Overcoming the identity crisis – how effective customer identity resolution is powering a more insightful customer experience

As the fourth industrial revolution accelerates, data-driven insight is the new currency and holds the power to disrupt traditional ways of working. However, this transformation is not just limited to the tech sector, and businesses around the world need to take note or risk being left behind.

 

For advertisers and publishers alike, increasingly digitalised ad spaces present opportunities to serve people-based and targeted content like never before. New channels of communication and, therefore, ways of targeting are opening up all the time. These are proving irresistible to brands which need to test, learn, and understand what works best for the constantly evolving needs of their customers.

 

Digital advertising revenue in the UK is expected to hit a record of almost £13bn this year and will increase by nearly 10% in 2019 according to data market research company eMarketer^[1]. The changing media landscape now encompasses many touch points across multiple devices, meaning that consumers are increasingly difficult to identify as being the same person, as they move seamlessly from one platform to another and one device to another. While a profile of a consumer can be constructed based on items such as a similar IP address or pattern of consuming content, all too often this type of digital fingerprint can be finger-in-the-air stuff. Taking a more robust approach to identity is essential for ensuring the content that is delivered is relevant for that audience.

 

Effective measurement and the ability to respond in real time to what the advertiser or the publisher is seeing is paramount if people are to be kept engaged with your content. The challenge is finding a way to measure across the increasing number of touchpoints generated by each consumer. Techniques that effectively unite these many different and disparate data points are essential to make sure every interaction by a single person was consistently recorded and acknowledged.

 

With multiple, disparate data sets, it can be difficult to determine if the visitor anonymously browsing your website is an existing customer visiting your site from a new device or a completely new and individual user. It’s important to be able to distinguish each individual you are targeting in the digital space to ensure they are presented with targeted and personalised experiences in order to increase the likelihood of a conversion.

 

Identity resolution connects these dots between multiple (sometimes, anonymous) profiles, both online and off. A holistic approach to identity is paramount if you are to obtain a clear picture of the customer journey and thereby improve attribution modelling for businesses that take advantage of the process.

 

Central to the identity resolution process is data onboarding, which enables true people-based marketing. Connected to your existing CRM system, this means that you can identify exactly when a customer is accessing your content from different channels, allowing the customer journey to be mapped revealing multiple touch points. All of this is achieved through a fully privacy-compliant process, even for data points which may not be in the same format.

 

Once these different sources have been united, the resulting insight enables a truly omnichannel approach to customer targeting, resolving the identities and interactions of real people both in the real world and digitally. It allows marketers to segment audiences more effectively and serve each customer with a personalised experience that is relevant to them. Not only does this unification of data increase the efficiency of campaigns and marketing budgets, it makes for happier customers as well.

 

So, it’s clear that data-driven insight will be the one of the foundations of future CRM and marketing campaigns across all digital platforms. Companies which ignore or downplay their own customers’ data risk restricting  the amount of insight they can garner from a dataset and may leave them guessing what target customers want and need.

 

For measurement to be truly effective, it needs to be specific. A customer-first, people-based approach incorporating both on and offline datasets is essential. Factoring in identity resolution as part of the marketing stack enables marketers to map customer journeys and learn more about their customers. No longer can silos of data be left unconnected; businesses need to reap the rewards of identity resolution or risk being left behind.