Is It Time For Consumer Data Onboarding To Take Off?

Onboarding is becoming an increasingly central component to the consistent and accurate customer recognition needed for the personalization, insights, and targeting that enables omnichannel marketing.

As content personalization and consistent messaging across in-store, at-home, and online locations has risen to the top of marketers’ objectives, one of the critical components for achieving success has become the recognition of consumers in the right place, on the right device, and at the right time. Consumer data onboarding—very generally, the process of linking offline data with online attributes—is key to accurate recognition at scale.

As the use cases expand, along with suppliers offering the service, marketers (and their agencies) want to know: “What exactly is onboarding? How does it work? What can we use it for? Why should we onboard?” This fall, we set out to answer these questions. We began speaking with industry experts involved in the onboarding process, ranging from service providers to the legal experts focused on privacy considerations, in an effort to develop a deeper understanding of how onboarding works, the use cases, pricing models, and regulatory considerations impacting this dynamic market.

What we found is that onboarding is becoming an increasingly central component to the consistent and accurate customer recognition needed for the personalization, insights, and targeting that enables omnichannel marketing. And as omnichannel grows, so, too, does onboarding. Our research estimates that the U.S. onboarding market has grown from an estimated $30 million in 2012 to $250 million in 2016 and is forecast to reach $1 billion in 2020.

Looking ahead to 2017 and beyond, indicators all point to continued growth. What should marketers consider as they look to onboarding in support of their omnichannel marketing efforts? Click here to read our free white paper, “The State of Consumer Data Onboarding: Identity Resolution in an Omnichannel Environment.”