Zero-party data is the most accurate customer data you can get. Businesses use it to make better marketing decisions and deliver superior customer experiences. Let’s dive in and analyze what zero-party data is and the best ways to collect this high-value information from your customers. Keep on reading.
If you want to summarize zero-party data as a concept, you could see it as more control for the users and less control for us marketers.
You see, in the early days of digital commerce, consumers didn’t control what companies knew about them. However, the large companies controlling everyone’s data are focused now on putting more of that control in people’s hands because legislation is getting stricter, i.e., Congress is breathing down their necks.
Then, how can we marketers:
- Learn about our customers’ tastes and preferences?
- Customize their experiences?
- Personalize these experiences according to channels and activity time when you no longer control the flow of information?
The answer is, of course, to educate ourselves about zero-party data and how to use it.
Zero-party data invites your customers to reveal themselves to you when and how they want to. This information fuels relationship marketing and personalization strategies that increase customer loyalty and expand your revenue.
Below, we’ll explore the new world order of data collection and explain how to use zero-party data with website visitors, email subscribers, and customers while respecting their desires to be the author of their own stories.
Explaining zero-party data
Zero-party data is information that your users, website visitors, subscribers, customers, or other consumers interacting with your organization elect to share with you.
Sometimes called explicit data, zero-party data is not information that you’ve gathered about someone through observation or inference but something they’ve shared through a direct, intentional act.
| Why is this type of customer data called zero-party data? The “zero” in zero-party data refers to its distance from the source. When we discuss data and data gathering, the subject to whom a piece of information attaches is “person zero.” So, if you get the information directly from them, it’s zero-party or zero steps removed from the source. Other customer data categories follow this ordering convention. First-party data is the next closest, second-party data is another step away, and so forth. |
Consumers may voluntarily share zero-party data about themselves proactively because a business prompted them to.
For example, a customer might proactively contact a brand via its social media account to ask a question about their purchase, provide feedback, and share data about themselves during the process.
Suppose you send that same customer a post-purchase email asking them to rate their customer service experience, and they respond. In that case, that’s an example of a prompted zero-party data exchange.
Much of the customer data you collect comes through various prompting methods.
When someone volunteers information, or you ask a customer, and they answer, you’ve collected zero-party data.
Why do people share zero-party data with brands?
As mentioned, zero-party data is acquired with the subject’s consent and awareness.
But, the person sharing the data might not be aware of all the ways in which the information they’ve given a brand will be used.
For instance, a customer who takes a quiz to discover their skin type willingly describes their skin’s characteristics but may not realize the brand will use the information to identify which products to promote in targeted ads and personalized emails.
Often, a customer, website visitor, or email subscriber will share their personal information in exchange for something they want from your business, like a discount on their purchase (or the quiz results).
Transactional incentives aren’t the only reason for someone to share zero-party data, though. Sometimes, they share information to experience a sense of belonging or for fun.
They might participate in an email poll to influence a brand decision or to see how others vote.
Your customers or subscribers may also share data with you, such as their communication preferences, to enhance their experience with your brand.
When your customers tell you about themselves via your preference center or fill out a product recommendation quiz, they’re giving you valuable, zero-party data that you can use to serve them better and more profitably.
What are some examples of zero-party data?
Zero-party data can provide brands with deep customer insights beyond the basics of name, address, phone number, and email address.
Personal and professional information, including birthdays, social media handles, job titles, and product or service likes and dislikes, are examples of zero-party data that can enhance your knowledge about customer preferences.
When you can link it to a specific person, information such as the star-rating someone gives a product or the emoji they entered in response to a social media post or email poll is zero-party data, too.
StudentBeans asks for data on their preferred pronouns and graduation dates when registering for the company’s student discount program.
What are the other types of customer data marketers collect and use?
Earlier, I mentioned that there were other types of customer data. Like zero-party data, those data categories also get their names from the distance from their subject.
First-party data is nearest to zero. It’s followed by second-party data and then third, after which we quit counting.
Here are the definitions for each of those types of customer data and how they differ from zero-party information.
First-party data is information shared directly but not explicitly by the subject
First-party customer data is information that you can associate with an identifiable individual and is obtained from that individual. The difference between first- and zero-party data is that first-party data is obtained through inference or observation.
