Quick Guide to First-Party Data for Travel Marketers

First-party data has been all the buzz. For what seems like years, we’ve had the threat of cookies going away, but the can keeps getting kicked down the road. This quick guide to first-party data will discuss what first-party data is (also second and third-party data), how to get it and how to use it.

First-Party Data (plus second and third-party data)

First-party data is the data that you own that has been collected directly from your customers— contact info, emails, website visits, social media followers and more. It’s stored in databases, Excel sheets, email CRMs, Data Management Platforms, and the platforms you use to run ad campaigns.

Second-party data is similar but shared from another partner’s first-party data. For example, another business could send an email to their email database on your behalf or let you retarget ads from their website.

Third-party data is also valuable, but it depends on how you slice and dice it.

The good: buying data that is timely like keyword search data in the past 30 days. For example, a person that is looking to travel in the next 3-6 months will start searching and reading about destinations, places to stay, things to do, where to eat and more. This data is fresh and gives your destination the perfect chance to target and draw in that traveler. If someone is ready to buy something, you want to reach them in a short window.

The bad: a general travel segment with no time behind it. Data like this can be people that traveled 1 year ago but are not in the market to travel again anytime soon. They get bucketed into a travel segment, but your destination will waste impressions targeting them because they are not planning to go anywhere soon.

Ways to Collect First-Party Data

Now, how do you get more of that first-party data goodness?

• Traffic to your website
• Sweepstakes and giveaways
• Special offers in exchange for email addresses
• Lead generation meetings marketing
• Exclusive offers

Data From Survey About Collecting Emails

Here’s data from a recent survey about coupons and discounts in exchange for emails from Capterra who surveyed 981 US consumers that shop online at least once per week in August 2022.

Consumers are willing to provide the following information in exchange for discounts:

• Email address — 85%
• Gender — 70%
• Name — 60%
• Date of birth — 48%
• Occupation — 43%
• Home address — 32%

Moreover, Gen Z is the generation most likely to find coupons on social media:

• Gen Z — 59%
• Millennials — 49%
• Gen X—38%
• Boomers—27%

Gen Z also leads in finding coupons in online communities:

• Gen Z — 60%
• Online — 58%
• Gen X — 38%
• Boomers — 24%

Using First-Party Data Successfully

Last, but not least, how do you go about using the data? Here are some examples:

• Remarketing: retarget people from your website or reach people with ads programmatically or on social media from their email address
• Email: send a regular newsletter or develop a strategic automated email campaign
• Creative options: test creative or develop sequences based on users’ data
• Personalization: add names or distance from your location to ads and emails
• Meetings: know your database so you can market them in the multiple ways mentioned above

First-party data for travel marketers is important. Be intentional about gathering it and keeping it. We hear so many stories about marketers with good size databases that haven’t used the data for years, rendering the data useless.