WebEngage’s Ankur Gattani on the Power of Zero-Party Data for Retention

Retention marketing is all about engaging and keeping existing customers for repeat business and customer lifetime value. Companies such as WebEngage, a customer data and marketing automation platform, drive retention marketing needs—changing relationships with customers and increasingly personalized engagement and agile brands.

This is in consideration of the need for personalization of customer insight against the fast rising awareness of data privacy and user consent, which have become defining features of the digital landscape today. Transparency in data collection, express consent of users, and security dealing with data—these are what this really means.

Ankur Gattani, chief growth officer, WebEngage, said the company ensures its consumers—brands—make more outcomes from their consumers. He further claimed that for WebEngage, user permission is at the centre and starting point of everything it collects. The company works only with zero and first-party data and has no interplay with a third-party data system which at times can have accuracy issues.

“Everything that we have in our systems that is captured for a brand has been captured with permission from users. There’s tons of merit to the user experience becoming superior if it’s more personalized. If you open the Amazon app, you wouldn’t hate on it just because it reminds you where your last trolley was, or gives you some recommendations. That’s where we are very, very respectful of people’s preferences,” he shares.

While the industry is inching toward gradually adopting zero or first-party data, it is also believed that using them also comes with its challenges. Gattani thinks the unstructured way brands capture this data, store it, and process it, cleaning up still needs to be done.

“From using this data to get it ready to consume and deploy still takes a lot of hard work. Not everyone is putting in that effort, which is why, despite having a lot of data, many brands do not yet provide precise experiences”, he adds.