First-Party Data for a Business With None

What the term actually means

Information you collected yourself, from your own customers, through your own dealings with them.

As opposed to information about your customers assembled by somebody else and rented to you, which is what most targeting has consisted of.

The distinction has become practical rather than philosophical, because the borrowed kind is becoming less available and the kind you gather yourself is not.

Most small businesses assume they have none. Almost all of them have a great deal, uncollected.

What you already hold

• Every enquiry, in your inbox and call log.
• Every quote, including the ones that went nowhere.
• Every job, with what it was and what it was worth.
• Every complaint and what caused it.
• What people asked before deciding.
• Which customers came back.

None of this is stored in a way that can be counted, which is why it feels like nothing. The information exists; the recording does not.

The three fields to start with

Resist building a system. Start with three things captured consistently, because consistency is what makes data useful and elaborateness is what makes people stop.

How they found you, in their own words rather than from a dropdown.

What they asked for, in a category simple enough that two people would record it the same way.

Whether it turned into work, and roughly what it was worth.

Three fields, on every enquiry, for six months, will tell you more about where your business actually comes from than any platform report has.

Ask the question properly

How did you hear about us is unfashionable, imprecise, and now among the most reliable signals available.

It works better as an open field than a dropdown, because a list of options tells people what answers you expect and collects those.

Ask it at the point of enquiry rather than later, while the route is still fresh.

Expect roughly a third to say something unhelpful such as online or a friend, and record it anyway. The pattern across a hundred enquiries is informative even when individual answers are not.

Have whoever answers the phone ask the same question in the same words, or the two channels will not be comparable.

Where to keep it

Somewhere durable and boring.

A spreadsheet is entirely adequate for most small businesses and has the substantial advantage of being understood by everybody and dependent on nobody.

A proper customer system is better once volume justifies it, and worse before that, because the setup absorbs effort that should be going into capturing anything at all.

What matters is that it is one place, everybody uses it, and it survives the departure of whoever set it up.

Information held in one person's memory or a private inbox is not data, however good that person is.

A worked example

A commercial cleaning firm believed most of their work came from search advertising, which was where most of their marketing budget went.

They added one open question to their enquiry form and asked the same on the phone, recorded in a shared spreadsheet with two other columns.

After five months they had two hundred and eleven enquiries recorded.

Search advertising accounted for about a fifth. Referrals from existing customers accounted for over a third, and produced the largest contracts by a clear margin.

A property management company they had worked with twice had generated eleven enquiries by recommendation, which nobody had known.

They shifted budget toward a simple referral arrangement and toward staying in contact with past clients, and reduced advertising spend without reducing enquiries.

The whole exercise cost one spreadsheet and one extra question.

Consent, briefly

Collecting information about customers carries obligations, and they are lighter for this kind of thing than people fear.

Record what you need for the dealings you are having, tell people what you hold and why, and do not use contact details for marketing without permission.

The relevant distinction is between keeping records of your own business dealings, which is ordinary, and building a marketing list, which requires consent.

Adding an enquirer to a newsletter because they asked for a quote is the mistake to avoid, and it is a common one.

This is a general description rather than legal advice, and requirements vary depending on where you operate and what you collect.

Build a list you own

The most valuable asset available from this, and the slowest to accumulate.

An email list of people who agreed to hear from you is yours. It does not depend on an identifier, a platform, or anybody's advertising policy.

It survives a platform changing its rules, its pricing, or its existence, all of which have happened repeatedly.

Build it slowly and honestly, with a clear reason for somebody to join, and treat the size of it as less important than whether the people on it want to be.

Use it for more than marketing

The reason to do this even if you never advertise again.

Recorded enquiries tell you which services people ask for that you do not offer, which is a product decision.

They tell you what people ask before buying, which is a list of pages your site should have.

They tell you which quotes are declined and, if you ask, why, which is a pricing conversation.

And they tell you which customers return, which is usually the most valuable pattern in the whole set and the one nobody tracks.

The counter-case

Collection can become its own project, and that failure is common.

A business that spends three months choosing a system, designing fields, and configuring integrations has collected nothing while doing so.

There is also a point at which asking customers questions becomes an imposition. Three fields at enquiry is reasonable; a survey before a quote is not, and it costs you the enquiry.

And data nobody reads is worse than none, because it creates a belief that the question is being handled.

Book an hour every quarter to actually look at what you have collected. If that hour never happens, stop collecting and admit it rather than maintaining the appearance.

Starting this week

1. Add one open question to your enquiry form.
2. Ask the same question on the phone, in the same words.
3. Record three fields in one shared spreadsheet.
4. Keep it consistent rather than detailed.
5. Get permission separately before any marketing use.
6. Book an hour a quarter to read it.

Six months of that will settle arguments about where your work comes from that have been running for years.

Counting the right thing is covered in counting enquiries instead of visits.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.