With Google about to drop the bomb on third-party cookies, a lot of marketers are worried about the future.
And we get it. It might seem scary at first that third-party data is about to go the way of the dinosaurs.
But the fact is, there are still a lot of tactics and tools marketers can use beyond third-party cookies. Among them is the tactic we’ll discuss today: email marketing.
In a nutshell, email marketing is the process of sending a commercial message to someone via email. Automated emails are often used: this is done by setting up software that sends the same message (or variations of a message) to people on a mailing list (or several lists).
Email marketing is going to become even more important for businesses this year. But for you to understand why, we’ll have to first go into the differences between first-party and third-party data.
A Quick Explainer: First-party Data vs. Third-party Data
First things first: what are cookies?
Roughly speaking, cookies are files that represent data collected by websites on their visitors or users.
A first-party cookie is one that’s tied directly to the website a person may be visiting.
If you visit www.example.com, for instance, a first-party cookie is one that example.com itself sets.
This means only example.com can access or view the data in that cookie. No other websites or businesses can, whether they’re Google, example.com’s competitors, or something else.
A third-party cookie works differently - it’s actually not exclusive to the website the person is actually visiting.
So, for instance, let’s say again that you visit www.example.com. You visit it to look at Product A offered on the site, but eventually decide not to buy the product.
If you move on to browse other websites and find Product A being displayed to you repeatedly (even though you’re not on www.example.com anymore), it’s because you got a third-party cookie on example.com.
This tells you that a website can use both first-party and third-party data. In fact, most of them have been doing that for ages!
What’s more, this shows you the main difference between first-party and third-party cookies or data:
The first-party data was accessible only to the website or business that you actually had direct dealings with, whereas third-party data is accessible to even businesses you haven’t dealt with yet.
Why Businesses Are Worried and Why They Shouldn’t Be
Third-party data has been a big deal for marketers and advertisers for some time now. They’ve been using the ability to track consumers’ activities across the Web to identify and target audiences.
Unfortunately, Google is about to get rid of that data.
Without that cross-site, cross-platform data, the fear is that marketers will henceforth have to go in blind.
But that’s a hyperbolic take, really. Remember: only third-party data is about to go. First-party data lives on!
That means you can still collect information on your actual or potential customers. You can still deal directly with people who visit your site, make inquiries about your products or services, and so on.
That leads us to why email marketing matters more than ever before. With marketers having no choice save to focus on first-party data from now on, channels like these have just become doubly valuable.
Why Use Email Marketing, In Detail
Email marketing is already the result of you leveraging first-party data: email addresses you collected through lead generation forms, sign-up boxes, surveys, and more.
But beyond that, it’s actually an excellent way to continue collecting more first-party data.
You see, this channel can be a superb tool for engagement marketing.
You can ask people on your email list to reply, to click on a hyperlink, to submit some data, and so on. You can ask them to view a video, encourage them to tweet about something in the email, and more.
Emails may have been viewed before as one-way communication channels for marketers, but that’s an outdated view.
If the social media marketing era and age of personalisation has shown us anything, what really matters is engagement - and emails actually open doors for that if you use it right!
Email marketing can be used to start a dialogue. It can be used to kick off interaction, ask questions, and learn more about your target customers.
Email nurturing lets you lead consumers further down the funnel, for instance, and even afterwards, you can use it to re-engage customers!
Taking Advantage of Email Marketing’s Flexibility
As you can see, there’s so much space and flexibility on this channel, that you’d be insane not to take advantage of that.
There are very few limits to worry about in emails: this is a medium through which you can ask your audience to respond or react in many ways, which is great for marketers!
Moreover, because you’re collecting the data transparently and keeping it only in your own data banks, no privacy or security issues need to come to the fore.
Now before you worry that email is outdated as a communications channel compared to, say, social media, people are sending more emails than ever. The Radicati Group’s report on email statistics projects 333.2 billion emails sent per day this year.
And email users? It’s supposed to hit 4.258 billion this year - up 3% from 2021.
Starting Email Marketing ASAP
Even if we’ve convinced you to try email marketing this year, you may have thought of another concern at this point: namely, that with the developments and figures we just explained, you’ll probably face more competition in consumers’ inboxes now.
Honestly, this is true. Inboxes fill up quickly and not every email gets opened.
But if you plan your email campaign wisely, clean your email list regularly (to keep spam reports down), and focus on offering actual relevant value to your target audience, that shouldn’t be a problem.
And of course, it wouldn’t hurt if you got started on all that now!
If you need help figuring out how to do that, get in touch with us. We can set up an email marketing campaign that suits your business and goals, as we’ve done for many other business owners in Singapore.
Or we can just talk first about what exactly your business might need in marketing this year, whether email marketing is included in that or not. Either way, reach out to us and we’ll chat!
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