Why Corporate Affairs Should Focus on First Party Data

First Party Data Premiums

Many advertisers are finding new data streams, but one of the first and most important pivots following GDPR, was a deeper consideration around how to obtain and leverage first party data. First party data is data that companies have collected about a user or audience. When you sign up for an email newsletter – whatever you have populated in the sign-ups fields – is first party data that company now owns.

GDPR forced companies to be more careful about retention and usage, but also prompted companies to demand more value out of the data they had collected. And so they did. If you ever receive cannily well-targeted ads or ads for the same product that pop up across different websites, it could well be that your email address is being used as an identifier, matched against subscriptions, social media profiles and other platforms to serve you ads wherever you go.

Investor relations, public affairs and corporate communications professionals should similarly be considering how any existing email databases for their stakeholders can be unified with tools used and data gathered by digital marketing teams, to think about how targeting can become more multichannel.

Email Marketing Surges

For investor relations and corporate communications practitioners, there is both a risk and opportunity when it comes to email.

The risk is that even though corporate affairs teams have been lucky in the sense that investors and media want to know the latest news from their company and will, hence, sign-up fairly willingly to email newsletters; those newsletters and alerts are hitting increasingly busy inboxes. And to help users deal with the deluge, inboxes are getting smarter about routing anything that looks automated or promotional into separate folders.

On the flip side, email presents an opportunity for companies willing to invest resources and focus. While email is getting more and more crowded, there is a reason news outlets, individual journalists, VCs and other actors are piling into platforms like Substack to create their own direct audiences. Email presents an opportunity for direct, rich storytelling delivered to multiple devices.

A more concerted email strategy, as well as opening up opportunities for better communicating corporate and financial narratives to stakeholders, creates opportunities for better data analysis.

Value from Email Data

A focused email campaign means more data; both in behavioral and performance data and also gathering more audience identifiers.

An email newsletter will feature a number of links, often embedded within or linking out to stories on a variety of topics. This means that communicators can explore beyond whether users are opening and viewing an email to see what types of topics those users want to see more of, based on what they click.

A successful email campaign or approach should focus initially on driving subscribers, which means collecting valuable first party data.

This data can then be used to better target campaigns, for example by matching with social media accounts to create custom audiences in Twitter or LinkedIn. Suddenly, email alerts turn into an opportunity for a multi-channel, highly targeted campaign.

And of course, there are applications in internal communications as well, where corporate affairs teams can better understand how their employees are engaging with communications via internal emails. This data can be leveraged to assess interest levels across themes and initiatives, or to help measure the impact of a broader campaign.

Responsible Data Usage

Regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and other legislation governing commercial messages have enforced more responsible and transparent data use. So, while there is an opportunity in this type of data capture, it is also critical for companies to consider the risks if not done right.

Companies need to remember some key components of these regulations when establishing these campaigns. First, always be transparent about the data you’re collecting and how you plan to use it. This should be communicated at the point of data capture through clear and visible disclaimers to help users make informed decisions about providing their personal information.

Additionally, opt-ins must always have opt-outs, with users able to unsubscribe from emails and clear their data from company databases upon request. In addition, GDPR allows individuals to request the data companies have about them at any time and ask companies to remove this data too.

These are not insurmountable obstacles to effectively building and understanding an audience and establishing the right protocols and maintaining tight control of how data is collected and used can help companies mitigate the potential risks.

First Party Data for Enterprises

In summary, the thoughtful and strategic collection and analysis of first party data from corporate stakeholders can present significant opportunities in understanding and more effectively reaching them. Often, activating this type of program is not as far off as many communicators might think, with many internal digital marketing and IT teams leveraging technology within an organization already.

Email addresses can often be a foundational identifier for these stakeholders that can be leveraged for profile-building and outreach. Remember though, that these stakeholders’ inboxes are more crowded than ever, so the quality of the content you’re delivering matters.

Finally, data collection, analysis and resulting outreach must all take into account responsible use guidelines and laws from multiple geographies. With proper external disclosures and internal policies, collecting first party data can be a safe and effective component of an data strategy for reaching critical corporate audiences.