The Real Deal: Foundational Data Essentials

How to build a complete foundational data strategy

In your database, you might have a customer's name, an email and a zip code, plus what they bought from you and when.

But you might not know that they have three email addresses, moved in 2020, enjoy traveling and spent more with your competitors.

A solid foundation for your customer data is critical to achieving one view of each customer as a person and truly understanding who they are.

How to get started with first-party data

It starts with the first-party data you already have, like customer names, emails, transaction history and their digital and channel engagement.

It’s important to make sure your first party data is always accurate with home address, all emails and phone numbers. This enables you to consolidate data to one person, accurately identify customers and reach more of them across online and offline channels.

Why you need to incorporate third-party data into your data strategy

As robust as your first party data may be, you’re not always able to see what customers are doing outside of your owned channels—like what other brands they're looking at, what they're buying, how much they're spending and what influences their purchases.

That’s why you have to bring in high-quality third-party data to create one vision to engage each person and deliver more than just the right message at the right time.

What are the three primary types of foundational data?

There are three types of foundational data you can use to enhance your customer data strategy:

• Transactional data: How much people are spending at specific merchants on clothes, travel or meals.
• Demographic and lifestyle data: Attributes like someone’s age, their level of education, their household income and what cars they have in their garage.
• Psychographic data: How consumers prefer to shop, channel preferences and preferred charities to support.

How Epsilon can help you improve your data strategy

To find a data provider you can trust, make sure to consider essential data capabilities like:

• Privacy and accuracy
• Data quality
• Coverage of data attributes
• The predictive power of the data
• How the data can be used effectively across channels

For decades, Epsilon has invested to build a suite of best-in-class data offerings. Whether you're building or refining your data strategy, Epsilon can help you efficiently identify and engage with your best and next-best customers with third-party data.

Find out how you can leverage best-in-class foundational data.