Your customer or subscriber doesn’t tell you this information. They show you.
During first-party data collection, gaining information is a byproduct of the customer’s intended action.
For example, many e-commerce stores use first-party data or observations about a visitor’s browsing behavior to make product recommendations.
The subsequent recommendations are an algorithm’s best guess as to what the customer may like or want based on the behaviors of similar customers, the subject customer’s purchase or viewing history, and the characteristics of the products that the brand offers.
Online and offline retailer Target uses its first-party observations about customers’ past visits to customize its home page.
Second-party data is like first-party, once removed
Second-party data is information gathered from an individual but not by your organization.
Often you receive this data from a partner or affiliate under an agreement that permits them to gather and share the information with you.
You may have seen opt-in statements on webinar sign-up or gated content registration forms that ask you to agree to share your information with select partners.
Disclosures such as this one in VMWare’s privacy policy signal that the information a customer provides to Business A may be shared with Business B.
Second-party data exchanges between companies may facilitate a mutually beneficial business relationship or be a direct purchase of information by one organization from the other.
Data clean rooms that facilitate sharing first-party data to acquire second-party data are getting added attention from marketers and advertisers seeking alternatives to third-party cookies.
Brands are obligated to disclose when they share information under this type of arrangement. However, disclosure doesn’t always mean that customers are fully aware of how their data is being transferred between companies.
Consumers who place a premium on privacy and trust expect the brands they share their information with to go beyond meeting the legal minimums for compliance.
Take a forward-looking approach to building your data-sharing agreements and disclosures to avoid losing your customers’ trust.
Third-party data is an indirect source of information about your customers
Third-party data is information that you purchase from a data broker, data exchange platform, or similar data aggregators. This data may be gathered from a variety of sources, including other organizations, web scraping, or independent research.
There is a significant degree of separation between the subject and the collectors of third-party data and the end user (you).
Aggregate third-party data supports brands’ audience segmentation, competitor analysis, and data modeling. Information from data enrichment vendors can supplement what you already know about a specific user with details gathered from other sources.
For example, a data enrichment service can match the name and email address you have for an email subscriber with a physical address, social media handle, job title, or personal interests.
Third-party data is sometimes linked to an individual using probabilistic matching, where distinct pieces of information from various platforms or devices are linked using predictive modeling or other methods.
As a result, businesses have less certainty about the connection between an individual and the information. The data may be inaccurate or out of date.
Also, customers may feel that their privacy has been invaded if your customized messaging and personalization efforts use the information they don’t remember sharing with you.
Still, third-party data can be used discreetly to enhance and personalize customers’ experiences with a brand.
In contrast, zero-party data’s certainty is one of its primary benefits. But there are others.
Why is zero-party data important?
Zero-party data is accurate, attributable, and owned by your brand. Access to zero-party data is an essential hedge against the impact of data deprecation and your roadmap to sustainable growth.
This high-value customer data obtained with your audience members’ consent drives smart business decisions and enables brands to deliver enhanced, personalized customer experiences that lead to lasting customer relationships.
Gathering zero-party data mitigates the effects of data deprecation
Data depreciation, a convergence of changes to public and private data privacy and control policies, has flipped the script on data use for businesses and their marketing teams.
Data privacy laws require greater disclosures about brands’ data use and enable consumers to say “no” to sharing and distributing their personal information.
Global insights leader Gartner projects that in 2024, 75% of the global population will “have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations.”
Operating systems, third-party platforms and search engines are also shifting their policies in recognition of consumers’ demand for greater control over their data.
Google’s phase-out of third-party cookies in 2024 marks the culmination of this shift in attitudes about consumer data.
Even without government or private industry actions, businesses have to change to a permission-based model for data collection because individuals are pushing back against business overreach.
Zero-party data collection practices build customer trust
I recently enjoyed a performance of the musical “& Juliet.”
Like many re-visionings of Shakespeare’s classic work, this one flips the script and imagines a world in which Juliet lives and takes control of her destiny.
The musical’s message was empowerment and being true to oneself.
Modern takes on classic scripts often present an alternative angle in which society or familial expectations and restraints don’t confine the protagonists. Instead, they are free to pursue their own ideas and dreams.
Audiences love it when that happens!
