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Ecommerce’s share of total retail sales has grown immensely in the past decade and will only keep growing. Omnichannel marketing helps businesses meet customers where they are — both online and in stores. To capture audiences’ attention in today’s distraction-filled world, brands must adopt an omnichannel strategy. This means implementing data-backed promotional and shopping campaigns across a variety of platforms.

We’ve devised a set of clear, simple steps for creating an omnichannel strategy for your business.

Seven steps for creating an effective omnichannel strategy

1. Define your ideal customer

The first step in creating an omnichannel marketing strategy is identifying and defining your ideal customer. While multichannel strategies are broad and channel-centered, omnichannel strategies are specific and customer-centered. The more specific you are about your target audience, the better. Ask these questions about your ideal customer:

• What do they care about? 
• Where do they shop?
• Where do they get information?
• What annoys them?

There are many more questions to explore when getting to know your ideal customer, but these are a good place to start.

2. Find your ideal customer

Once you’ve outlined your ideal customer and target audience, you need to know where they spend time. This isn’t just where they physically live but also where they hang out online. Answering these questions can help you find your ideal customer:

• Do they primarily shop online, in stores, or both?
• When do they shop?
• Do they shop with your competitors?
• How much do they spend?

To answer these questions, use whatever data you can access — website analytics, social listening tools, surveys, social media, and more. If you can get your hands on customer transaction data, you’ll receive valuable insights into spending habits and trends.

3. Choose your channels

Based on the insights you’ve gathered, select which marketing channels and platforms you’ll use for marketing to your customers. A successful omnichannel strategy should have a mix of digital and traditional channels. Examples of potential marketing channels include:

• Social media
• Brand website
• Mobile app
• Email
• Broadcast — radio and TV
• Digital ads
• Paid search
• Print materials
• In-store ads and promos

An effective omnichannel strategy needs to integrate multiple marketing channels seamlessly and give customers multiple options for where to make purchases. An example of this is a loyalty rewards program customers can use via website, mobile app, and in-store.

4. Enhance your online presence

Your online presence is extremely important, even if your brand primarily operates as a brick-and-mortar business. You must ensure your digital efforts align with in-store branding and messaging.

Make sure your brand image is cohesive, and the user experience is pain-free across all channels and platforms. When consumers interact positively with your brand across multiple channels, your reputation grows, and you stay at the top of their minds. Here are a few things to look for as you audit your online presence:

• Consistent imagery and messaging across social media platforms
• Mobile-friendly website with simple UX and clear CTAs
• Frictionless experience within your app
• Seamless integration with relevant third parties, such as delivery apps for restaurants

5. Map the customer journey

As you build your omnichannel campaign, you’ll find many moving parts across the various channels. Create a map of your customer’s journey, highlighting which channels customers will encounter along the way. Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes will bring clarity to your omnichannel efforts and help you shape your messaging to speak to the right audience at the right moment.

Mapping the customer journey also helps you find potential pain points and inconveniences that could deter customers from engaging with you. As you create your map, look for ways to encourage crossover between online and offline experiences — offering in-store pickup for online orders is one example.

6. Prioritize customer support

A customer’s journey doesn’t end when they make a purchase. Customer support is an important part of the customer experience. A strong customer support strategy can turn casual shoppers into loyal customers — and a poor customer support experience could turn someone away forever. Provide support through multiple channels, and create a personalized experience through warm, friendly support specialists.

7. Collect and protect customer data

As you implement your omnichannel marketing strategy, you’ll undoubtedly need to tweak your targeting, messaging, or other elements of your strategy. Rather than basing changes on trends or assumptions, make data-driven changes based on the results you’ve seen so far. 

In addition to your own customer data, investigate solutions like Cardlytics Purchase Intelligence™ to gain powerful insights based on real customer transactions and purchase habits.

What a successful omnichannel marketing strategy looks like

Once you’ve implemented your omnichannel strategy, how do you measure success? Since your campaign spans multiple channels and marketing platforms, cross-channel or aggregate, metrics are important. Some KPIs to consider when evaluating your omnichannel efforts include:

• Cross-channel pageviews
• Social media engagement metrics
• Cross-channel conversion rate
• Average order value
• Churn rate

Your KPIs will differ depending on your overall campaign goals and which stage of the customer journey you’re looking at. Additionally, an effective omnichannel strategy may look different depending on your industry vertical — travel brands will craft a different customer journey than restaurant brands, for example.

Make Cardlytics part of your omnichannel marketing strategy

A successful omnichannel marketing strategy is key to reaching your target audience where they’re at. Cardlytics can provide marketing insights based on over 179 million consumers’ actual transaction data — all while protecting customers’ identification and personal information. Reach out today to learn more about how Cardlytics can enhance your omnichannel efforts.

Brands favor omnichannel marketing strategies for many reasons, including the opportunity to reach more customers and make more sales. However, in addition to business benefits, omnichannel efforts can greatly improve the customer shopping experience.

A well-crafted omnichannel customer experience can help you build a satisfied, loyal, and enthusiastic customer base.

What is the omnichannel customer experience?

The omnichannel customer experience is simply a way of describing how customers engage with and interact with brands through several channels. This is also known as the omnichannel customer journey. 

An effective omnichannel strategy should include a customer journey map, with details about which channel(s) the customer interacts with at each stage in the purchasing process.

