As the marketing world evolves, the importance of first-party customer data (also called 1pd or 1p data) has only grown. Marketers have realized the value of building their strategies on first-party data foundations. 

First-party data is crucial for:

1. Delivering personalized experiences — First-party data provides insight into customer preferences, behaviors, and interactions, allowing marketers to create highly personalized marketing campaigns. 
2. Reducing wasted resources by suppressing existing customers from future campaigns — By suppressing existing customers from future acquisition campaigns, marketers can focus their efforts and resources on attracting new customers.
3. Lookalike modeling purposes — Marketers can identify common attributes among their most loyal customers and use this data to find new prospects who share these traits.
4. Measurement — Taking a data-driven approach allows marketers to make informed decisions, refine strategies, and optimize marketing spend for better results.

Collecting first-party data is critical to your marketing success and overall customer experience. But, first-party data becomes most valuable when you can reach more of your customers online by matching your first-party data in your activation channels.

The disadvantages of traditional targeting

Today’s consumers lean heavily on social media when planning a purchase, including researching brands, reading reviews, and seeking support. This makes it more important than ever to reach your customers online, ensuring your product and service offerings remain top of mind.

Traditional social onboarding typically matches 40% or less of your customer list, meaning more than half of your customers will be left out of your social media campaigns. These poor match rates occur due to limited or outdated contact information in your database.

Here’s how traditional social onboarding works

Let’s walk through an example of a common problem that marketers experience in reaching these audiences:

A marketer collects their customers’ first names, last names, and email addresses. This data then flows into a Customer Data Platform (CDP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. 

If this marketer pushes that data directly to Meta or TikTok for advertising or retargeting, they’ll likely see a match rate that fluctuates between 10% and 40%. What’s happening behind the scenes? The end platform—Facebook or TikTok, in this example—is trying to match the data sent to it. 

The issues in doing this will include:

• Your customers have moved homes or changed their contact details.
• They have multiple email addresses, and you may not have their most-used email.
• Some platforms don’t collect much data upon sign-up, so they have less data to match to.
• Your customer data may contain errors or be missing information and would require cleansing or enrichment to be actionable.

So, for all of the hard work (and resources) that went into collecting your data in a privacy-conscious way, you can only find between 2 and 4 out of your 10 customers online. That’s certainly not ideal! 

However, there is a solution that can help marketers reach more of their customers across channels: enhanced social onboarding.

First-Party Enhanced Social Onboarding: A Better Way

Marketers can reach more of their current customers on Facebook and TikTok by improving their offline-to-online social onboarding results. This can be accomplished through the addition of valuable match identifiers. 

First-party enhanced social onboarding dramatically increases downstream first-party match rates by pushing first-party data through a robust identity graph. This process works by ingesting your customer data, enhancing it with a number of online and offline identifiers, and delivering this file to Meta or TikTok as a custom audience.

The more identifiers that flow to a downstream platform, the more likely that platform will be able to match at some level. These identifiers could include (but are not limited to):

• Full names
• Home addresses
• Additional email addresses (which is especially important if you mainly store business email addresses, since consumer email addresses are preferable for matching on Meta and TikTok)
• Phone numbers
• Digital identifiers

How Enhanced Social Onboarding Improves First-Party Match Rates

By adding attributes like recently used email addresses, up-to-date home addresses, and other digital identifiers, marketers can improve the likelihood that the customers in their CRM will be matched to their social profiles for targeting.

Here’s how it works:

In the diagram above, the direct upload to Meta and TikTok did not produce a match because the platforms were unable to identify their users based on the customer information provided. 

With the optimized matching process of Enhanced Onboarding, however, the platforms were able to identify their users and add them to the marketer’s target audiences because they were able to match on 4 distinct attributes. 

Improve your match rates with Deep Sync’s Enhanced Onboarding

Reach more of your current customers on Facebook and TikTok with Enhanced Onboarding from Deep Sync One! Our newest feature—available today—increases customer match rates thanks to Deep Sync’s robust identity graph. Here’s how it works:

• Deep Sync One ingests your customer data
• We enhance it with a number of online and offline identifiers
• We deliver the file to Facebook or TikTok as a custom audience 

To further expand your social reach, Deep Sync can help you find additional members of your customers’ households with Facebook and TikTok profiles. With household-level matching, you can easily look beyond your current customers, identify valuable social profiles, and increase your social reach.

To access enhanced social onboarding today, visit the “My Audiences” section of Deep Sync One. Log in today and get started! 

Need help getting started? Check out these resources:

• Enhanced Onboarding User Guide: Get up and running quickly with our step-by-step social onboarding instructions.
• Pricing for Enhanced Onboarding: Learn more about pricing for enhanced social onboarding, which is billed monthly based on the number of active input records within a given month.