Post-cookie playbook: how do publishers develop first-party data strategies?

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Google's decision not to phase out third-party cookies this year is another reminder that publishers must start owning their relationships with their audiences. But how?

A recent online webinar organised by Brian Morrisey's The Rebooting offered practical starting points for a first-party data strategy and what you can expect along the way, with insights from two companies with an outside perspective as they do not work exclusively with the media industry.

Patrick Crane, director of the core sales team at BlueConic, a customer data operating system, says that publishers need to start asking fundamental questions: who is their audience, what needs do they have, how to serve them, and what monetisation options are possible to sustain the business.

• Think about the value exchange. What can you offer to persuade them to download an app or hand over their email address?

• You may not need the scale you think to have a compelling advertising proposition. A specialised audience does not need to be large.

• Gifting articles is a surprisingly effective technique for building a user base and also reducing churn in the process. One client saw a 9 per cent reduction through this strategy.

• Quizzes and polls shake up the static reading experience. This can produce a rich dataset of demographic and contact information. One client, a medical publisher, did a quiz that resulted in 12,000 net new sign-ups and one third answered every question.

• Events are a good opportunity to find your deepest and most loyal users - those who are willing to turn up and travel. Events do not need to be conferences, either. Intimate events produce captive audiences, great for surveying audiences there and then, and create valuable commercial opportunities.

• Follow the golden rule of software companies: build a community that loves your product and then build another one. It is okay to have one subscriber base who pays for the subscription and another who does not but is monetised via advertising.

• See the silver lining in a non-paying user base. This is a less risky user pool to experiment with ad positions and embedding premium content. Look at ARPU (average revenue per user) to see the results.

• Executives are wary of new software as it feels like reinventing the business. Find quick wins and draw a line vision-wise to where the organisation can go with deeper commitment.

• Companies tend to underestimate how digital transformation affects internal processes in terms of jobs, teams and task prioritisation. Pitch for first-party data strategies with this detailed and accounted for.

• Always stop and make sure the strategy squares against the purpose of the organisation. If it does not, think twice about whether you are chasing trends.

Craig Schinn is the co-founder of Actable, a consultancy that has The Atlantic, The Globe & Mail, and Bloomberg as clients. He says there is a universal desire amongst all media publishers to have a deeper understanding of their customer base to create more personal relationships.

• Two-step newsletters (free sign-up with integrated premium content) should be genuinely valuable content in their own right, not just a marketing tool.

• One client, an NPR-affiliate newsletter, has a free email with the morning news plus an editor's take as a convenient way to stay on top of the news and to keep donors engaged with the product.

• Test around promotional messaging within the newsletter to weave in your core product, which should work to sift out the 'dead weight' in the mailing list and convert more engaged readers.

• Lack of buy-in from the top is the number one killer for first-party data strategies, regardless of how strong middle management pushes. ROI-focused business pitches can secure an executive's buy-in when it accounts for changes to roles and resources.

• Work to get a first-data strategy to proof of concept first, and then work towards incremental progress over time. This leads to product changes and improved data. Moving too fast can limit the future scale of the business, whereas a slower approach can help define future goals, like the next iteration of the product and readership.

• Think outside the box, like one publisher with a subscription base of less than 100k specialised in content for people considering retirement outside the US. It created a partnership with a real estate company operating in the places they write about. A referral fee generates 1000x the subscription fee. This is made possible by the first-party data, targeting those who are able to make these transactions (only a fraction of the population with enough investable assets).

Follow the conversation on 27 November at our digital journalism conference Newsrewired in London, where we will explore advertising opportunities in the post-cookie world with News UK and Reach plc. Check out the full agenda and grab your ticket today - but be quick as there are limited spaces left