What do customers really want?

To provide an exceptional customer experience, you need to understand what customers want and give them what they want. Some examples of consumers' customer service expectations include:

• Foresight
• Convenience
• Flexibility
• Reliability
• Empathy

With a well-crafted omnichannel strategy, you'll have various resources at your fingertips to meet and exceed these expectations, ultimately providing a satisfying, elevated experience that keeps customers coming back.

Meeting customer needs with your omnichannel customer journey

Adopting an omnichannel approach is the best way to serve your customers and improve their overall experience with your brand. Here are some ideas for crafting an omnichannel customer experience that meets and exceeds customers' expectations.

Foresight — anticipating needs

Customers want brands to anticipate their needs, not just respond to them — but brands aren't mind readers. To effectively anticipate customer needs, you need an in-depth understanding of your customer, which you can get through data and customer feedback. Some ways to improve foresight include:

• Soliciting customer feedback across multiple channels — add a link to a survey on printed receipts, in order confirmation emails, and on social media posts
• Including proactive outreach as a part of your customer communication
• Analyzing cross-channel customer data and looking for patterns

Swift, thoughtful responses are now the bare minimum in customer service. To really connect with customers, use data and feedback to anticipate their needs.

Convenience — reducing friction

Customers expect convenience when shopping in-store and placing orders online, and even small inconveniences can cause them to shop elsewhere. Your omnichannel customer journey should be streamlined and optimized to provide the level of convenience customers want. Here are some ways to achieve a more frictionless customer journey through your omnichannel efforts:

• Optimizing your digital platforms — website, mobile app, social media profiles, Google My Business profile — for speed and usability
• Giving customers a real-time view of inventory to see what's in stock
• Streamlining the ordering and checkout processes

You can see increased sales and more repeat customers by improving convenience and optimizing your customer journey.

Flexibility — providing options

The more options you offer, the more personalized your customer experience. As you create your omnichannel customer service strategy, look for opportunities to offer a variety of options, such as:

• Allowing customers to make purchases through any channel
• Allowing all forms of payment
• Offering a variety of shipping and fulfillment options

Customers have unique wants and needs and are more likely to shop again when their preferences are accommodated.

Reliability — being consistent

Consistency can be challenging with an omnichannel strategy because you may have many channels to coordinate and integrate. Try these tips to increase your reliability across your omnichannel efforts:

• Consistent branding and brand messaging across channels — your presence and promotions should be instantly recognizable no matter where customers encounter you
• Fast response times across all customer service channels

When you provide an exceptional customer experience, you'll gain a reputation for excellence. Maintain and grow your brand's reputation by being consistent and reliable with branding and customer service.

Empathy — showing you care

Although you may handle a large volume of customer inquiries, each customer wants to feel like you care about their specific question or issue. To show you care and to build trust with your target audience, incorporate these things in your omnichannel customer service strategy:

• Warm, friendly customer service representatives
• Multiple customer service channels — email, phone, online chat, social media, in-store
• Creating customized responses to customer reviews

When consumers feel cared for, they develop an emotional connection with your brand, and they're more likely to return and share their positive experiences with others.

Provide a better omnichannel customer experience with Cardlytics

A well-executed omnichannel strategy can transform the customer experience into a seamless series of touchpoints where you're meeting customers' every need. Solutions like Cardlytics Purchase Intelligence™ offer transaction-based data and insights that can boost your omnichannel efforts and drive results. To learn more about how Cardlytics can help meet your customer's needs and expectations, reach out today.

Did you know that omnichannel customers–those who shop through multiple channels- spend nearly twice as much as traditional brick-and-mortar customers?

Post-COVID pandemic recovery in the retail sector was fueled largely by omnichannel retail strategies. As consumers returned to their favorite retailers, they increasingly turned to digital channels to find store locations, compare prices, read reviews, and get discounts. 

It turns out that double the exposure meant double the spending. During the holiday shopping season, these omnichannel customers spent twice as much as their single-channel shoppers. That is a profit-driving trend that can’t be ignored.

We saw similar themes in food and beverage, with online ordering reaching 26% of the food order share in 2020–and showing no signs of slowing down even as restaurants opened their doors for traditional dining options.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what you need to know about omnichannel marketing–what it is, why it’s important, and how to use it–to serve a growing consumer base that prefers to blur the lines between e-commerce and traditional retail.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is an all-encompassing marketing strategy designed to provide a seamless brand experience across multiple touchpoints. 

It begins with the fundamental understanding that customers may choose to engage with your brand in a variety of ways, like mobile shopping, social media engagement, and in-store experiences. Because these channels are not mutually exclusive–consumers often use multiple touchpoints.

For brands, it’s important that wherever and whenever customers engage with the brand, their experience is consistent. It’s also a growing necessity. The pandemic era push towards digital enablement brought a new level of comfort across multiple channels for brands and consumers.

Omnichannel marketing is a trend that’s here to stay. According to Cardlytics data, online spending has maintained increases between 90-130% YoY even as most consumers have returned in person. This means that customers are no longer either online or in-person. And that shift is reshaping how companies market to these consumers.

Omnichannel marketing vs. multichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing occurs across multiple channels, creating some confusion between these two terms. Let’s look at how they’re different.

