Build Your Brand with First Party Data
By Alysia Ehle

June 2, 2020

By Alysia Ehle

June 2, 2020

Gain customer insights and understand how you should ask your media partner to create campaigns leveraging first party data.


A successful media campaign is going to exceed your KPIs—whether that be store traffic, purchases, VCRs or CTRs—and hopefully with a high ROI. 

But a successful media partner doesn’t just care about meeting a campaign’s KPIs. A media partner should care about building your brand’s customer base. After all, ROI is an empty metric if your campaign only drives one-time transactions, and not acquiring new, loyal customers. 

So, how can your media partner help you build your business? It starts with first party data, ie. your CRM list.

The first thing a strategic media partner will ask you during a brief for a new campaign is if you can provide your CRM list. Having access to your brand’s first party data provides a solid foundation to audience creation across all channels and is helpful in a number of ways.

Know your customers

You might know who your customers are, but do you really know who your customers are? Where they live, what they enjoy, and how they behave? What characteristics of this audience do you know? What don’t you know? To find this out, you can do an audience analysis against your existing customer base to find out what they have in common. 

This analysis can shed light on new audience segmentation opportunities you may not have known were available to you. It can not only help with more granular audience targeting capabilities, but it can provide direction for campaign messaging, and maybe even a new product line.

Knowing what the existing customer base looks like is crucial to acquiring new customers. Having a full understanding of this audience, will help your media partner target the right consumers with your media dollars.

Curious to know more about your customer base? Let us know, and we can help you find insights! This is an example of a customer audience analysis, and the types of information you can uncover.

Arm-Candy-Example-Audience-Analysis

Advertise directly to your customers

Although the goal of many campaigns is to find new customers, there is a time and place for advertising to your existing customers across each piece of the sales funnel. It’s important to segment this out. Certain messages will play better to consumers who already know and trust your business. 

This can be a highly effective approach for conversion-based campaigns, and lead to great results when you are confident that your target audience is likely to convert, because they have converted before. The size of this audience will also dictate how many media dollars you put behind the audience, to make sure you have appropriate frequencies against each consumer, and too many dollars aren’t wasted on people who have already converted during a campaign.

Depending on the breadth of your first party data, and what you have access to, you can advertise to the audience as a whole in brand awareness campaigns, or create audience segments based on consumers who have purchased specific products or services.

Remove first party data from your prospecting base

In the same respect, it is important to remove your existing customers from a prospecting audience pool in lead generation campaigns. You never want to send a ‘first time purchase’ message to consumers who are already loyal to the brand, as these would be wasted media dollars and lead to lower conversion results. 

You can also apply the concept of prospecting within your customer base. By advertising to consumers who have not yet purchased a specific product line or service offered by your brand, you can generate additional revenue from the customers you have already acquired. 

At Arm Candy, we enjoy and accept the challenge of lead gen campaigns, which are crucial to seeing new customers come through the door—or your website’s checkout page.

Build look-alike models

Perhaps the most powerful use for a CRM list is building look-a-like (LAL) audiences. Media platforms (such as DV360, Adelphic, Amobee, Facebook, etc.) are able to ingest your current CRM list, and scale out new prospecting audiences who have similar attributes to your current customer list.  With the slow demise of third party data, and the general lack of effectiveness, LAL modeling is only becoming more prevalent and precise. As this is done with machine learning, It’s a level up from hand-picking segments out of an audience analysis, and it  typically leads to incredible results. 

Our priority is your success

Arm Candy’s number one priority is helping your business grow. We care less about individual campaign results, and more about the success of your company as a whole. Learn how Arm Candy can help you acquire new potential customers, as demonstrated in this membership warehouse club lead generation campaign.

Want to learn how to get started leveraging your first party data? Drop us a line to start a conversation!

Written By Alysia Ehle

Alysia is all about the data. She uses it for all things, primarily to help craft the media plans and strategies that are intended to drive our desired outcome. And when she’s not developing strategies, she’s either writing, parenting or on the Peloton.

Written By Alysia Ehle

Alysia is all about the data. She uses it for all things, primarily to help craft the media plans and strategies that are intended to drive our desired outcome. And when she’s not developing strategies, she’s either writing, parenting or on the Peloton.