The paradigm shift in consumer behaviour, due to the wide availability of choices, technology-driven interactions and real time feedback, has made it essential for marketers to have a holistic view of the customers’ journey across multiple touch points.
Customers expect that a marketer should know, pre-empt and create inbound personalised experiences.
In the era of personalised experiences, businesses have been struggling to make the right choices about existing technologies that can equip them with a decision management layer that integrates with strategic and operational workflows.
Before diving into why identity resolution matters, there are a number of pre-requisites for meaningful data-driven customer strategies.
1. Shift from heuristic decisions strategy to data-driven decisions strategy: Decisions that are made backed by data rather than assumptions are far more likely to produce more accurate and meaningful customer-focused outcomes. Marketers can then be more confident in their decisions when allocating budget driven by data insights.
2. Holistic data strategy for consumer centricity and integration with enterprise functions: Bringing together multiple data points across the digital ecosystem to provide a bigger picture or more complete view of the consumer enables better targeting and value. This provides greater value for both the consumer and the organisation with predictive modelling based on more accurate and complete data sets.
3. Scalability of analytics, data science and algorithms for data-driven decision-making: Once a marketer has a more robust and accurate view of the target audience by matching and analysing broader data sets (such as first, second or third-party data), the marketer can create similar audiences based on this data to expand and scale the reach. Businesses can better plan future campaigns and allocate budget more accurately.
4. Automated decision-making for real-time activations and feedback: Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)-based assumptions allow marketers to deliver targeted value at scale. It is important the underlying data is accurate to support this.
5. Closed feedback loop for response data and continuous optimisation: To make informed decisions, a marketer must first be able to measure accurately. This is a major challenge for marketers to piece together individual consumer profiles (behavioural data) when consumers are engaging across multiple platforms and systems online as well as offline. By closing the loop or filling the data gaps on a continuous basis, marketers can better optimise their campaigns for higher performance and accuracy.
So, how does identity resolution bring it all together and add value to a customer-first strategy?
Stitching the customer identity across the journey and touch points
In a fragmented consumer identity landscape, it is almost impossible to realise and understand customer behaviour across various touch points and interactions. Identity resolution enables the resolving of conflicting identities across a range of offline and online devices, to determine a single source of truth around consumer identity.
A unique ID is then used to connect and sync with multiple touch points across the digital ecosystem. This is important for understanding the customer across the points and activate most relevant and precise decisions to fuel the business strategy.
Enabling data partnerships and data acquisitions
Data accessibility and data acquisitions is a constant need for brands, in order to realise the full picture of customers actions, beyond a brand’s own touch points.
There is a significant shift in brands becoming open to share data with each other in an de-identified, privacy-safe environment, for mutual gains. Enabling this at the people level unlocks a huge potential in terms of tapping the share of the wallet, co-marketing opportunities and customer acquisition.
Identity resolution makes it a reality for two parties to share data with each other through a common de-identified link.
Addressing privacy and consent management questions
With GDPR driving the need for consumer consent in data collection and usage, there is a push globally to address privacy and consent needs. In Australia, the presence of data privacy legislation, in the form of the Notifiable Data Breach Scheme and the announcement of the Consumer Data Right, we are seeing local laws moving in this direction to better protect customers and consumer data.
Marketers need to reinforce maintaining best practices around data ethics and privacy to establish trust between them and their customers. Identity resolution enables enterprise decision management to be compliant through incorporating consent management platforms and treating customer data with dignity.
With identity resolution, it puts the focus on the customer and ensures their data is secure and leveraged in the most meaningful manner to enable marketers to build on their data-driven customer strategies.