Themes of self-discovery, empowerment, and rebellion against others’ expectations resonate with us because everyone longs to control who they are and how they present themselves to the world.
We want to decide who gets to know us best and reveal ourselves only to those we trust most.
Eight out of ten consumers say that they judge an organization based on how it treats its customers’ personal data.
They’re willing to share their personal information with brands to get better, more personalized service,, but only if your data collection practices instill confidence.
Giving your subscribers and customers control over their data builds that confidence and trust.
Zero-party data informs customer-first strategies that win new customers and builds customer loyalty
Today’s consumers don’t want others to define them, yet they want brands to understand them. Feeling understood strengthens consumers’ connection with your business and their brand loyalty.
Creating personalized, contextual interactions that anticipate your audiences’ wants and needs is a competitive advantage and, in many industries, a business necessity.
Consumers spend more with brands that offer seamless, conversational experiences and provide informed, contextual customer service.
You can’t build one-of-a-kind experiences that surprise and delight using information that is limited and out of date. The information you collect directly from your customers is central to establishing a 360-degree or single customer view (SCV) and delivering complete, customer-first experiences.
Using targeted communications that meet your customers where they are also reduces the noise you send their way and your marketing costs.
How to get zero-party data to enhance your customer experiences and business performance
Managing the evolving relationship between your customers, their data, and your interests starts with changing your perspective and refining your strategy.
Despite a new focus on customer relationship building in marketing, modern data relationships between consumers and brands are transactional.
Businesses can no longer expect customers to share their personal details without receiving some kind of benefit in return.
Further, just because you can get information by asking for it doesn’t mean you should.
Every request for data has the potential to add friction to your customer’s journey, and overreaching can inspire distrust.
Additionally, as more companies recognize the importance of developing proprietary data sets of zero- and first-party data, answer fatigue will (and is) setting in.
Poor UX, trust issues, asking for more than you give in return–all these factors can inhibit your access to the information you need to understand and serve your customers and maximize your revenue.
Use the following tips to discover who your customers are and build a proprietary data set that will prepare you to deliver a one-of-a-kind customer experience across your customers’ journeys.
14 ways to collect zero-party data from your customers (with examples)
A data ecosystem where your customers decide what you know about them, how you can use that knowledge, and how long you get to keep their data may take some getting used to.
It may help to keep in mind that an ideal customer relationship doesn’t begin and end in a single transaction. It takes time to get to someone and earn their trust.
The more effort you put into earning your customers’ trust (and demonstrating that trusting you benefits them), the more information they’ll share.
Approach your new zero-party data-gathering strategy as a full-funnel process that begins at the awareness stage and continues through discovery, conversion, retention, and advocacy.
Here’s how.
Invite first-time visitors to share their email addresses
When someone visits your website for the first time, start learning about them by inviting them to share their name and email address in exchange for a new customer discount. You can also gather this starter data set by inviting visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter.
Makeup for Melanin Girls encourages email sign-ups with a spin-to-win giveaway.
Ask a few warm-up questions to help your website visitors find what they’re looking for
Consumers expect you to offer value in exchange for information, but that value doesn’t have to be a discount. Product discovery tools such as quizzes or surveys that help new visitors navigate your website quickly and efficiently are a valuable offer, too.
A quiz that helps customers choose the right products for their skin type or narrows down a business owner’s marketing goals can provide useful data for you and shorten their buyer’s journey.
Use A/B testing to find the right balance between gaining the information you need to make relevant recommendations and overwhelming new customers with questions.
Laurie Loo invites website visitors to find out where they are on their style journey and gains valuable insights about its customers in the process.
Asking a few initial questions about your customers allows them to self-segment and find the resources they need on your website.
If you want to gather lots of responses, keep your quizzes short. Alternatively, you can use a longer, more detailed quiz to learn about and pre-qualify leads.
A data-gathering strategy like this will eliminate many visitors with low purchase intent. Creating a multi-stage survey or quiz gives you plenty of room to seek information that goes beyond standard demographic data.
I’m not a member of Gloss Genius’s target market and wasn’t interested enough to stick around to the end.
Adding visual cues to get zero-party information
Swipe left or right isn’t just for dating apps.
Innovative companies are building product and style selection apps to fill the gaps in online retailers’ personalization efforts with a twist.