Multichannel marketing refers to using multiple channels to promote products and services, often with independent strategies optimized for each channel. This means different campaigns for different audiences in print, media, and digital formats. 

A multichannel strategy tends to be broad in scope and siloed, with each channel performing independently to reach as many customers as possible.

With omnichannel marketing, the strategy utilizes multiple channels,  but the focus is on consistency across all of those channels.

Brands using omnichannel strategies favor an integrated approach with personalized experiences that prioritize customer loyalty over exposure.

Brands that take advantage of omnichannel marketing benefit from strong, cohesive brand identity, better customer experiences, and more engagement leading to more traffic and better sales. In 2018, back-to-school shoppers proved that omnichannel marketing is more effective, with 48% more spending by omni-shoppers.

Learn more about omnichannel marketing vs. multichannel marketing.

How to create an omnichannel marketing strategy

Omnichannel retailers see benefits beginning with the ability to meet consumer expectations. A positive customer experience drives sales and loyalty, giving these brands a clear competitive advantage.

Here’s a quick look at how to get started.

1. Study Your Customer Data

2. Create Shoppable Touchpoints

3. Connect the Dots

Customer data is key

First, look at who your customers are and where they engage. Comparing sales from online orders, in-app purchases, and brick-and-mortar transactions will give you an idea of what channels to include in your strategy. Customer demographics will clue you into how to reach them. Take time to map the entire customer journey from first look to post-purchase retention.

Create shoppable touchpoints

Next, embrace the idea that revenue-generating transactions can look like many different things, depending on where they originate. Your in-person store experiences can look like racks of product and lanes of cashiers–or it can look like personal shoppers and QR codes. 

Augmented reality can redefine e-commerce transactions, and your social media ads can transform into shoppable, influencer-driven sales. Bring the focus of your digital presence to revenue-generating activities by making every channel shoppable.

Connect the dots with omnichannel integration

Finally, connect your shoppable touchpoints. Find ways to engage app users in the store, direct social media traffic to your website or cue up discount codes scanned from smartphones in the checkout lane. In the delivery, prioritize customer service to balance the human interaction element and collect data to measure and monitor effectiveness.

When you get it right–you’ll see the difference in cross-channel pageviews, social media engagement, cross-channel conversion, average order value, and churn rate. Dig deeper with an easy step-by-step plan to create an omnichannel marketing strategy.

Benefits of omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing strategies are a consumer-driven sales optimization tool offering plenty of benefits for shoppers and retailers. Let’s look closer at how each party benefits.

Consumers get a better experience

Omnichannel marketing enables brands to provide what customers really want–offering positive, personalized experiences.

What does that mean?

For consumers, it means that brands proactively anticipate their needs even before they shop. And meet them with:

• Convenience
• Flexibility
• Reliability
• Empathy

In the moment, consumers want convenience–or the ability to get exactly what they want without waiting. To follow through, customers want flexibility–or the option to choose when, where, and how they will make a purchase. And to keep coming back, consumers want reliability–or trust that they will continue to receive the same experience each time.

But it’s not enough to go through the motions. Consumers want all of this–with empathy. The difference between a good experience and a brand loyalty-worthy experience is feelings. Consumers need to know that your brand cares about meeting their needs. 

Omnichannel marketing enables customer-driven service models so that brands can balance automation, optimization, and human interaction to provide a positive customer experience.

Businesses get a better image and a healthier profit

Why are so many retailers going to great lengths to create positive customer experiences? It’s simple–catering to the demand for personalized experiences drives business.

An omnichannel marketing strategy can:

• Identify New Customers (Opportunities)
• Nurture Customer Loyalty (Efficiency)
• Increase Sales (Profit)

When retailers take the time to study their shoppers, digging into data-driven insights, they can discover entirely new subsets of customers they didn’t even know existed. Identifying these customers and their unique needs is the first step in reaching them with personalized service and driving more sales.

For example, Cardlytics data shows that online shoppers spend more by an average of $15 per basket. Still, three-quarters (75.1%) of shoppers remain loyal to the in-store shopping experience. Using an omnichannel approach, retailers can supplement the in-store shopping experience with digital channels to add convenience and flexibility for the customer, netting higher sales for the retailer.

Another key business benefit is optimizing the lifetime value of a customer. Retail businesses know exactly how much it costs to gain, service, keep, and lose an individual customer. And time and again–the data proves that the lifetime value of loyal, repeat customers is the key to sustainable growth.

When you know who your customers are–and you’re making an effort to give them what they need–you’re effectively driving sales. See how the omnichannel customer experience captures what the customer wants to increase sales with this in-depth

The takeaway on omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is an opportunity for retail brands to reach new audiences, drive loyalty, and achieve sustainable growth by improving the customer experience. It’s an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage using convenience, flexibility, consistency, and empathy. Cardlytics’ solution can support your omnichannel marketing strategy with transaction-based data that provides real insights into what your customers want most.

The rise of digital marketing has evolved side by side with third-party cookies. And now–they're parting ways. 

Evolving privacy concerns are shaping policy decisions across the big tech landscape that will change how marketers handle digital channels. An entire industry is shifting from reliance on cookie-based marketing data to a future that currently feels a bit unclear.

You have options, but if you're asking—now is the time to support an omnichannel cookieless marketing strategy.

In this guide to a cookieless strategy, we'll discuss why third-party cookies are a thing of the past and how performance marketing programs with an omnichannel approach are the path forward.

What is cookie-based marketing?

In the digital world, a cookie is a small piece of code designed to store user data. In 1994, when a Netscape engineer invented the cookie, the goal was to improve the user experience on the web. 

Cookies can track things like:

• Page Visits
• Length of Time on Page
• User Location
• Income 
• Gender
• Interests
• Social Media Likes
• Age

By 1996, developers had figured out how to use cookies to extract valuable data for marketers, and by 1999 the third-party cookie had revolutionized digital marketing capabilities. For the last two decades, the marketing world has revolved around cookie-based marketing, often at the expense of data privacy.

As momentum grows behind data privacy as a human right, fueled by policies like the General Data Protection Rights act passed by the European Union in 2018, Big Tech is feeling the pressure to take third-party cookies out of the equation–leaving marketers no choice but to adapt.

Preparing for a cookieless future

The end of third-party cookies is a significant change for digital and programmatic advertising. Without cookies, marketers must find new ways to gather demographic and psychographic data to build complex customer profiles. 

The ability to track attributions to measure campaign effectiveness or to retarget and redirect traffic effectively will also be diminished. This means that return on investment for ad spend will suffer as conversion rates decline.

The fallout from the depreciation of third-party cookies will force change as the marketing world explores new options to recover lost ground in audience profiling, retargeting, and attribution tracking.

Alternatives to third-party cookies include:

• Cultivate First-Party Data Streams
• Utilize Aggregate First-Party Data Sources 
• Pair Contextual Targeting with First-Party Data
• Watch for New Sources

How big tech is moving us towards cookieless marketing

Once a place of anonymity, the internet has morphed into a world full of tools to track every click and pixel for someone else's benefit. 

It's an invasive practice that grew alongside the internet while effective data privacy policies were slow to adapt. That is–until Big Tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook made policy changes that would push us towards a cookieless future.

Apple set a precedent with its iOS 14 updates. For the first time, this tech giant rolled out changes designed to protect its users' privacy. An App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATTP), Wifi MAC address randomization, and Apple App Store permissions and disclosures put iPhone users in control with who they shared their data with.

Google matched suit by developing Google's Privacy Sandbox to foster innovation and facilitate the development of privacy-first marketing solutions in preparation for a cookieless future. This tech-facilitated development project produced several great ideas, including:

• Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC)
• TURTLEDOV
• SPARROW
• Dovekey
• PARRROT
• Fledge

Each of these initiatives addresses a different area of concern for digital privacy, providing an alternative that serves as building blocks for future cookieless tech stacks.

The innovation process is experimental. Every new advancement is a learning opportunity to discover what works and what doesn't. Google FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) was the first attempt at a true cookieless alternative. 

FLoC was designed to protect data privacy, but it was quickly discovered that a fundamental design flaw actually made it easier to fingerprint and track users. Google suspended development on FLoC in July 2021, effectively shifting resources to Google Topics API instead.

This proposal utilizes a temporary, browser-based solution that shares topical interests safeguarded with pro-privacy protections. With Google Topics API, advertisers can access the important data they need for audience targeting and retargeting without third-party servers.

Policy moves towards privacy, limiting cookie-based marketing

Policies that protect personal privacy aren't new. As far back as 1789, the US Constitution included amendments addressing these protections. The only thing that has changed since then is how information is collected, stored, and used. 

The digital world is continuously evolving, and along with it, how we apply policy changes. More recent legislative actions like the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) or CCPA (US) are modernized policy updates to protect personal privacy as a human right in the digital age.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, policy moves established a National Do Not Call Registry and the Health & Medical Privacy (HIPAA). When Web 2.0 arrived in the 2000s, many states adopted data breach notification laws. And as recently as 2018, the EU passed a first-of-its-kind privacy act for the digital world, setting a precedent for other global leaders to follow suit.

With each new policy, the rights of individuals gain a little more protection, and the responsibilities of organizations that collect, use, and store personal data become greater. After the GDPR went into effect (2018), most online websites began displaying opt-in notices regarding cookies. 

This was one significant step in bringing personal privacy concerns out of the peripheral and into focus for everyday users. In the US, California was the first state to pass privacy-specific legislation similar to the GDPR, with a few states like Colorado and Virginia following suit. These policy changes designed to give individuals control over how, when, and with whom their information is shared have a naturally limiting effect on the function of cookie-based marketing systems. So, that is to say, every step in the direction of pro-privacy interactions is a step away from cookie-based marketing.

A cookieless marketing strategy for the future

Not all cookies are getting the crunch. Pro-privacy maneuvers are specifically targeting third-party cookies that collect and share unauthorized data. That means it will take a little more effort to collect data–but quality, first-party sources are still out there.

Customer loyalty programs provide a path forward

In a high-effort, high-reward environment, customer loyalty programs shine as a quality-rich data source. This sets the stage for building a cookieless marketing strategy that prioritizes personalization and engagement over blanketed demographic reach. 

With this level of detail, the downfall of third-party cookies is enabling the rise of omnichannel integration. We're moving away from generalized tactics and siloed strategies fed by voluminous third-party data streams. And we're working towards hyper-personalization that caters to a specific, highly-engaged, opt-in audience.

Personalization is great, but efficiency is still important

Without third-party cookies, marketers are apprehensive about finding cost-effective ways to reach their audience. These feelings are valid–the cost of curating first-party data streams can be higher and is often spread across a much smaller audience.

But what if you can grow the lifetime value of a customer to offset the cost? An omnichannel marketing strategy that relies on first-party data fed from a well-designed loyalty program offers a cyclical, self-feeding sales cycle that can extract that value.

What if your customers received a notification reminding them of special offers in your app when they stepped foot in the store? With geo-location data, it's possible. What if your purchase decision process in the store was facilitated by scannable QR codes that helped your customers find the things they really wanted? 

And what if they received an SMS follow-up after leaving the store, giving a time-based second chance offer on something they shopped for but didn't purchase? With an omnichannel strategy, it's all possible.

It's time to rethink the customer journey

The key to a loyalty-driven cookieless strategy is to redefine the customer journey. Instead of focusing on the 'awareness to conversion' journey, the new strategy will focus on the 'conversion to advocacy' journey.

Nurturing your most loyal customers with a seamless experience that transitions easily between digital and physical touchpoints will be the key to success in a post-cookie world.

How Cardlytics can support your cookieless strategy

The end of third-party cookies signals a major shift in how brands market their products and services. This change doesn't necessarily mean the end of targeted campaigns. If you look at the end of cookies as an opportunity, it's a better chance to serve your best customers with highly personalized experiences. 

When you invest more into serving your loyal fanbase, brand affinity grows naturally. Those satisfied, engaged customers are more than happy to share their positive, attention-grabbing experiences across various social platforms to bring you new traffic in a very authentic way.

The first step to building your cookieless strategy is to find a high-quality source of first-party data. With the power of firsthand Purchase Intelligence™ provided directly by banks, Cardlytics provides exactly what brands need to make the switch.

Our platform has been built with a pro-privacy mindset from day one. By partnering with top banks, we can provide access to high-quality first-party data from real consumer purchases, providing valuable insights to share of spend across brands and competitors. Our data is vital to growing a healthy, sustainable loyalty program, providing you with a high-value audience to power your cookieless strategy.

As time goes on, consumers are becoming even more skeptical about how their personal information is collected and used. In a recent KPMG survey, 86% of respondents said they feel a growing concern about data privacy, while 78% expressed fears about the amount of data collected. 

Yet, user privacy concerns are nothing new. Over the past decade, the number of data breaches in the U.S. has skyrocketed. As a result, businesses are taking steps to protect user privacy. That's one reason Google decided to eliminate third-party cookies and introduce Privacy Sandbox. Let's look at what Privacy Sandbox is and how it impacts your business.

Key takeaways:

• In response to concerns regarding user privacy, Google created Privacy Sandbox.
• Google's goals for Privacy Sandbox aim to build new technology for keeping user data private.
• Google is considering TURTLEDOVE, SPARROW, and Dovekey, among others, as potential solutions.

What is Privacy Sandbox?

Privacy Sandbox is a project led by Google to create web standards that allow access to user information without compromising privacy. Privacy Sandbox proposals are based on advertising through cohorts rather than individuals. They place the web browser in control of user privacy and move some data collection and processing that supports advertising onto the user's device. By putting boundaries around how advertisers interact with and utilize data, Privacy Sandbox is designed to keep user data more secure.

What are the goals of Privacy Sandbox?

The goal of Privacy Sandbox is to develop a set of open standards to enhance privacy on the web. In addition, third-party cookies are replaced by multiple application programming interfaces (APIs). Instead of leaving the users' devices, these APIs will process and store data at the browser level. This solution provides more security and privacy to users but still allows advertisers to utilize a more controlled environment for targeting and measurement.

Ultimately, Google hopes to:

• Build new technology to keep user data private
• Allow developers and publishers to keep online content free
• Team up with the industry to build new internet privacy standards

Potential Privacy Sandbox solutions

Here is a summary of the potential solutions Google is considering as part of the Privacy Sandbox:

Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC)

Federated Learning of Cohorts is a way for browsers to continue allowing interest-based advertising on the web. Instead of observing users' browsing behavior, companies observe the behavior of a cohort of similar people. In January of 2022, Google withdrew the FLoC proposal following strong criticism from privacy and antitrust advocates and was replaced with Google’s Topics API proposal.

TURTLEDOVE

"TURTLEDOVE" stands for Two Uncorrelated Requests, Then Locally-Executed Decision On Victory. It's one of the solutions that can make retargeting possible after the third-party cookie is phased out. However, while it seems to solve some key privacy-related issues, it fails to provide a clear idea around how it would address frequency capping, A/B testing, or brand safety. As a result, TURTLEDOVE eventually evolved into the FLEDGE proposal.

FLEDGE

FLEDGE stands for First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment. An evolution of TURTLEDOVE, this solution supports retargeting. The purpose is to allow remarketing to specific cohorts of users without allowing third parties to track browsing behavior across sites. Google opened initial trials for FLEDGE on March 31, 2022.

SPARROW

Given the limitations with TURTLEDOVE, Criteo, a French ad tech company, created another proposal. It's called SPARROW, which stands for Secure Private Advertising Remotely Run On Webserver. This solution builds on TURTLEDOVE while introducing additional capabilities to protect users and ensure advertisers function more freely and transparently. SPARROW is currently being considered as an alternative to FLEDGE.

Dovekey

The Google Ads team responded to SPARROW with DOVEKEY. DOVEKEY addresses many of the same use cases as SPARROW while also alleviating the need for the ad tech industry to re-implement bidding models and auction logic into another server. DOVEKEY is being considered an alternative to SPARROW.

PARRROT

PARRROT stands for Publisher Auction Responsibility Retention Revision of TurtleDove. It aims to uphold the privacy goals of TURTLEDOVE while moving the auction decisioning back to the publisher side. In simple terms, PARRROT is an attempt to re-create header bidding under the framework of the Privacy Sandbox. This solution would be an alternative to FLEDGE.

PeLICAn

PeLICAn stands for Private Learning and Interference for Causal Attribution. Rather than provide a fully-baked solution, the initial purpose of PeLICAn is to raise awareness around what a privacy-safe multi-touch analytics system could look like for Chrome without being able to use third-party cookies. This proposal is still being considered.

Privacy Sandbox goes mobile

Privacy Sandbox isn't just focusing on desktop environments. Recently, Google announced an initiative to build the Privacy Sandbox on Android. The goal is to offer new, more private advertising solutions that limit sharing user data with third parties. It also operates without cross-app identifiers, including advertising ID. Google is also exploring solutions that reduce the potential for covert data collection, including safer ways for apps to integrate with advertising software development kits.

Concerns with Privacy Sandbox

Privacy Sandbox has sparked antitrust and anti-competitive concerns across the ad tech ecosystem. In a bold move, U.S. state attorneys general filed a complaint against Google, claiming that the Privacy Sandbox attempts to disadvantage ad competitors by eliminating access to detailed information about consumer web-behavior. The overarching concern is that Google uses privacy to take control of all identifiers and cut off third-party participants.

While many Privacy Sandbox proposals are being evaluated, the initiative is ongoing. According to Google, over 30 different proposals have been introduced, with many more to come. Now that we are moving to a future without third-party cookies, it's critical to create a sustainable first-party data strategy. 

Cardlytics can help you gain a competitive advantage because user privacy has always been central to our DNA. And, through our partnerships with banks, we have insight into actual transaction data for over 175M consumers. Contact us today to learn more.

It's official—the cookie is crumbling. Because of consumers' growing demand for privacy, Safari and Firefox have already disabled third-party cookies. And Google Chrome, which represents close to half of the US browser market share, plans to stop using them by the end of 2024.

Epsilon research estimates that about 80% of advertisers depend on third-party cookies, so it's time to find a new way to reach customers and prospects online. One way to do this effectively is through first party data.

Key takeaways:

• Third-party cookie deprecation means marketers must re-focus their targeting and remarketing tactics.
• An alternative is Google Topics, but there's still limitations to contend with
• First party data is valuable as it still touches points tailored to an individual's behaviors

The new cookie landscape

With third-party cookie deprecation looming, first party data will be increasingly important for targeted marketing strategies and campaign measurement. The widespread targeting and retargeting tactics that you may have relied on in the past will no longer be possible. As a result, expect limitations with behavioral and browsing data, making it difficult to personalize ads.

In addition, basic capabilities like A/B testing and frequency capping will be a challenge. Expect analytics and attribution to be much less effective. By leaning into first party data marketing, you'll be able to minimize the impact of a world without third-party cookies.

What marketers will no longer be able to do

Marketers have been relying on third-party cookies for years. Now that they're going away, remarketing across domains and apps will no longer be possible. For example, the products you view on a retail website will no longer follow you to your Instagram feed based on your browsing behavior. As a result, Google announced Topics, a privacy-friendly replacement.

With Topics, as someone browses the internet, Chrome records the categories of websites they visit (like News or Finance). Each week, Chrome determines the five categories the user is most interested in and then randomly adds a sixth to boost user privacy. Chrome then stores these six interests for three weeks. 

Unfortunately, this option only allows you to target consumers based on broad website categories rather than specific content or user actions. So, given those limitations, it remains to be seen exactly how well the industry will receive Topics.

Increased importance of first party data

First party data is information that's collected from customers through direct interactions with them. It includes demographics, purchase history, website activity, mobile app data, and specific behaviors like clicking on an email. A first party data strategy is even more valuable in a world without third-party cookies because it represents your most engaged customer group.

A first party data approach also enables highly granular segmentation to serve your audience with personalized content based on their behavior. In addition, by using a test and learn approach and tying engagement metrics to first party cookies, you can increase the effectiveness of your campaigns over time. 

Ultimately, this translates into increased revenue and cost savings. In fact, one BCG study shows that digital marketers who can deliver relevant experiences at multiple points across the customer journey achieve revenue increases of as much as 20% and cost savings of up to 30%.

First party data to lean into

You can leverage first party data in multiple ways. For example, email marketing continues to be one of the most effective marketing strategies—delivering an ROI of $44 to every $1 spent. Similarly, text messaging is an excellent way to leverage first- party data. As with email, you can run different testing campaigns and optimize accordingly.

Another example is leveraging a customer data platform or CDP. This platform collects, stores, and amalgamates real-time customer data. With this tool, you can gain valuable insights into the consumer journey and identify which factors convert them into customers.

Finally, with first party data, you can make website improvements to provide a personalized experience and create new retargeting strategies based on improved customer knowledge. Whether they're new or returning customers, first-party data marketing gives you the ability to create tailored messaging based on shopping or browsing behavior and engagement with campaigns.

How Cardlytics can help

Gain a competitive advantage with real purchase data - one of the most accurate indicators of shopping behavior. This data can help you understand purchase intent, inform advertising spend and strengthen the customer experience.

Reach out to us today to learn more about how we can help you transform your marketing initiatives.

An omnichannel marketing strategy is a gold standard for effective brand messaging. By leveraging consumer data gleaned from third-party cookies, advertisers can get the right message to the right customer at the right time, regardless of channel or device. It's no wonder brands with robust omnichannel strategies increase average order value by 13% and purchase frequency by 250%. 

The coming cookieless future could threaten that success. Without third-party cookies, advertisers will struggle to track customers across channels and devices, analyze their journeys, and deliver personalized content and offers. 

It's easy to assume that cookie deprecation means the death of omnichannel marketing, but that's definitely not the case. If you have the right data, omnichannel marketing still holds the key to success.

Key takeaways:

• Consistency in branding and messaging across every channel is among the key elements an omnichannel marketing strategy prioritizes. 
• We can expect the deprecation of third party cookies from Google Chrome in 2024.
• First-party data in omnichannel marketing takes personalization to the next level, increasing a customer's lifetime value.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing seamlessly blends messaging and branding as customers move through online and offline touchpoints along the path to purchase. It puts consumers in the driver's seat, allowing them to choose how, when, and where to engage with your brand. 

An omnichannel marketing strategy prioritizes the customer experience through the effective use of a few key elements:

• Consistency in branding and messaging across every channel
• Personalized messaging and offers relevant to consumers interests and behaviors
• Content shaped by past interactions and the stage of the customer journey

A well-planned omnichannel strategy lets you target customers at the right time with on-brand offers that increase your chance of a conversion.

Omnichannel versus multichannel: What's the difference?

Omnichannel and multichannel share similarities, but the differences are significant. Multichannel marketing gives consumers multiple options to engage with your brand, but the channels aren't seamlessly connected. The experience is optimized for each separate channel. 

On the other hand, omnichannel marketing recognizes that the customer journey spans multiple channels and seeks to create a consistent, personalized experience as the customer moves between them.

The Coming “Cookie-geddon”

Although Google's cookie deprecation timeline has changed a bit since they first announced the phaseout in 2020, the final demise of the third-party cookie is slated for 2024. The news didn't come as a surprise to anyone paying attention to the growing concerns of privacy advocates. 

Third-party cookies collect an enormous amount of personal data, usually without the individual's explicit consent. Data breaches and privacy violations caught the attention of legislators around the globe, resulting in the EU's GDPR and "cookie law." In the US, individual states passed their own versions of the cookie law in an attempt to promote transparency in data collection practices. 

A few tech CEOs also took a stand for privacy. Apple and Mozilla were among the first to give users the ability to block third-party tracking as early as 2012, with both companies disabling third-party cookies entirely by 2020. Google, the browser behemoth representing over 60% of Internet traffic, was the only holdout. But by 2020, it too announced it would end third-party cookies, albeit on its own, slightly elongated timeline. 

Now “Cookie-geddon” is almost upon us, and marketers are scrambling for solutions to replace the data cookies provided.

What Does This Mean for Brands?

Marketers have become addicted to the easy flow of third-party cookie data driving programmatic and digital advertising. It enabled personalization, targeting, and attribution to justify spend. But third-party cookies have their share of drawbacks:

• There's no transparency. The slightly underhanded way data is collected destroys the sense of trust between consumers and brands. Omnichannel marketing is a two-way street; consumers are willing to trust brands with their data in exchange for a more personalized experience as long as they feel confident their data is secure and only shared with consent.
• They're not people-based. Cookies are connected to devices, not people, so there's a lot of waste and duplicate impressions.
• They're not persistent. Cookies don't last forever, and the user can always delete them.

Third-party data made it easy for brands to acquire new customers, lose them to churn, and reacquire them with aggressive retargeting. What it didn't do is help them build the trust and loyalty that drives long-term profits. Customer retention has always been key to profitability; invesp, a conversion rate optimization consultancy, showed that increasing retention by just 5% led to a 25% increase in profits.

On the other hand, first-party data from past brand interactions and logged-in states give marketers the information they need to genuinely understand their customers and create highly relevant experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. 

Leveraging first-party data in omnichannel marketing levels up the personalization and relevancy of the content you serve your customers. Where retention spreads customer lifetime value over a longer timeframe, personalization increases the absolute lifetime value of the customer. Boston Consulting Group found that marketers who could deliver relevant experiences at multiple touchpoints decreased costs by 30% and increased revenue by 20%.

The Cardlytics Advantage

Cardlytics is uniquely positioned to help brands deliver relevant and personalized experiences via cash back offers served through the consumers trusted digital banking channels. Using first-party data obtained from one in two card swipes in the US, we can provide a whole-wallet view with insights into the cross-channel purchase behavior and preferences of your customers. 

Get in touch today to find out how Cardlytics can help you reach your customers with personalized offers in a brand-safe channel to help drive customer loyalty, retention, and revenue.

