senckađ
Group745
Group745
Group745
Group745
Group745
Group745
Trends and Insight in association withSynapse Virtual Production
Group745

Why the Death of the Cookie Is Ushering in a New Era of ‘Identity Resolution’

10/11/2022
Marketing & PR
Manly, Australia
141
Share
Amperity's area vice president, Billy Loizou unpacks why marketers need to embrace customer 'identity resolution'

Customers provide businesses with a wealth of data — from loyalty programs, to transaction history and email engagement. But the tricky part is making sense of it and then putting it into action. Quality data fuels consumer business and opens the path to delivering personalised marketing experiences. 

However, companies can’t personalise when they don’t know who their customers are. This is why identity (ID) resolution is so important — it turns scattered data into concrete customer information. And without it, it’s virtually impossible to treat your customers as the unique individuals they are. Identity is the foundation for true personalisation.


What is ID resolution? 

ID resolution is the process of connecting and matching different data points across multiple devices and channels to form a unified view of a single customer, allowing brands to connect the dots between fragmented data to form a complete picture of an actual person.


What are the benefits of ID resolution?

The benefits of getting ID resolution right are the cornerstone to any organisation’s success. With an accurate customer data foundation, all departments across the company have the same access to customer information in real time. This access ensures the customer will have a seamless journey at every touchpoint, whether that’s in-store, online or with customer service. 

Even more, quality ID resolution prepares organisations for a cookie-less future by building a hearty, privacy-compliant, first-party data set, providing a buffer against increasingly strict privacy policies that limit the use of third-party data. With deeper customer relationships, brands can speak to their customers on the individual level, boosting customer loyalty and increasing lifetime value. 

ID resolution improves marketing performance and ROI too. Smart segmentation allows brands to create highly targeted campaigns for specific customer segments, cutting down on redundancies. This gives brands the ability to react in real-time and effectively allocate budgets, cutting down on expenses. 


‘Cracking the nut’ on true ID resolution

The goal of ID resolution is to identify the same individual within and across all data sources that contain customer information. Simple enough. But why, then, is it such a tough nut for brands to crack? Because a truly complete and up-to-date view of the customer must combine an individual’s transactions from multiple sources — point-of-sale, e-commerce, email interactions, loyalty data, mobile app engagement and more. It also has to include historical data as well as new data that’s produced every day when customers interact with a brand. The scale and scattered nature of it all has kept effective ID resolution out of reach for most brands.

Consider this incredibly common scenario: your brand just received a new online buyer called Victoria. You send her your welcome series. At the same time, another in-store customer called Vicky hasn’t purchased from you in four months, so you send her discounts persuading her to shop with you again. Here’s the kicker — Victoria and Vicky are the same person.

Customer data is inherently uncertain. Customers are not always consistent in how they identify themselves when they engage with a brand. They move through life, creating new emails, getting new phone numbers and sometimes even changing their names. At the same time, they or a store associate might enter typos when updating their information. What’s more, a brand’s best customers are more likely to have inconsistent and inaccurate Personal Identifiable Information (PII) because they interact with the brand more often, opening the door to potentially messier data.

Add technology overload, lack of communication between systems and algorithms that can’t predict human behaviour to the mix, and it’s clear why getting ID resolution right can be a real challenge for brands. Data is coming in from everywhere. Yet to achieve a single-customer view, that data has to first be combined from disparate sources, which requires building, maintaining and monitoring data pipes into and out of a centralised system.


Getting ID resolution right

While seeing double might be costing your brand triple, it doesn’t have to. The right software can provide you with a strong customer identity foundation, allowing you to build the most accurate and comprehensive view of your customers to help you manage and grow your business. 

First-class ID resolution software should be powered by machine learning (ML). With ML, match rates and accuracy improve over time even when unique identifiers are incomplete, inconsistent or unavailable. At the same time, ML-based ID resolution uses probabilistic data linking, allowing human-like logic to catch inconsistencies that more rigid matching schemas couldn’t process. 

It’s also key for your ID resolution software to be transparent, providing a clear idea of the process. This builds trust and confidence versus ‘black-box’ processes that don’t show how an answer came about. ID resolution software should also provide a stable customer ID and allow for enterprise scalability – handling and resolving massive amounts of customer identities quickly and cost-effectively, regardless of the size of customer data volume.

Even more, the best solutions are flexible, allowing for simple updates and management and not ‘one size fits all’ to ensure they meet your unique business needs. Above all, expertise should be at its core, providing you with an implementation and support team with deep experience and knowhow.

The right ID resolution platform enables brands and organisations to take control of their customer data, systematically improve customer relationships, foster brand loyalty and win.

3 reasons true ID resolution is solid gold for your brand:

A great ID resolution strategy takes ‘dirty data’ and turns it into value  — forget about ‘garbage in, garbage out’. With true ID resolution, it’s ‘garbage in, gold out’: 

1. Most marketing activation channels charge by volume, so having bad ID resolution wastes money in the form of duplicate marketing.

2. Exceedingly simple ID resolution makes it impossible to accurately understand who the most valuable customers are, leading to bad customer experiences, incorrect analytics and inaccurate personalisation.

3. The marketing technology landscape is cluttered with SaaS offerings that overly specialise in a subsection of data. Adopt a strategy that can handle all your data,  otherwise, it will just reinforce silos and not truly solve the problem.

Find out more by downloading Amperity’s Identity Resolution: Connecting the Dots and Understanding Your Customer guide here.

Credits
Work from AZK Media
AZK Meets SnapLogic
SnapLogic
19/01/2023
11
0
AZK Meets Selligent
AZK Media
04/11/2022
88
0
AZK Media
22/02/2022
41
0
ALL THEIR WORK