data. For example, a retailer could provide loyalty points or tailored recommendations in return for insights on preferences or shopping habits,” says Janet Jaiswal, Global VP of Marketing, Blueshift.
“Businesses must prioritize data collection via loyalty programs, exclusive offers, or personalized services. CDPs consolidate, enrich, and activate this data, enabling brands to foster trust, loyalty, and measurable outcomes while ensuring compliance with evolving privacy regulations,” explains Megha Singh, Senior Content Marketing Manager, Algonomy.
“With increasing privacy regulations, zero-party data—information that customers proactively share with brands—becomes crucial. Brands will focus on creating interactive experiences to gather this data directly from customers. This, combined with first-party data, will be used to create personalized and highly targeted campaigns, reducing wasted spend and increasing conversion rates,” predicts Ben Tepfer, Director of Product Marketing, Optimove.
“A strong first-party data strategy relies on data quality, accessibility, and governance. Prioritize accurate, consistent (event-stream, server-side) collection, ease of access across teams, and compliance with GDPR/CCPA. Address issues like duplication and inconsistencies to reduce waste, build trust, generate insights, and boost customer loyalty through better-informed decisions,” recommends Guus Rutten, Managing Director, GX.
“There is greater recognition that a 1st-party data strategy must safeguard enterprise data. Marketers must balance a desire for relevant, clean data with the enterprise goal of reducing data replication/movement. To satisfy this balance, a CDP has to properly cleanse and unify data while also being capable of smart data management, i.e., having a clear separation of PII from other attributes,” says Steve Zisk, Product Marketing Principal, Redpoint Global.
“Brands must prioritize ethical data use and adapt to a cookie-less future. With regulations like GDPR shaping expectations, zero-party data—willingly shared by customers—is essential. By creating interactive experiences to collect this data and combining it with first-party data, brands can craft personalized campaigns, reduce waste, boost conversions, and build trust through transparency,” explains Ben Tepfer, Director of Product Marketing, Optimove.
We hope you enjoyed reading about 1st party data strategy. Thank you to our participants! You may also be interested in our series of blog posts on CDP Best Practices, including:
