Winning in a Cookieless World

When Firefox and Safari shut down the support of third-party cookies and third-party tracking (to enhance the protection of internet users), they caught the attention of ecommerce companies around the world. 

Google’s “scheduled death” of third-party cookies and third-party tracking also poses existential challenges for browser-based digital advertising and the prediction of consumer demand patterns. This profound shift will drive companies away from third-party data and towards zero-party and first-party data that can be accessed through a single customer view. 

This has forced — or will soon force — digital commerce companies to answer a key question: What does the digital future look like for companies online in a cookieless world? 

Bloomreach has put together three key strategies to help companies win in this reality. 

Finding Success Without Cookies

Companies everywhere will soon have to determine how to move forward with important online marketing tools such as targeting, retargeting, display advertising, and other types of general behavioral marketing. 

Imagine a real-world scenario where you walk into your favorite brick-and-mortar store or restaurant and all of a sudden the employees that have recognized you and greeted you personally for years stopped recognizing you. That wouldn’t be great for your customer experience or brand loyalty. 

That’s the situation many ecommerce companies are now facing. The transition to cookieless ecommerce makes owning your customer relationships and customer data more important than ever. The building of customer relationships can no longer be easily outsourced to Facebook or Google, and buying relationships with customers rather than developing them organically will no longer work. 

The bottom line is that there are few things more important than the connection your customers have with your brand. Having a connected online and offline experience is essential, and in a cookieless world, your company needs to be ready to pivot and find a new approach to fostering customer relationships. 

To ensure that your company avoids having its loyal customers become strangers, here are three key strategies to employ as third-party cookies crumble. 

Maintain Data Quality 

Data hygiene is of the utmost importance in today’s market. 

Cookie limitations are greatly changing how analytics and advertising reporting works. While a company could previously track a customer’s clicks and purchases through third-party cookies, that is no longer the case on Firefox and Safari. By the end of 2023, the same will be true on Google Chrome. 

Maintaining data quality in a cookieless world and reconstructing that picture of the customer again is crucial to continued success in ecommerce. Bloomreach Engagement helps with this in two ways: server-side data ingestion and server-side conversion tracking. 

Via tracking API and front-end tracking, Bloomreach can ingest additional clean data from your server so that data can be used in an actionable way for connecting with consumers. Server-side conversion tracking exists to give your company complete control over the conversion data shared with ad networks such as Facebook, Google, or your affiliate partners. It will help ensure that your campaign performances remain consistent. 

For example, Bloomreach’s Facebook Conversions API (FB CAPI) is an integration which allows data to be sent to Facebook. You can send important events, such as purchases or leads, to Facebook for better optimization of campaigns. 

Respect Customer Preference

As fines soar for data privacy issues and security breaches, your company must re-center its focus on respecting the preferences of customers. 

When The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the European Union in 2018 (with other similar laws following suit not long after), everything changed in regards to customer privacy. The need for real-time consent management and SaaS solutions that are fully secure is at an all-time high. 

Consent management is a system or process for allowing customers to determine what personal data they are willing to share with your company. Your platform needs to be able to update consents in real time and give customers granular control over what information they want shared with your company. 

This will help customers build trust with your brand. The consents are used in all customer communication channels and are evaluated at the moment each campaign is executed. 

All of your company’s efforts to stay up to speed in a cookieless world will be for naught without a secure SaaS solution. Bloomreach Engagement is GDPR certified and Bloomreach holds a slew of security certifications to prove our commitment to protecting your data. 

Play to Win

While maintaining data quality and respecting customers are largely “defensive” in nature and are required for companies to stay afloat in a cookieless world, embracing these new privacy standards can also be proactive and help businesses drive growth. 

Bloomreach Engagement allows privacy to be a differentiator for businesses and a competitive strength. It does this by: 

• Leveraging micro-opportunities with weblayers. This can be done for customers at almost any stage of the customer journey so that value can be delivered when needed. Displaying the right information to consumers at the right time helps facilitate a sale and can also encourage brand loyalty. Weblayers are also a great tool to collect zero-party data for future personalized marketing purposes.

• Allowing you to know your customers better than anyone. Our customer data model is fully customizable with 255 customer attributes. It has unlimited segmentations, predictions, and aggregates. You will never run out of information that you can collect and add to a specific customer profile. 

• Predicting what you can’t track. Use predictions to scale learnings from known customers to anonymous visitors. Identify patterns of customer behavior and target customers who are likely to make a purchase or are at risk of churning. This can increase ROI and garner customers’ attention by reaching them at the right time on the right channel. 

Partner with Bloomreach as Third-Party Cookies Crumbles

If your company does not already have a plan for the cookieless world in place, the time to act is now. It is essential that you understand how cookie limitations are already affecting your business and what a future-proof solution looks like for your company. 

Our experts at Bloomreach have worked tirelessly to answer your questions and stay ahead of the curve with key partners. We have already helped customers like Sofology, musicMagpie, Rapha Racing, and others achieve success with their cookieless efforts. 

Bloomreach is the partner you need to guide you as third-party cookies crumble. Schedule a demo today to learn more about how Bloomreach can help your company.