Data marketing starts with a simple question: which data should you collect first? Capturing everything is expensive and hard to govern. Capturing the right data lets you segment, personalise and measure from day one. Here are the six types of data marketers should prioritise, and the best practices to use them well.
1. First-party identity data
Names, email addresses, phone numbers, company and job title. This is the foundation that lets you recognise a person across channels and connect marketing activity to your CRM.
Best practice: collect only what you need at each step. Short forms convert better; progressive profiling can fill the gaps over time.
2. Behavioural data
Pages visited, content downloaded, emails opened and clicked, webinars attended. Behaviour shows intent more reliably than what people say about themselves.
Best practice: link behaviour to known contacts and use it to trigger journeys and lead scoring.
3. Transactional data
Purchases, contracts, renewals, order values and dates. This data tells you who your best customers are and when they are likely to buy again.
Best practice: sync transactions from your ERP or e-commerce platform into your CRM so marketing and sales see the same history.
4. Engagement and service data
Support cases, satisfaction scores, product usage and feedback. These signals reveal both risk and opportunity: an unhappy customer should not receive an upsell email.
Best practice: share service data with marketing and suppress campaigns when a case is open.
5. Declared preference data (zero-party data)
Information customers give you on purpose: interests, preferred channels, communication frequency. It is accurate and explicitly consented.
Best practice: offer a preference centre and respect choices across every system.
6. Consent and privacy data
Opt-ins, opt-outs, the date and source of consent. In Canada, CASL and Quebec’s Law 25 make this data mandatory, not optional.
Best practice: store consent at contact level, with source and timestamp, and apply it automatically in every send.
Best practices for data-driven marketing
- Unify before you personalise. Bring data into one customer profile, for example with Salesforce Data Cloud, before building complex campaigns.
- Define data ownership. Decide who is responsible for each data source and its quality.
- Clean regularly. Deduplicate, standardise formats and archive stale records.
- Start with use cases. Collect data because a campaign or report needs it, not “just in case”.
- Measure outcomes. Connect campaigns to pipeline and revenue in your CRM.
Turn data into results
With these six types of data in place, you can segment accurately, trigger timely journeys in Marketing Cloud and prove marketing’s impact on revenue. Need help structuring your marketing data? Contact Incloud.