Why Real-Time Onboarding Combined with Adobe Audience Manager is a Game-Changer for Marketers

Signal, the leading SaaS provider of data onboarding and real-time identity resolution, helps brands activate their first-party data and persist their customer connections in the digital ecosystem. In this article we’ll unpack how Signal and Data Management Platform Adobe Audience Manager are working together to create uniquely powerful, individualized marketing experiences.

Adobe Audience Manager DMP: The audience builder

Adobe Audience Manager DMP gathers, sorts and stores data in one centralized location so brands can build customer segments, uncover trends and create lookalike audiences to inform acquisition strategies and increase scale for data-driven marketing initiatives. Because Adobe Audience Manager uses identifiers from a number of sources to build customer profiles, marketers are able to combine a wealth of first-, second- and third-party data to build audience segments, target them across marketing channels and measure campaign performance. Once those audiences are ready for activation, brands seamlessly send their profiles to Adobe Advertising Cloud.

But frequently, in order to add a brand’s offline customer data (such as CRM, point-of-sale or loyalty program information) to the mix, brands must turn to a secondary vendor for data onboarding, the technical process of uploading offline data to the online environment to match with digital identifiers. This is especially true for customers who have low user authentication, and it’s where a solution like Signal’s comes into play — and where data-driven strategies give way to people-based marketing.

Signal: The matchmakers

As the foundational first step to customer identity, data onboarding is baked into Signal’s platform. Yet because resolving customer identity is Signal’s endgame, its onboarding process operates differently than that of traditional third-party data onboarding vendors, powering unique integrations like the one with Adobe Audience Manager.

Typically, data onboarders process customer data in batch files, a five-to-seven-day process that involves uploading specific groups of data files, matching them against digital identities and pushing out customer profiles. Any data that is not matched to a customer during the initial batch upload disappears, and any customer activity that takes place afterward is not recorded.

Signal, on the other hand, continuously onboards data as new information emerges, refreshing data sets as customers enter or leave the system — all at a rate of one million customer profiles per minute. As for data quality? Unlike most identity players, Signal bases customer profiles in persistent, 100 percent deterministic data such as hashed email addresses and authenticated user information. Combine that data accuracy with profiles that are continually refreshed with each new interaction, and brands know precisely who they can address and on what channels — all in real time.

Adobe Audience Manager and Signal: The power partners

By pairing a continuous onboarding solution like Signal’s with a DMP like Adobe Audience Manager, marketers substantially elevate the performance of their marketing stack and get the most value out of both platforms. Consider these five ways how:

1. Increase 1:1, real-time customer connections

With Signal, brands connect offline information and individual profiles to all of their Audience Manager segments in the moment. This allows marketers to leverage the highest fidelity profiles to target their Audience Manager segments on a 1:1 basis in real time. Further, by combining Signal and Adobe’s additional integrations, brands increase their reach using the same identity asset across multiple systems.

2. Deepen insights and analytics

Audience Manager manages and presents audience data and campaign activity at the segment level. Signal takes that rich data one step further by helping marketers understand that customer information and marketing performance at an individual level. By continually onboarding customer data and resolving identities in real time, Signal drives richer, fresher and more accurate people-based insights, so marketers optimize campaigns and strategize more impactful marketing.

3. Build more high-value customers

Brands already have great customers, and they’ve built robust audiences in their CRM comprised of these customers based on offline attributes.Why not get some help finding them online? Signal helps brands recognize these customers in the digital environment, push them to Audience Manager and activate these audiences in the moment for retention — and even create lookalike audiences as they expand into acquisition. Meanwhile, Signal continues to add up-to-the minute online search and behavioral data, as well as offline data, to create more complete customer profiles. This allows brands to take what they know about high-value customers, reach them in new ways, and build a host of larger, more relevant identity-based audiences.

4. Ensure data governance

Audience Manager stores one thing competitors can’t touch: a brand’s first-party customer data. Signal’s integration to Audience Manager provides a closed environment throughout the entire onboarding process, ensuring brands maintain sole ownership and control of their customer data.

5. Optimize the customer relationship and your ad-spend through strategic suppression

Audience Manager creates look-alike models that can be used to target prospects who look like your customers, but what happens if someone that looks like a buyer has already indicated elsewhere that she isn’t? Or worse: what happens if she is already your known customer? The Signal integration with Audience Manager removes current or converted customers from your look-alike audiences to ensure your campaigns are primed for the intended acquisition strategies — helping brands use their advertising budget to not only target the right people, but suppress the wrong ones.

Without question, the digital footprints consumers leave are massive, and Adobe Audience Manager is well-equipped to keep pace. But only by connecting this online knowledge with the brand’s real-world data through Signal’s platform can marketers gain the holistic understanding necessary to relevantly engage existing customers and, potentially, many more like them.

Sure, in the past, the task of merging offline and online data was cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive, to say the least. But with the evolution of continuous onboarding technologies, it is now possible to link CRM, point-of-sale and even call center data to digital identifiers in real time with one turnkey solution.

When it comes to understanding Adobe Audience Manager and Signal, it’s not a matter of using one or the other. It’s realizing how they work even better together. Reach out to your Adobe representative to learn how you can onboard your first-party customer data and create more complete and accurate audiences for activation when it matters most.