What Will Change After the Blocking of 3rd Party Cookies?

This revolution significantly impacts the online marketing landscape. One could even say that nothing will ever be the same. With the departure of 3rd party cookies, all kinds of remarketing campaigns as we know them today—using tools like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Programmatic—will become obsolete.

Defining audience segments at the top of the funnel (brand and product awareness) will also become much more complex. In this area, new standards are currently „being developed” (see, for example, Google’s FLoC experiment). One thing is certain: large players like Google and Facebook, who are already collecting vast amounts of data on their registered users, will benefit the most, as it will be easier for them to define segments that they can then sell to advertisers.

What to Do When Remarketing No Longer Exists?

For actions to remain effective, besides reaching the audience with the initial message, the later stages of the customer journey, often carried out via remarketing, must also be addressed. Since we can no longer rely on anonymous campaigns using third-party cookies, what’s the alternative? One solution appears to be de-anonymizing the user by asking them to reveal their data, such as their email address, which we can use for further communication.

However, we must create incentives that potential recipients will find valuable enough to „pay” for with their data. These lead magnets can take various forms, such as:

• White papers containing important information (e.g., guides, case studies)
• Discounts on first purchases or free shipping for e-commerce
• Market or industry reports
• Dedicated webinars

Every marketer will likely come up with several good ideas.

How Can Your Own Database Help?

By collecting data on your audience, you can build a long-term newsletter subscriber base while also moving potential customers further down the sales funnel. Tools like Marketing Automation and Consumer Data Platforms (which often overlap in functionality and will be referred to as MA here) can help with this.

Without getting into too much detail (this type of software usually has so many features that it could fill a book), MA tools can segment users based on their behavior on your websites and apps. This allows for personalized communication, tailoring the content displayed on your website, emails, SMS, or push notifications to the user’s actions.

What seems even more critical today are broadly understood automation rules, which, based on user behavior (e.g., reading our messages, visiting specific pages, or returning to our site), combined with personalization, allow automated communication without manual intervention.

Using MA tools, you can maintain relationships with potential (or current) customers at every stage of the customer journey or every level of the sales funnel. The complexity of these scenarios (number of variations, steps) depends on the type of offer being promoted, your creativity, the tool’s sophistication, and the expertise of the operator. Remember to choose a tool that fits your needs—don’t bring a cannon to a knife fight, but also don’t try to tackle a big task with insufficient tools.

The era of 3rd party cookies (at least as we know them today) is coming to an end. We must find ways to adapt to this new reality. Marketing Automation tools, combined with original content, seem like an interesting alternative that could at least partially replace solutions based on third-party cookies, and will certainly help build relationships with users on your site.

Key Takeaways

• If you use 3rd party cookies in your marketing strategy, you’ll need to find substitutes by the end of 2022.
• Marketing Automation tools can be excellent solutions for the middle and bottom of the sales funnel or the middle and closing stages of the customer journey.
• Marketing Automation requires the user’s consent to communicate and provide their data. Think about a lead magnet that is unique and interesting enough for users to „pay” with their data.
• Personalize your content and carefully design your communication. We are bombarded with messages daily. Your recipient needs to feel that your messages are not just more sales and marketing spam.