Instead of just collecting zero-party data in the form of multi-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions, these apps combine text with images that consumers can rate to come up with a customized preference profile.
New interactions and gamification features capture consumers’ attention and make sharing personal data about their likes and dislikes seem effortless.
Using images helps brands overcome language barriers and enables consumers to share personal information with a tap.
Provide free tools and get personal data in exchange
Tools are another innovative and value-adding way to learn about your customers and prospective customers.
Mortgage calculators, square footage estimators, cost comparison tools, and tools that will tell you what your monthly car payment should be help consumers better understand what solving their problem will cost –whether they need new carpeting or a new car.
These tools attract prospects to your website and give you direct insights into what your customers want and need.
💡 Pair your free tools with an offer to save the results or send them to the user’s email account to connect their entered data to their unique ID.
Gather additional information from visitors who elect to register with your site
Given the right incentives, such as more convenience, customized recommendations, or other “remember me” benefits, your website visitors may be enticed to create an account before they make a purchase.
When a customer moves from visitor to “sign in” or “create an account” status, use this opportunity to ask questions that give you greater insights into their tastes and preferences.
Users are invited to add their phone number, sign up for text messages, and share their birthdate (in exchange for a special perk) at Potbelly.
💡 Use autofill or omit data fields that you’ve already filled during previous interactions so your customers don’t have to waste time providing you with information you already have.
Use your “request further information” forms (a.k.a. intent surveys) to gain information that helps you help your customers.
Website visitors who are contacting you with a question or to sign up for a demo are signaling their interest in you. That’s the perfect time for you to take an interest in them.
Ask questions that will help you provide a better answer to their question or a more personalized demonstration of your product or service.
John Deere’s product demos take place in-person. So, step one when signing up is to share your location.
Wow! Customized demos for every customer? Yeah.
I know it may seem like a tall order–especially when you’re engaging with customers at scale. But increasingly, B2B and B2C customers expect you to use the technology to provide them with personalized, cross-channel experiences.
Brands that are prepared to meet those expectations can expect to pull ahead of the competition.
Zero-party data can yield information about your marketing effectiveness. People who sign up for a demo from Skuid are asked to share how they learned about the company.
Let your chatbot do the asking,
Speaking of leveraging technology to serve your customers better. Chatbots are in.
Prompt your website visitors to share important details about themselves or their query with AI-assisted chatbots.
Customer service chatbots can engage in a series of questions about a customer’s device, product use, or other details necessary to resolve their problem and add this data to the customer’s data set.
Get more data through the tactical use of gated content
Gated content is a common and sometimes controversial method to gather leads and learn more about them.
Should you ask everything you need to know to qualify a lead before you let someone access your content? That has certainly been the practice when using lead magnets in the past.
But, as I mentioned earlier, this strategy can sometimes backfire.
Genuine leads may abandon your sign-up form because it asks too much, and invalid leads may provide you with inaccurate information to obtain your whitepaper, report, or other high-value content.
This is another situation where testing can be an invaluable guide.
Develop goal-focused lead magnets. Who do you want to register? What information is most important for you to obtain? Then, look at the quality of the leads and the data your lead magnets are generating to find out if your tactics are working.
Collect critical details during checkout
If you’ve designed your data-collection process as a continuum, then your checkout stage represents another opportunity to add to your knowledge of your consumer.
Fill in missing details such as their delivery address and preferred payment methods, or ask more probing questions about how they’ll use your products or services and what types of offers they’d like to receive from you.
Ask experience-enhancing questions during onboarding
When someone first visits your website, asking pre-purchase questions helps you guide them toward finding a solution. This process can continue after they’ve decided that your product or service is the right solution.
Ask further questions during your onboarding process that will improve their experience and ensure successful adoption.
Develop automated email campaigns that prompt interaction and keep the conversation going. Then save this zero-party data so that you can continue to provide them with excellent customer support and identify new opportunities.
Collect post-purchase feedback from satisfied and unsatisfied customers
What went right? What went wrong? Look for opportunities to ask specific questions, such as how often the customer uses the product after purchase, to learn more about them.
Extend your data even further by inviting customers to participate in VIP advisory groups or share user-generated content with you.
Both structured and unstructured customer feedback following a purchase can provide your company with valuable insights. AI-powered tools for marketers with natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities can help you make sense of it all.
