What is Zero-Party Data?

DEFINITION
Zero-party data is the data that a user voluntarily and proactively shares with your brand. It gives you an idea of things like purchase intentions, personal contexts, communication preferences, and how the individual wants to be recognized by the brand.

💡Understanding Zero-Party Data

With the emergence of privacy norms, data protection regulations, ad-blocking, Google phasing out third-party cookies support by 2023, and the iOS 14 update allowing users to turn off data tracking, marketers have now entered a new era of smart data collection. 

Zero-party data, in this scenario, seems to be the way forward to make important business, product, and marketing decisions. 

It’s the data that a customer intentionally shares with your brand. Suppose a potential customer downloads an e-book through your site in exchange for their email address. As the email address comes to you directly from the user, with their permission, it’s considered zero-party data.

This data is not only of higher quality as it comes straight from your customers, but it’s also a sign of customers placing trust in your brand.

🖋 Takeaway

Zero-party data takes the guesswork out of the picture and you can delve deep into accurately understanding your customer preferences, sentiments, intentions of buying the product, their pain points, and much more.

You can make use of this data to not only market your product but for various other activities like personalizing your user’s journey, driving product-led growth, and offering solutions to your audience’s specific problems.

What Is Zero-Party Data?

Let’s suppose you want to try a new CRM to streamline your customer information better. But before the CRM software presents a plan to you, they ask for information like your company size, your ideal customer profile, your exact needs, and an estimate of the number of customers. The data will help the company provide a plan best-suited to your needs.

This becomes zero-party data as you proactively share the data with the CRM software company. 

Let’s look into how this data can help your business:

• Drive product-led growth: By asking strategically framed questions around how a customer uses your product, their likes, dislikes, and future expectations, you can keep improving your product.

• Better quality data: Purchasing data from third-party sources increases the risk of getting data that is ineffective or outdated. This may pose greater challenges like poor targeting, lost customers, and wasted money. With zero-party data, you’ll not only get reliable data but you can even ask for data that you actually need.

• Better personalization: With zero-party data, you can create personalized campaigns throughout the customer journey. When you have information like customer preferences and buyer intentions, you’ll be able to craft personalization strategies that drive conversions.

• Gauge brand’s trustworthiness: The more customers are willing to share and exchange data with your brand, the more trust they have in you to keep their data secure. You can let customers know why you are collecting the data so that they feel comfortable providing it.

How To Collect Zero-Party Data?

Product-Led Onboarding

Product onboarding is a great opportunity to ask for customer information—as long as you still get your users to their aha! moment early on.

This will not only help you understand who they are, their pain points and needs, but also what features or options they’re looking to have. You can guide them to the feature best-suited for them and experience the utility of your product—before they lose interest in it.

You can use this data, later on, to encourage them to upgrade to a paid plan. 

However, make sure you don’t go too far with the questions and give the users their aha! moment as soon as possible.

Valuable Downloads

Lead magnets remain one of the most popular avenues for gathering zero-party data. 

Many SaaS companies have actionable e-books or webinars as lead magnets where users can get valuable content in exchange for some personal data. 

You can even make use of progressive forms to ask for different information at every download.

Interactive Quizzes

You can have engaging and fun quizzes where the user is posed different questions related to your industry and at the end of the quiz, you can give them a score and tips related to their answers. 

How Does Zero-Party Data Help In Converting Leads To Customers? 

Once you have zero-party data, you can use it to better understand your users and deliver highly relevant messaging and marketing campaigns. This leads to a stronger sales and marketing funnel and a higher probability of conversions.

On top of this, as zero-party data is highly reliable and personal, the sales team can make use of it to convert sales-qualified leads (SQLs) and turn them into paying customers.

Based on the success of earlier conversions and what content and campaigns worked for different buyer personas, you can choose to have an automated content channel and marketing channel for different segments and increase your conversion rate.

A tool like Breadcrumbs makes it easier for you to bring your zero-party data together. This, in turn, gives you actionable insights to score leads more effectively.