As an agency that represents consumer brands across a variety of verticals, we have worked with brands since 2018-19 to develop strategies to maximize performance in the post-cookie world. With Google having officially begun the great cookie phase-out, we can boil the most powerful takeaway for post-cookie prep down to one phrase: first-party data.

What I mean by that is that the brands that are most prepared to limit performance decline as a result of cookie elimination are the ones that invested the most, and the earliest, in their first-party database marketing efforts. Brands that developed above-board, privacy-compliant tactics to increase the volume of opt-in consumer data collection earlier have seen the biggest gains five years later.

For our clients, the most powerful method of deploying that first-party data has been the development of thoughtful database marketing campaigns to automate and personalize brand messages to their first- party database. These campaigns include email marketing, SMS marketing and other marketing automations that rely on an email address rather than a cookie. Similar to the above, the earlier a brand committed to building these database marketing campaigns, the larger the gains they are seeing now, which will help offset the losses from cookies going away. This is a result of the compounding benefit of optimizing these marketing campaigns year over year.

There are obviously many other initiatives in the marketing landscape that can work to offset the losses from cookie deprecation. What distinguishes first-party database marketing is that it’s the one solution that works without any third-party audiences – and is therefore entirely within a brand’s control, no matter how privacy regulations evolve.

A fundamental first step is to ensure your brand is maximizing consumer opt-ins at all of the logical, organic touchpoints that are currently available. From engaging lightboxes on your homepage that prompt a newsletter signup, to promotional campaigns that get pushed out to your social audiences, it is important that brands leverage their existing audience reach to maximize first-party data collection from consumers interested in engaging. Once you are confident you are maximizing these organic touchpoints, it could make sense to assess options for paid campaigns to help drive more opt-ins to those channels.

But consumer acquisition is only the first step. As these consumers join the database, you need to maximize their LTV by building engaging, personalized marketing campaigns – beginning with an automated welcome series. From there, brands will want to test triggered messages to continue building personalized experiences for all of their customers, while also using that behavioral data to develop powerful segments within their database that will enhance their database marketing campaigns.

Whether you have the data and haven’t yet used it strategically, or you need to buckle down and build your database to a healthy state, being behind the curve with cookies actually starting to crumble is a tough position – but it’s not an impossible one. Brands that are behind on first-party database marketing planning can still build a promising future beyond cookies if they commit to developing that initiative now.