How many of your customers do you actually know?

There’s a funny thing about having a lot of customers: you may not actually know very many of them.

That came up in a few different conversations at eTail Boston earlier this month. Brands are reaching customers through Amazon, their own ecommerce sites, paid media and an ever-growing collection of digital channels. Great for reach. A little more complicated if you’re trying to understand who those customers are, what they want, and what might bring them back.

Amazon was a particularly interesting part of those conversations. For many brands, it’s an incredibly important channel, and no one is suggesting customers are about to give up Prime because your checkout experience is particularly delightful.

The question was more practical: When customers can discover and buy from you in so many different places, how do you create more opportunities to actually know them?

Key takeaways:

• Amazon gives brands reach; owned experiences build customer understanding.
• First-party data creates value when it improves what you do next.
• Useful value exchanges turn anonymous visitors into customers you can know over time

‍

Customers leave clues everywhere

Consider everything someone can tell you without ever filling out a 20-field form.

They browse waterproof hiking boots instead of trail runners. Spend ten minutes toggling between the 32- and 40-ounce water bottle. Take a skincare quiz and tell you dryness is their biggest concern. Click through three emails about your new arrivals and ignore every promotion for clearance.

On their own, these are small clues. Together, they start to tell you quite a bit about what someone wants.

At eTail, the stacks sounded familiar: Shopify. Klaviyo. Postscript. Loyalty programs. Paid media. For some, Snowflake or BigQuery sitting underneath it all. The tools varied, but the question underneath them was remarkably similar:

We have all this data. Are we actually getting enough value from it?

Because collecting signals is the easy part. Remembering them, connecting them to a customer, and using them to make the next interaction better is where things get more interesting.

‍

Most website visitors still leave as strangers

Brands spend a lot of money getting people to their websites. Someone clicks a $2.37 Instagram ad for a pair of boots, spends seven minutes browsing, checks the size guide twice, reads six reviews and leaves to think about it.

From the shopper’s perspective, that’s a perfectly normal Tuesday. From the brand’s perspective, it’s often the end of the story.

So we invented the email pop-up. You know the one.

‍WELCOME! GET 10% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER!

There’s a reason approximately every ecommerce site on earth has one — it works. But an email address only tells you how to reach someone. It doesn't tell you that they need a wide-fit boot, that they're replacing the same pair they bought two years ago, or that free shipping matters more to them than 10% off.

If every new visitor gets the same offer in exchange for the same piece of information, you’re learning surprisingly little from all that traffic you worked so hard to earn.

‍

Give people a useful reason to tell you more

Customers will tell brands quite a lot when there’s something in it for them.

A running store can ask where you run, how far you go and whether your knees start complaining around mile four before pointing you toward a shoe. A skincare brand can ask about sensitivity and breakouts before handing you a 12-product routine. A coffee company can help you find a roast you'll actually like instead of making you decipher “notes of elderflower and contemplative sadness.”

The customer gets help making a decision. The brand learns something useful. That's a much better value exchange than “give us your email address and we'll send you marketing.” Quizzes, product finders, preference centers and other interactive experiences can make shopping easier while giving customers a natural reason to share what they want.

And you don't have to learn everything about someone in one sitting.

Maybe today you learn that they need running shoes for pavement, not trails. Three weeks from now, their browsing tells you they're training for longer distances. Their first purchase gives you a price point. Six months later, they're back looking at the latest version of the same shoe.

Customer understanding can build gradually, the same way an actual relationship does.

‍

Knowing more should change what you do

The payoff isn't a really impressive customer profile with 137 attributes in it. It's being able to do something useful with what you know.

You recognize that the person browsing today is the same person who bought last month. You know enough about someone's preferences to recommend the waterproof version because they told you they hike in the Pacific Northwest, not because “people also bought” says it's popular.

All of that should change what happens next: what someone sees on your site, which product you recommend, when you reach out, which audience they enter, and when it's probably better to leave them alone.

And ultimately, whether more of the traffic you're already paying for turns into a first purchase, a bigger basket, or a customer who comes back.

That's when first-party data starts earning its keep.

‍

The customer journey was never going to stay in one channel

Of course, customers aren't going to interact with you in one neat, predictable sequence.

Someone might first encounter your product on TikTok, read 47 Amazon reviews, visit your site to compare two models, buy one at Target because they happen to be there on Saturday, and come back to your website three months later looking for an accessory.

Good luck putting a tidy funnel around that.

What you can do is make more of the interactions you do control count.

If someone comes to your site, help them find what they need. Give them a worthwhile reason to identify themselves. Learn something (with their permission) that makes the next interaction more useful. And when they come back, don't make everyone start from scratch.

Do that consistently and you start building something that gets more valuable with every interaction: an audience of customers you actually know.

‍

Start with the audience you've already earned

Start with a part of your site that already gets meaningful traffic and ask two questions:

1. What are these visitors trying to do?
2. What could we learn while helping them do it?

If 20,000 people a month are landing on your running shoe category, maybe you help them figure out which shoe fits how they actually run. If shoppers are bouncing between six nearly identical skincare products, help them narrow it down. If thousands of anonymous visitors are reading your buying guide and disappearing, give them a reason to continue the conversation.

That's what BlueConic's First-Party Audience Building Growth Play is designed to do: create useful value exchanges that turn anonymous visitors into known customers, then progressively build richer profiles from the signals they share over time.

Because getting people to your site is hard enough. It would be a shame to keep meeting them for the first time.

See how First-Party Audience Building works →

‍

FAQs

How can brands build direct customer relationships when they sell on Amazon?

Brands don't need to choose between Amazon and direct customer relationships. Marketplaces can provide valuable reach and distribution, while owned channels like a brand's website create opportunities to identify customers, learn their preferences, and build first-party profiles over time. The goal is to make direct interactions useful enough that customers have a reason to identify themselves and share more.

How can ecommerce brands turn anonymous website visitors into known customers?

Start by giving visitors something useful in exchange for identifying themselves. Product finders, quizzes, preference centers, buying guides, and other interactive experiences can help someone make a decision while capturing information about their needs and interests. Those signals can then enrich a persistent customer profile as the relationship develops.

What should brands do with first-party customer data?

First-party data should help brands make better decisions about what happens next for each customer. That might mean recommending a more relevant product, recognizing a likely repeat buyer, timing a replenishment message, personalizing a website experience, building a higher-value advertising audience, or suppressing marketing that is no longer relevant.

‍