A customer relationship with a company can mean more than just mutual material gain; the information and data earned through understanding the customer journey and those who interact most can be even more meaningful. As the digital landscape lets go of cookies, there’s much to be learned from leveraging data and analytics to optimize marketing campaigns and accelerating customer growth.

On March 22nd, Bloomreach gathered a panel of experts to discuss No Cookies, No Problem: Future-proof Marketing Strategies for Growth, and owning the relationship to customers without third party providers.

Check out a few takeaways from our discussion on the 22nd:

1. Knowing your customer

As customers change, the company has to change with it. Alessa Martin of Tacori spoke about her company’s customer journey, and the way they followed the map of information already readily supplied by their consumers.

“When we think about the customer journey, we think about attribution,” said Alessa. “It’s about stepping back and looking at all the things we know for certain about our customers. We went back to the drawing board to do some foundational brand research as our customers’ lifestyles shift.”

2. Shifting strategies for targeted marketing

“Something that we’re working on currently is the fact that we have tens of thousands of customers that have placed orders with us, but have unsubscribed from our email list,” saidSteve Morale, of NYDJ Apparel, LLC. “So we’re putting together a direct mail campaign to show them what they’ve missed in our emails since we’re so email heavy.”

To keep up with changing customer patterns, the company has to bend to what they’ll actually read, which in this case for Steve meant shifting their attention back to their email marketing.

3. Following along on the purchase journey

Sarah McDaniel of Mad Dogg Athletics discussed finding the sweet spot of customer information throughout their purchase journey.

“What we’re trying to be better at is what they’re seeing when they go to search, what their first impression of the brand is, and how they ended up on our site,” she said. “We want to find out what continues to drive someone to the point of purchase.”

4. Utilizing digital media partners after 2020

To best utilize a media partner, Alessi talked about Tacori and her team’s strategies to change what the finish line might look like as the digital landscape shifted.

“It was about looking at our digital media partner,” Alessi shared. We have a real distinction between vendors and partners, looking at our metrics and what happened in 2020. We had to change the way we saw success, so we took that information and got everyone aligned for a brand new pixel strategy.”

5. Protecting customer data

“Aside from our everyday emails, we’re also looking back to see where old data is from,” said Sarah. “Looking at what permissions we have, and that becomes an education on data for the rest of the company. Customers need to trust that you’re doing the right thing with their data.”

While it may be tempting to reach for the five-year-old email list with ten thousand names, it’s also important to understand where the data is from, and if permissions have been granted on the customer end.

Curious to learn more about our discussion with Bloomreach and our expert panelists? Access the full event content by filling out the form at the top of this page.