Engage in two-way conversations with your email subscribers
Email marketing is an incredibly effective way to learn more about your customers. Email’s capacity to customize your messages as scale helps build the kind of deep relationships that inspire trust and encourage customers to tell you about themselves.
This simple email from SaaS Growth Bites invites subscribers to share their thoughts about the newsletter by responding to a survey. Feedback and click-throughs–what’s not to like!
Use email campaigns to solicit qualitative and quantitative insights from your entire list or specific segments. Include polls, quizzes, surveys, and contests that invite your subscribers to share information about themselves and their purchasing or content preferences voluntarily.
Go omnichannel with contests, polls, surveys, and social stories
Your website and your customers’ inboxes aren’t the only places where you can engage in conversations to learn more about them.
Extend your reach to social media and SMS to encourage your customers to tell you more about themselves. Text-based, guided-polls and social stories are two ways for you to ask questions across channels.
Once you do that, you’ll have to up your analytics game and employ multi-touch attribution methods.
Take your preference center to the next level, and make it a data management center
Most preference centers began as a way for email subscribers to control how often they heard from brands and what type of content they received.
Convert your preference center to a central point of contact for your customers to update their communication wishes, change or delete the data they’ve shared with you, and request that some or all of their data be erased.
Motorola’s preference center gives visitors a choice of email notifications but requires them to share details about themselves in exchange.
7 best practices for gathering zero-party data to fuel effective, value-adding email marketing campaigns
Employ a focused approach to data collection and maintenance to ensure your resources are well spent,, and the trust your customers place in you is well-deserved.
📋 Prioritize your pursuit of data based on your business objectives
Unlike third-party data, which you can gather at high volume without your customers even knowing, zero-party data requires your customers’ active engagement.
Every request for information is a touchpoint, for better or for worse.
Don’t waste your customers’ time or try their patience by asking for more information than you need. Instead, develop a customer data strategy that identifies the information that you most need to improve your product and services, enhance your customers’ experiences and maximize sales and revenue.
It may seem like a good idea to try to gain as much information as possible, as quickly as possible.
But that perspective fails to recognize your customer’s point of view.
Are you asking them for information because you plan to use it for their benefit or because you think you might want it someday?
📋 Prepare your data repository before you add your newly acquired zero-party data
Don’t mix good data with bad. If your business has been operating for long, you probably have customer data tucked away all over your physical and digital workspace.
It’s time to straighten things up.
This is important not only because you don’t want to lose your hard-won zero-party data in a mass of unorganized information, but also because poor data housekeeping leads to poor data security.
Choose your data storage system or systems, whether it’s a customer data platform (CDP), data warehouse or lake, or a customer relationship management (CRM) app, and start normalizing and deduplicating its content.
Ensuring that your data is compatible across platforms will make it easier to use this valuable proprietary asset. For example, integrating your CRM with your email marketing platform enables your organization to send customized messages at scale.
At the same time, audit your customer data for regulatory compliance.
Involve your risk management team and take this opportunity to create a solid, secure foundation for your future data management activities.
If you collect zero-party data before your primary data storehouse is ready, maintain a separate clean data set and develop an integration plan to merge your information later.
📋 Build and maintain trust through transparency and ongoing communications
When asking your website visitors, email subscribers, and customers to share personal information with you, be transparent about your purpose.
Clearly communicate how you’ll use and share that information.
For example, when a customer completes a “Find your skin type” quiz, do they expect you to store the information they’ve entered? Would they have volunteered the information if they knew it would be saved and used for marketing research and creating customized targeted promotions?
📋 Give your customers a genuine choice about sharing their data
In most jurisdictions, check-the-box consent satisfies the letter of the law, but is the customer who accepts your conditions genuinely giving you permission to use their data?
Does your sign-up or download form permit users to choose the data they share with you or is their only choice to tell-all or abandon the form? Can website users opt out of the data sharing agreements referenced in your privacy policy?
True consent is based on full disclosure and real choices–not contracts of adhesion.
Disclosures like the one below give users a choice between accepting all cookies in one click or interrupting their browsing task to “manage your cookie preferences.”
Some consumers may click yes to move forward. But that doesn’t mean they are happy about it.
