Why Marketers Need To Get Identity Resolution Right

The ability to confidently identify customers as they move fluently across a broad spectrum of screens, devices, and touch points is mission-critical for any marketing department that claims or aspires to be “customer-obsessed.”

The ability to confidently identify customers as they move fluently across a broad spectrum of screens, devices, and touch points is mission-critical for brand marketers. Speed and accuracy are everything. Rigorous data preparation is mandatory. Simply deduping and uploading some CRM data won’t cut it.

Identity resolution is foundational for uncovering customer insights. It requires collecting and connecting (matching) data to individual customers, and then activating that data to engage them at the right time with the right message.

The most progressive marketers are using increasingly sophisticated, next-gen customer “identity graphs” that incorporate demographic, behavioral, financial, lifestyle, purchase, and other data. The data is gathered from numerous sources, such as online news sites, purchase transactions, surveys, email providers, public records, and device ID providers.

Any marketing department that claims or aspires to be “customer-obsessed” must get identity resolution right. The opportunities are endless.

Opportunity #1: Growth Opportunities

Accurate ID graphs can extend marketing’s reach as much as 50% or more. Additionally, the possible cross-sell and upsell opportunities that are frequently revealed from insights gained through identity resolution, along with potential opportunities to re-engage former customers, also offer growth.

Opportunity #2: Hit Your Targets

Marketers today must be highly flexible and adaptive to hit targets that are constantly moving and changing. Getting identity resolution right helps speed your marketing efforts. There’s less guesswork, increased flexibility (you can target messages properly, for one thing), and you can act quickly based on knowing with confidence who a customer is, where he is and what he’s doing.

Opportunity #3: Personalized Customer Experiences

If you don’t know with confidence who the customer is, you can’t personalize your messages or experiences. That, in turn, lowers the quality (and probably the duration) of your relationship with that individual.

Opportunity #4: Happy Customers

This is a biggie. Customers increasingly expect brands to engage them in highly relevant, personalized ways, and with accurately targeted content. If your content and engagement strategy is based on resolved customer identities, you are more likely to meet customers’ identities needs and expectations. On the flip side, inaccurate identity resolution can cause you to misidentify customers and engage them in ways they perceive to be intrusive or even creepy.

Opportunity #5: Efficient Spend

Timely, accurate identity resolution allows you to market more efficiently and spend less to achieve the same—or better—results. ID graphs reduce waste, overlap, and duplication.

Conversely, a lack of identity resolution forces you to “spray and pray,” which is a marketing ROI killer. Ultimately, growth suffers.

Opportunity #6: Single View Of The Customer

Identity resolution helps marketers be sure about who’s on the other end of a browser, mobile app, or location. Accurate identity resolution allows companies to create a true single view of their customers that can be consistently communicated and deployed across brands, business units, and product lines. You should be able to continuously enrich, update, and share identity data across the entire organization to facilitate greater control and personalization.

Opportunity #7: Holistic Measurement

Missing data and poor match rates create a fragmented picture of your customer, making measurement (including attribution) more difficult. Getting identity right allows companies to holistically measure results and capture customer activity as they move between the online and offline realms.

Opportunity #8: Building Stature And Credibility

Marketing’s stature and credibility within the organization (not to mention budget) strengthens mightily if you can accurately identify customers and engage them in personalized ways.

Opportunity #9: Staying Compliant

Well-executed identity resolution embraces industry best practices and principles that ensure data is harnessed in ways that are ethical, compliant, and privacy safe. This includes secure data transfer and encrypted storage, data processing controls and access restrictions, and regulatory compliance.

The underlying message to marketers is clear: Do whatever is necessary to get identity resolution under control, and reap the benefits.