In today’s competitive digital landscape, brands must prioritize their customers in every decision they make, no matter how small, to realize the true potential of their growth. But brands that are customer-centric do more than develop a new solution or send personalized marketing messages. These brands have a deep understanding of each individual customer’s needs, preferences, and intent, and use this insight to design experiences that help the customer reach their end goals.

When done right, this level of hyper-personalization helps brands form trusted relationships with their customers, earning their loyalty and increasing their value over time. As third-party cookies deprecate, the brands that prioritize first-party data to better understand their audience will be able to craft a differentiated customer experience that sets the brand apart from direct competitors, but also every other brand competing for consumers’ attention online.

To better understand how marketers collect and leverage first-party behavioral data today, Acoustic commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey over 1,200 marketing decision-makers across the globe. The findings indicate that despite marketers understanding the importance of first-party data, few effectively leverage it throughout the customer journey, creating significant holes in the cohesive, personalized experience consumers have come to expect.

Here, I’ll explore key findings from the study as well as strategies for marketers looking to make the most of their customers’ behavioral data.

1. Marketers understand the value of real-time data, but struggle to collect it

Perhaps the largest discrepancy the study uncovered is that 75% of respondents say collecting real-time experience data is critical to their business, but less than half (47%) currently collect this data.

Since consumers’ interests and intent change over time, signaling different needs at different points in the customer journey, being able to respond to customer needs in the moment is essential to creating highly personalized experiences. Yet marketers struggle to translate knowledge of best practices into actions their brands take because they lack the data and insight.

To ensure that real-time data is collected effectively, marketers need to work collaboratively with their core data or IT teams and leverage a single data layer that can tie back each behavior to an individual, campaign, and channel holistically. By investing in real-time experience data, brands can differentiate themselves  while staying top-of-mind for consumers and finding new opportunities to increase share of wallet.

2. Most marketers don’t have a comprehensive behavioral data strategy

Only 45% of respondents are doing any kind of journey orchestration using first-party behavioral data. This may be because marketers don’t understand the breadth and depth of the data and end up using it at the initial stages of the customer journey: discover and evaluate.

Utilizing behavioral data at each stage of the marketing funnel presents opportunities for an improved customer experience. Capturing how consumers engage with a brand over time provides real-time actionable insights and new scoring models to better target, time, and personalize campaigns and messages, opening new opportunities for data-driven strategies.

Not all consumers will be ready to buy at the entry point of their journey with a brand. Once a brand attracts a potential shopper, they need to nurture the relationship, personalize engagement, and grow customer lifetime value. To do so, brands must understand consumers’ interests and intent and build experiences based on the individual goals they have. For example, if someone is rage clicking a link that doesn’t work, it could indicate they’re interested in learning more about the item but can’t get to the next step. Taking this behavioral data, marketers can draft an email apologizing for the broken link and share a discount code for the person’s next purchase. This can help the customer feel seen and understood, encouraging them to continue shopping with the brand.

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3. Marketers lack the necessary tools to act on behavioral data

It’s no secret that marketers are overloaded with competing priorities, which means they need tools that help them act quickly and improve process efficiency. Yet marketing decision-makers report that their top challenges include marketing automation (73%), audience management and segmentation (69%), personalizing customer outreach (67%), and analyzing customer data and signals (66%).

Without the right MarTech in place, marketers are struggling to personalize the customer experience based on first-party behavioral data. Investing in tools that can capture the entire spectrum of first-party behavior – including nuanced interactions like frustration and reasons for abandonment – is key to unlocking the potential of first-party data. But it’s not just the ability to capture the data. Marketers must also glean actionable insights in context of campaign and marketing communications to build and deliver data-driven messages and campaigns efficiently.

4. Gain quick wins by applying behavior data across the customer journey

Most marketers (68%) collect channel engagement data such as click rates while 63% collect web engagement data such as time on page. But only 58% cite they are able to easily tie campaign customer behavioral signals across the customer journey and even less (32%) say that their organization is able to easily analyze customer behavior signals.

Customer needs and preferences change over time, so it’s important not to overwhelm the current systems and processes in place by trying to do everything all at once. Besides creating automated triggers based on static website engagement for campaigns, marketers should work with data teams to tie the channel engagement data and web engagement data across the customer journey for a more holistic view into the customer. This helps create a stronger foundational view of the customer journey. As marketers capture deeper levels of behavior like experience and inferred or nuanced signals, they’ll be able to gain deeper, actionable insights.

5.Behavioral data drives tangible marketing and bottom-line results

Marketers expect a range of benefits from incorporating behavioral data into their marketing strategy, including positive impacts to customer acquisition costs (83%), customer satisfaction (78%), brand awareness (75%), conversion rates (73%), and ROI (72%).

This demonstrates that although marketers are still struggling to leverage first-party behavioral data across the customer journey, they understand there are significant benefits once they do so. To get ahead, marketers can employ a crawl, walk, run approach to capturing and leveraging behavioral data. It’s not easy, but ultimately, by gaining a stronger grasp of behavioral data, marketers are empowered to have a deeper understanding and view of each of their customers, contacts, and audiences. It’s another dimension of the consumer that marketers haven’t spent a ton of time investing in, and now is the optimal time to do so to get ahead.

Don’t wait to act on first-party behavioral data

As third-party cookies deprecate, the brands that effectively harness the power of first-party behavioral data stand to gain significantly in terms of customer retention, engagement, and overall lifetime value. By embracing the shift from third-party cookies to comprehensive first-party (and even zero-party) data, brands can future-proof their marketing and deliver personalized experiences across the customer journey, at any point in the journey.

The time to invest in first-party data is now. Find new opportunities and build new data-driven strategies to increase basket size and create cross-sell/up-sell opportunities that inspire. Gain a competitive edge, earn customers’ trust, and create a differentiated customer experience that relies on privacy-first personalization.

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