Giving your customers full control over their data requires a shift of mindset in favor of permission-based, data relationship management (DRM).
This low-friction cookie disclosure presents visitors with all their options via a single interface.
The email sign-up form from ASICS pictured below invites new subscribers to provide their birthday but doesn’t require it.
As consumer expectations continue to evolve, you may find customers rejecting privacy and data policies that take away their control.
📋 Eliminate friction and develop UX that encourages honest exchanges
I mentioned earlier that the manner in which you request information can lead to inaccuracies.
Now, I’m going to make a confession: There are a lot of enterprise businesses out there that think I work in agriculture or banking.
🤷♀️Those are the options that appear at the top of their dropdown lists that require me to disclose my industry.
None of the fields in this form are optional, including two of the dreaded drop-down menus!
If the information you ask customers to share doesn’t directly benefit them, they really have no incentive to be honest.
And if your data intake form adds friction to their journey, they have every incentive to lie their way through it so they can get on with their day.
Managing data relationships in the future will require making strategic choices about what to ask, how you ask it, and what you’ll give in return.
📋 Offer genuine value in exchange for the information you request
People realize their data has value and that it isn’t being collected solely for their benefit but to be packaged and resold to the highest bidder.
This knowledge triggers our inherent sense of fairness. “Why is someone else profiting from my data?”
Previously, I asked if your customers would still be willing to share their personal information with you if they knew it would be used for your benefit and theirs.
The answer may be yes.
Various studies have found that the majority of consumers will share information with brands. However, consumers are more likely to share data with familiar brands over new ones and in exchange for some benefits more than others.
| What incentives influence consumers to share their deets? 35% A mix of offers 19% Free trial offer 14% Other offers 13% Discounts 6% Free gifts 6% Loyalty rewards 4% Giveaways 2% Exclusive content |
Test different tactics to encourage your customers to share.
Your website visitors, subscribers, and customers may be willing to give you personal information in exchange for social recognition, exclusive access to products or experiences, VIP club membership, customized product recommendations, or enhanced customer support, too.
When exchanging benefits for data, make sure the value of your offer matches the significance of the data you’ve requested. Persuading a customer to share their email address may be simple. But you may have to sweeten the pot if you also want their mobile phone number.
Like many other websites, Black & Bold offers a little something extra for visitors willing to give up their email and share their digits.
Finally, be sure to keep your promises. Use data in the way you say you will, deliver the benefits you offered to get it and prioritize your customers’ privacy and data security.
📋 Give your customers a clear path to control their data, including the right (and ways) to change their minds
Preference centers are a familiar way to gain information about your customers and enable them to control how and when they hear from your brand. For example, an email preference center that allows your customers to opt-down can prevent them from unsubscribing.
Similarly, a data preference center that allows your customers to change their minds about the types and amount of data they share with you can increase their satisfaction with and trust in your brand.
Plus, giving your customers access to and control over the information you’ve collected about them puts you ahead of the game when it comes to compliance.
New regulations in California and Nevada have prompted websites to add “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” opt-outs to their privacy policies.
Your customers have the right to be forgotten in many jurisdictions. When you provide them with an alternative to allowing you to store all of their data or none, you increase the chances that you’ll get to keep some.
Your data will probably become more accurate over time as well.
A customer whose style or household needs have changed can update their preferences and receive better tailored offers and experiences. That customer who initially lied about their phone number or birth date because they didn’t trust your brand might decide you’re okay after all and correct their data. (C’mon, it could happen!)
Permission-based, customer-first data is a new way to look at customer analytics and it may take some getting used to. But, change is a’coming, so you might as well get out in front of it instead of lagging behind.
Get ahead of data deprecation by upgrading your zero-party data practices today
Adopting a customer-first, consent-driven, zero-first strategy isn’t a matter of if anymore, but a matter of when.
Zero-party data can help you maintain the delicate balance between giving your customers the personalized experiences they want without making them feel that someone else is controlling their storyline.
Be courageous as you define how you’ll engage with your customers to develop a unique, proprietary data set that enables you to serve your customers and build your brand.
How can you use all this fabulous fresh-from-the-source data to improve your email communications? Discover how to use what you learn about your customers to build detailed, accurate buyer personas to inform your whole team in our article, Buyer Personas: Who Should Be Involved in Creating Them and How.
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