Offboard Your Onboarding Process with First-Party Data

If you’re suffering from high cost of acquisition with match rates that aren’t up to par, you may be suffering from an (acquisition) identity crisis — that means, it may be time to cut your onboarding process out of your life.

In the new cookie-free world, brands have been looking for ways to find and understand anonymous customers to get them to convert — and within that new cookie-free paradigm, solutions built on third-party cookies have entered the scene and pivoted their legacy solutions — with reduced capabilities that have implications on their client’s performance.

As brands evaluate their tech stack investments and scrutinize their spend, understanding those tools that may have met their expiration date is key.

How the Data Onboarding Process Has Changed

For customer acquisition, data onboarding is the process of sending your first-party customer data to a separate online environment to be matched with digital identifiers. Onboarding vendors take data like an email or a phone number and match it with a user’s online identity in a separate location.

The fact is that media onboarding fees are expensive — and not necessary to onboard for some channels such as Meta, Google, Bing and Yahoo. In the wake of third-party cookie deprecation, each of these walled gardens have made huge strides in their direct first-party activation capabilities in ways that connect with their own proprietary identity graphs.

This means that organizations can activate directly to walled gardens without copying data with an onboarding solution first, which incurs added cost as well as inefficient workflow copying the data with an intermediary identity.

Rather than contend with increased customer acquisition costs (CAC), reduced efficiency and match rates that aren’t measuring up, brands can embrace a more flexible solution to identity.

3 Solutions to Offboard Your Onboarding Process

When brands embrace first-party data in their acquisition strategy, they experience higher match rates by activating directly, rather than going through an onboarder — which would require a translation of first-party data to their system, and another translation back to the walled garden. With a direct connector to primary channels within a brand’s media mix, brands can activate audiences easily.

1. Choose Your Identities

Don’t get locked with Ramp ID, leverage a private ID graph composed of any ID you need, generated by your systems or provided by vendors, for both anonymous and known users.

2. Self-serve Your Audiences

Use your first-party data to create highly customized audiences that are optimized with native lookalike modeling.

3. Activate Directly on Paid Properties

Reduce onboarding dependency and costs by syndicating anonymous and known audiences directly to your preferred walled gardens and demand-side platforms (DSP).

How Two Brands Harness First-Party Data to Increase Match Rate and Decrease CAC

Brands who have approached identity differently — leading with first-party data — have experienced higher match rates and bolstered their acquisition program with a more agile, flexible approach.

Bloomberg Increases Match Rates and Audience Sizes by 500%

Take Bloomberg. With a customer data platform (CDP), Bloomberg expanded access to multiple acquisition channels, and created an audience layer with anonymous web visitors, registered users and paying subscribers in one central hub accessible to the company’s business users. The success is in the numbers — with their investment in first-party data to power acquisition strategies, they saw a 500% increase in audience size and match rates and a 76% decrease in cost of acquisition.

Michael Kors Reduces Customer Acquisition Costs

Due to Apple and Google’s measures to curb third-party tracking, Michael Kors had to overcome severe limitations on its growth strategies and ability to understand customer behavior — particularly with the majority of visitors using mobile browsers. They had limited visibility into unknown visitors to digital properties, and less insight into returning website visitors and metrics related to repeated visits.

Using ActionIQ, Michael Kors was able to ingest all customer data to create audiences, extract insights and orchestrate customer experiences across top paid media channels, as well as walled gardens, demand-side platforms and ad networks. With a durable customer ID, they personalized experiences for unknown website visitors and collected additional identifiers. This led to improved attribution, and lowered CAC.

Design a Flexible Approach to Identity

In an environment that’s constantly changing, with new rules and regulations increasing, it’s important to ultimately select an approach to identity that will offer your organization flexibility to change and adapt with the environment, your customer needs and your changing data strategy and architecture.

For more strategies to cut costs and create a more seamless experience from anonymous browser to loyal shopper, check out our guide, How to Solve Your (Acquisition) Identity Crisis for more, or reach out to our team to see how we can support your acquisition strategy with flexible identity capabilities here.