Convenience stores have been stealing food share away from QSRs. Our data shows a slow and steady increase in convenience food share, aligned to a similarly slow decrease in share against the QSR category (convenience share is up +3pts from 2019). This could be the case due to quicker meal prep time and variety of food options at convenience locations.

Gas stations with made-to-order menus are shown to have higher walk-in rates than those with ‘standard’ snack options

The convenience store experience has evolved, and brands that have upgraded their food options benefit from higher walk-in rates compared to those with a more traditional offering. With elevated food options, however, comes share of stomach competition with QSRs.

Customer penetration of mobile ordering has been growing since well before COVID

Customers want quick – whether that comes to meal preparation, or placing an order in the first place. To that end, customers who used mobile ordering at convenience, QSR, or FSR retailers has risen over the last three years – up to 1.1% from 0.5% in Q1 2019.  Brands who haven’t taken advantage of this purchase channel fail to capture the full spend potential of their customers.

What does this mean for you?

A couple of things...Convenience stores are positioned well to continue stealing share, as long as online ordering and a variety of menu options are available to consumers. That said, these increases in share of trip and share of stomach need to be defended – especially considering that inflation has sent consumer choice in many different directions. Convenience stores need to solidify loyalty before QSRs lure lost consumers back.

Leveraging Cardlytics digital offers can help turn new and existing customers into long-term loyalists at a time when price efficiency is on everyone’s mind.

Cardlytics is here to help future-proof your customer loyalty and drive convenience purchases. Sign up to get our insights delivered to your inbox, early, and get ahead of what's happening in the fuel and convenience industry

Customer loyalty programs are a massive catalyst for building brand loyalty and increasing customer spend.  The question becomes how to construct an effective loyalty program. Should you compare cash back rewards vs brand rewards (like points or miles), or even cash back vs financing options?

Answering these questions  will have a great impact on customer retention and spending rates and impact the robustness and accuracy of your customer data. 

With top search engine providers like Google making the conscious choice to phase out cookies for third-party data collection by 2024, customer loyalty programs are an essential tactic to capture first party consumer data now and into the near future. So what's the strategy moving forward? How does your business optimize its loyalty program to keep customers satisfied without sacrificing access to information?

Key takeaways:

• Consumers prefer the instant gratification of cash back rewards over delayed rewards like miles or points.
• It's easier for brands to personalize messaging using loyalty programs to gather first party consumer data.
• Brands can enhance their targeting without third-party cookies.
• Starting in mid-2024, Google is phasing out support for third-party cookies, with plans to finish the phase-out by late 2024.

Instant gratification: why cash back is king

When evaluating cash back rewards vs delayed rewards, marketing and trends studies ultimately lean toward using cash back strategies for many reasons — the main one being the psychological "instant" gratification obtained from the transaction. Consumers immediately see that money going right back in their pocket when they make a purchase associated with a cash-back rewards program.

That's the opposite effect to other traditional programs such as points or miles, which require a significant amount of time before the benefits can be reaped — delaying the consumer gratification. 

Cash back is also generally easier to manage, understand, and earn from the consumer’s point of view compared to other programs — you spend money, you make money. In fact, 54% of loyalty program memberships are inactive. The number one reason being that it takes too long to earn points or miles for rewards.

The rising importance of loyalty data

Implementing the right elements of a customer loyalty program isn't just critical for revenue purposes but also for the advanced insights acquired through the data collected. Using an enticing loyalty system means you can ensure meaningful performance and behavioral insights are brought in and analyzed, to uncover the most engaged and valuable customers.

This powerful source of first party customer data lets you improve your personalized messaging toward your customers and makes it easy to design individualized promotional offers based on a buyer's behavior and previous purchases. 

There's even the added benefit of improved campaign measurements over time to see which content, deals, and messaging works best for its respective audience compared to others. Collecting this necessary loyalty data provides a better customer experience and a strengthened relationship between consumers and the brands they shop with.

Expand the power of loyalty data with Cardlytics

Brands can strongly enhance their market targeting through Cardlytics’ Purchase Intelligence™ and digital ad platform. Cardlytics, for instance, partners  with financial institutions, such as banks,  and leverages their online, mobile, and email channels to deliver ads based on first party consumer spending insights. 

In conjunction with data collected from loyalty programs, Cardlytics becomes a powerful tool to evaluate where your customers are shopping, when they are shopping, how much they’re spending, if they are brand-loyal, and if there are potential competitive market disruptors in your space. This information can then be used to develop purchase insights and make more informed business decisions.

Give cash back, get loyalty data

Loyalty programs increase customer spending, brand loyalty, and ultimately the total customer relationship value. Additionally, they offer premium data collection capabilities. That said, it's important to create a loyalty program that your customers will love and actually participate in.   

Therefore, you’ll need to diligently compare program structures such as cash back rewards vs points or miles and roll out the right rewards system. While traditional loyalty programs such as points or miles may have worked in the past, consumer behavior now shows that instant gratification in the form of cash back is more popular than ever before, as well as one of the easiest ways for the customer to manage and earn their rewards.  

By utilizing an effective rewards program with a first party data solution like Cardlytics, you can take data utilization to the next level. The platform's collection and analysis process brings data from critical customer channels to improve marketing strategies for your target audiences. Want to learn more about improving your targeting with advanced consumer insights? Contact us today to speak with an expert and learn how to take your data to the next level.