Imagine having a great conversation with a customer and then realising you were talking to the wrong person – or you were talking to the right person either too soon or too late, missing the signals of need and desire. Or maybe you got the timing just right but pitched the wrong product or service. The consequence can be dire. For one, brands can bid goodbye to attracting or retaining customers.
Great brand experiences happen only when they are built on robust views of the customer, from wide-ranging online and offline data sources and interactions. But with consumers spanning such a diverse range of channels, how can brands achieve engagement in the most effective manner?
Identity resolution is key. This is essentially the process of connecting hundreds of identifiers used by different channels, platforms and devices in near real-time. By doing so, marketers and the companies that support them (agencies, technology platforms, data owners, and publishers) can tie them all back to the same person in a deterministic, privacy-safe way to enable people-based targeting, measurement and personalisation.
The more you learn about how consumers behave in different scenarios, the smarter you get at improving and personalising your marketing campaigns.
However, the catch is that when you interact with your audience in many ways and in different locations – whether it’s offline, online or both – you end up with hundreds of customer identifiers representing just a single real-life human being.
The reality today is that the increased availability and use of multiple channels are a given for marketers. What it means is that consumers identify themselves in a multitude of different ways – whether it’s a device ID, an anonymous cookie, or an email address. Unless you can resolve these multiple identities back to a single, real human being, you’ll continue to treat them as different people, and your communication with them will be inconsistent, unremarkable and ineffective.
As a result, data becomes mismatched and it’s easy to make the wrong connections. This could cause brands to overlook valuable audience segments, duplicate efforts, and eventually create a confused and incoherent customer experience. In fact, over 90 per cent of marketers struggle to seamlessly connect more than three channels on the buyer journey according to Gartner.
Clearly, this fragmentation is the biggest obstacle between brands and true people-based marketing.
The connecting of offline segments with online platforms is the first step to overcoming this obstacle and obtaining a true omnichannel view. The next step is to use this single view to understand every customer as an individual and the role that every touch point plays in customer relationships. Thereafter, brands will be empowered to accurately match the data to the right individual regardless of the number of channels they use to access information.
This is the true power of identity resolution.
How does LiveRamp help you with identity resolution for your customers?
LiveRamp resolves these various identities in a privacy-safe way using de-identified data, sourcing and connecting hundreds of different identifiers back to real people. We use a deterministic matching process to resolve device IDs, cookies and emails to real people.
Identity resolution gives marketers the power to leverage the masses of data that exist today, and ultimately achieve what marketers have always sought to do: Have a meaningful conversation with the people who matter. Find out more here.