Unlocking the power of first party data

Hey everyone, 

Welcome back for another bite to chew on. 

If you’re an operator, we know you spend a lot of time, money, and effort driving qualified traffic to your website. 

Paid Acquisition. Influencer seeding. Organic social. Community building. etc.

We also know that most of that traffic inevitably bounces. 

The average conversion rate on Shopify stores is about 1.4%. 

No matter how impressive your creatives, or how trusted your influencers - the majority of people who land on your site are just…not ready to buy right away.

Enter —> first-party data (FPD).

By collecting FPD from your visitors, you can develop efficient and effective methods to warm up and convert your audience, rather than letting them just… leave and disappear.

Today we’ll take you through the Obvi FPD playbook, starting with the basics before moving on to our more advanced tactics. 

On the Menu: 

• Starter - First-party data basics

• Main - Next-level retention tactics

• Dessert - Warm up the right way

First-Party Data Basics

We should probably define what we’re talking about first. 

First-party (and zero-party) data is information collected directly from your users.

Including: 

• Activity logged on your site

• Social media engagements

• Purchase history/account details

• Survey data

• Reviews

• Customer service or call center tickets

• Email & SMS subscriptions

• Quiz results

So when your heatmap logs a user's session, or someone enters their email in a pop-up, you’re gathering FPD. 

To put it another way, these are the basic tactics you should be using to find out:

• Who your user is

• What their challenges are

• What they want

• How they interact with your brand

• How they feel about your product

• Their email or phone number

Your FPD collection and retention program should set out to answer as many of these questions as possible. 

If you don’t know your audience’s demographics, what they like, how they feel, and most importantly, how to contact them - 

It will be practically impossible to optimize your messaging or tune your CRO. 

It will also be incredibly difficult (read: expensive) to find them again and move them down your buyer journey if all you know about them is “anonymous site visitor #45400”. 

Table stakes

Alright, so you better have: 

• Pixels, analytics, a server-side data layer, and heat mapping 

• A lead capture process (ie; pop-ups) 

• Quizzes and surveys for qualitative insights

• And a process for combing through reviews and CS tickets

Do this on the regular, and you have a solid foundation to create personas, segment your users, and develop efficient buyer paths. 

Next-level tactics

Like we said, those are the basics of FPD collection. 

But here’s another benchmark for you - shoppers hate your popups. The average sign-up conversion rate is only about 4%.

Better than the average conversion rate, sure, but that still means a lot of people bounce without ever leaving their contact details.

This hurts - especially if these users are cart, product, or checkout abandoners.

Many abandoners aren't logged into their account or are using a different device when they bounce. Most brands use retargeting ads to recover these users, but that shouldn't be the only way.

This is where things get more advanced. 

Thanks to sophisticated new pixel tech, you’re able to recognize (formerly) anonymous visitors and turn them into subscribers. 

In theory, this means:

• A bigger email list

• A richer abandoned cart segment

• Better retargeting on Meta

To test this out, we recently added Retention.com’s advanced pixel to our site and created segmented flows based on product, cart, and checkout.

 At first, we used it as a simple backup on our site, in case visitors bounced without subscribing via a pop-up or leaving their email while abandoning their cart. 

But lately, we’ve been leveraging it on pages where we don't really have a pop-up or subscription ask - because sometimes you don’t want to interrupt the user experience or add friction.

If someone has surfed to an educational landing page, a pop-up can be jarring or annoying.  Don’t interrupt a potential customer when they’re especially engaged with your UX!

So in those cases where we don't even ask for contact details, Retention.com has been instrumental in turning those anonymous visitors into actual leads that we can nurture via email.

Lay the path

So in the landing page scenario where people don't give us their email because we don't ask for it, the Retention tech allows us to do that without interrupting the process. 

A lot of brands will do the wrong thing at this point. They take these new emails and send them the basic welcome flow -

But what you really, really, really should be doing is segmenting these users based on the relevant landing pages that you're gathering the data from.  

Meaning - if they're coming in via a specific landing page, the emails they get should be more about the product or messaging they saw. 

We’re talking about education and information that is specific and cohesive, so the experience is a good one. 

We know what you’re thinking… 

There's the fear of the user thinking “How did you get my email”? 

But that's where you have to be very purposeful about the content you're sending out.

it has to be valuable. It can't just “Get 20% off!”  Because it then becomes “Why am I getting this? I don't want your promos.” 

The flow needs to be a coherent and personalized buyer's journey so it doesn’t feel spammy.  

At Obvi, we make sure that the landing pages we send traffic to are educational, valuable, and knowledgeable. 

We then double down with our follow-up email campaigns, making sure the product or topic segmentation matches so it’s a smooth transfer from LP to email. 

So far, we have found that if you create the right experience, you can avoid spam complaints while greatly increasing your list size and retention revenue. 

Let’s talk a bit more about Retention.com. 

On top of turbocharging email list growth by turning anonymous visitors into subscribers, we’ve found Retention also helps us by:

• Finding and onboarding more users to your add-to-cart, product view, and checkout abandonment flows 

• Creating a new, high-performing retargeting audience in Meta

How? Well, the Retention Pixel is a first-party and doesn’t get blocked. It can cleanly identify audiences for extended periods of time and it plugs directly into tools like Klaviyo, Meta, Attentive, Sendlane (that’s our ESP at Obvi), Shopify, etc. 

Want to see if Retention will work for your brand? You can book a time with them here →

Sum it up

If you want to achieve profit at scale, then leveraging first-party data is an absolute must. 

First, be sure to have your foundation in place. Get your basic analytics, surveys, and pop-ups running. Mine them for user insights and leverage them to gather leads.

Next, you should consider new pixel tech like Retention that can reveal anonymous visitors and add them to your subscriber and remarketing lists. 

But don’t just plug them into your typical retention flows and call it a day.

This is a chance to intelligently segment your users and develop cohesive buy paths. Be sure to deliver value in both your LP content and then create matching email campaigns. 

If you do it right, you won’t just 10X your subscriber list, but you’ll be able to efficiently convert those added subscribers from window shoppers to buyers.

One last thing…

The name of the game is maximizing revenue per visitor, right? That’s why we’re talking about FPD and turning your visitors into actual shoppers today.

We recently sat down with the CEO of Bambu Earth Dave Recuk to dig deep into his philosophy of maximizing revenue per visitor.

In this Podcast, Dave delivers a DTC efficiency masterclass that touches on marketing unit economics, cost caps, subscription models, and CRO tactics that actually move the needle.

Killer insights from a killer leader and operator. DO NOT miss this one.

All the best, 

Ron and Ash