Progress Over Perfection: How Retail Marketers Are Actually Using First-Party Data

When brands talk about “activating first-party data,” it’s usually aspirational. At CommerceNext, it was refreshingly operational.

In a candid lunch panel hosted by RRD, marketing leads from Victra, The Tile Shop, and Family Farm & Home opened up about how they’re collecting, organizing, and using first-party data, not in ideal conditions, but in the real world of legacy tech stacks, shifting customer behavior, and unpredictable weather.

The key theme wasn’t sophistication. It was momentum. Again and again, speakers stressed the importance of starting somewhere, testing often, and bringing cross-functional partners, especially finance, along for the ride.

All three panelists lead marketing at companies with very different contexts. Victra is Verizon’s largest independent retailer. The Tile Shop manages trade and consumer segments across a fragmented path to purchase. Family Farm & Home operates 70+ stores across five Midwest states and is, as their marketing manager put it, “at the mercy of Mother Nature.”

What united them was the process: taking what data they could access, running tests, proving value in-market, and then using that momentum to improve systems and secure buy-in.

For The Tile Shop, early data work revealed they had misunderstood their core customer mix. What was assumed to be a DIY-heavy business turned out to be 60% trade, a discovery that reshaped their segmentation and email strategy. Their current systems still aren’t unified, but marketing now automates email triggers based on sales team reporting. The infrastructure is imperfect, but it works.

At Family Farm & Home, early wins came from using media mix modeling (MMM) to challenge assumptions. One test added a new media touchpoint to lower-volume stores and found a statistically significant lift in sales, without requiring new budget. A second test surfaced strong ROAS in categories like hardware and automotive, where the team hadn’t expected outperformance.

Throughout the session, a second theme emerged: you can’t scale anything, data strategy, budget, creative personalization, without organizational alignment.

Victra’s Chris Campbell emphasized the importance of turning finance into an advocate. When he joined, marketing meant two emails a week to the entire list. Today, it’s a multi-million dollar program that predicts 13-week sales with 96% accuracy. The turning point? He ran a two-hour marketing training for his CFO and now uses monthly executive P&L reviews to show marketing’s impact like a portfolio investment.

Tile Shop’s Shehan Ghanchi shared a similar story. When early match-back analysis showed the company was only capturing 50% of customer data, his team launched a long-term effort to bring sales associates into the loop explaining why capturing emails and order context matters. Three years later, capture rates are approaching 75%.

At Family Farm & Home, transitioning from a print-only model to a multi-touch strategy required re-educating internal stakeholders on how digital works, including explaining why ad visibility is targeted and personalized. As one stakeholder joked: “I haven’t seen the campaign”, only to be reminded they weren’t the intended audience.

Several examples showed how first-party data isn’t just about attribution. It’s about discovery.

At Victra, one insight revealed that 30% of device sales came from customers aged 55+, prompting a shift in influencer strategy. Another learning came from unexpected data patterns: new phone purchases often followed parenting milestones like becoming a grandparent or expecting a child.

At Family Farm & Home, the shift to e-commerce during COVID surfaced unmet needs in the older demographic. Customers were more than ready to order feed and supplies online even when the original site didn’t show store inventory. What began as a rushed pivot is now a foundational channel with growing investment behind it.

Meanwhile, The Tile Shop ran a designer referral campaign that seemed to be working until a deeper analysis revealed most referrals were actually coming from contractors. That prompted a full repositioning of the messaging and strategy, unlocking new clarity on who the campaign was really for.

If there was one shared recommendation across the panel, it was to abandon the idea that first-party data needs to be “ready” before it can be useful. Most wins came from initiatives that were partially manual, creatively patched, or launched with incomplete attribution.

All three companies balance internal builds with partner support often starting in-house, then layering in external expertise when needed. Family Farm & Home summarized the approach best: test slowly, grow confidence, then scale what works. Once results were visible, expansion happened organically.

None of the panelists claimed their systems were perfect. But all showed what progress looks like when you stop waiting for the ideal stack and start building around what’s already there.

ClickZ is a ClickZ Media publication