What is zero–party data?
As a marketer, you understand the importance of customer data, how to collect it safely, and how to use it wisely. But there are certain types of data that are more trustworthy, accurate and useful than others. At the top of the tree when it comes to personalizing experiences for your customers is zero-party data.
Zero-party data is data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with your business. It can include things like their birthday, gender, or shopping preferences. The most important thing about zero-party data is that it’s shared willingly by your prospects or customers, so you can be confident that this is information they want to share in return for a more personalized experience with your brand. In Klaviyo, we store this data on your customers’ profiles as a profile property.
In the sections below, you will learn how to:
- Collect zero-party data in sign-up forms.
- Gain inspiration for what kind of zero-party data to collect.
- Use your zero-party data to personalize the customer experience.
Collect zero-party data using forms
So how do you start collecting zero-party data for personalization? The first step is to decide what your ‘all-important’ question is. This might be a customer’s gender, favorite sport, or what kind of pet they have. It’s the question whose answer would help you personalize your marketing to the fullest, with increased revenue being your ultimate goal here.
Tip: If you don’t have a clear-cut use case for personalization across your product offering, start by collecting shoppers’ birthdays in your form. It’s an easy way to surprise and delight customers on their special day with a discount code or voucher!
The second step is to choose a vehicle for collecting the data, and sign-up forms are one of the easiest and most frictionless ways to do this. Let’s see how Nani uses forms to capture a crucial data point about their customers right at the beginning of the customer journey.
Get inspired by forms
See how 3 other Klaviyo brands used signup forms to ask their customers that all-important question.
Coffee preferences
Form audience: New visitors
How they use it:
- Personalize their welcome series with imagery and product blocks
- Personalize the contents of their subscription boxes
Diet and health concerns
Form audience: New visitors & existing profiles
How they use it:
- Monitor the growth of their Vegan and GF segments and use this data to influence their product innovation
- Promote their gluten free & vegan ranges to the right segments
- Target these segments with ad creative & copy that resonates with their dietary needs
Birthday
Form audience: Existing customers
How they use it:
- Use the birthday flow to send their customers a discount code a few days before their birthday
Create personalized experiences with zero-party data
Collecting zero-party data is just the first step. The real magic happens when you use your data points to craft compelling customer experiences tailored to your customers’ preferences and needs.
Personalize your welcome series
One of the most powerful uses for a profile property is personalizing your welcome series. Using conditional splits, you can send shoppers down different ‘branches’ of your welcome series based on what profile property they selected at sign-up. This guides the customer journey right from the start, so that their first purchase from you is a positive one.
Read more about how Wilkinson Sword achieved this.
Create segments based on preferences
Create a segment for each chosen profile property, so you can easily group customers who have this preference. These segments will steadily grow over time and give you an idea of how your customer base breaks down in terms of their preferences; this is great from a business intelligence perspective!
You can also use these segments in campaigns. For example, Nani sends a last-minute deal on a sensitive skin bundle to their window shoppers and sensitive skin type segments.
Target shoppers with hyper-specific ads
What do you do if someone signs up for your list, submits their profile property, but then stops opening your emails? One option is to reach them on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok with a hyper-personalized ad. Use the information they shared with you to your advantage to re-engage and bring them back to your site.
Elevate campaigns with show/hide blocks
Show/hide blocks dynamically display content in an email depending on the recipient’s profile property. This is great when you’ve got a wide variety of content in your newsletter, but you want to only display the blocks that will resonate most with each recipient without creating multiple different campaigns. By including show/hide logic in your content blocks, you can easily tailor your emails to each recipient and boost your click rate. That said, don’t forget to set a fallback block for those who don’t have a profile property.