n the platform, device and touchpoint confusion, customers have countless ways to interact digitally with your company. And then there’s the good old offline world, too. How are you supposed to create a consistent and holistic customer profile from all that data? How are you supposed to know whether he or she on a smartphone is the same person who bought from us last week on their work PC? So: how are you supposed to deliver real added value to your customers if you can’t really rely on your customer data? How do you address your customers in a personalized, privacy-compliant way – and even recognize the individual profiles in the first place? Without reliable data, it won’t work – and the key to that is identity resolution.
The “task” of identity resolution is, simply put, to recognize customers across different touchpoints and devices and thus create a truly usable customer profile—and all in compliance with data protection regulations. It is a process in which customer identifiers, such as an email address, login details, or an IP address, are matched and linked. This involves data from online and offline channels, from platforms, and from different devices.
martech.org defines identity resolution as follows: “Identity resolution is the science of connecting the growing volume of consumer identifiers to one individual as he or she interacts across channels and devices.”
Forrester defines it as: “The process of integrating identifiers across available touchpoints and devices with behaviour, transaction, and contextual information into a cohesive and addressable consumer profile for marketing analysis, orchestration, and delivery.”
Identity resolution therefore helps you get to know your customers much better. This is important so you can offer them the best possible experience with your brand and provide real added value. That’s how you achieve success. With the help of identity resolution software, you connect the big picture with individual people, their perception of the brand, and their motivation. The result paints a comprehensive picture of your customers—and the best part: you simultaneously protect data privacy.
There are many studies on what customers expect from companies in communication. And almost all of them come to the same conclusion: They expect individualized brand experiences that are relevant to them. Any brand that ignores this—anyone who doesn’t want to or can’t address customers individually because they don’t really know them—will be setting up their marketing the wrong way in 2022. That means you need to know exactly who’s on the other end of the line. Though that image isn’t quite right—it’s more like dozens of lines.
Keyword: dozens. As a marketing pro, you use a ton of tools to run campaigns, analyze your activities, and so on. Each platform generates even more data. The result: customer touchpoints are often scattered or even siloed. It’s hard to draw valuable insights from these data.
This is where Identity Resolution comes into play. By consolidating touchpoints, you create a backbone for your datasets. Scattered data becomes easily addressable identity profiles, which you can then use in a targeted way for people-based marketing.
You should keep an Identity Resolution platform on your radar if you’re familiar with any of these problems:
The MarTech stack is limited: data and marketing tools can’t be connected with each other, which reduces the reach of your campaigns. What a shame!
Customer profiles are not complete: data is constantly changing, which makes it all the more important to update it continuously and know your customers inside out at all times.
Identity resolution software gives you an overview of individual people and their preferences. To do so, the software assigns so-called identifiers to individual persons. This makes it possible to collect valuable data across different channels and devices. This creates an identity graph or identity profile.
Good identity resolution software is reliable, trustworthy, compliant with data protection regulations, and easy to use. It offers deterministic identity solutions – meaning it uses only data that is ensured to be correct (above all First Party Data).
So that you get the best possible result for yourself—and ultimately for your customers—pay attention to the following factors when comparing software:
It should be fast:
Identity resolution software must be able to connect offline and online data quickly and easily during onboarding. You choose an identifier and ideally receive a result quickly.
It has to be precise:
Good software works across all touchpoints, from social media to smart watches to smart speakers, and identifies additional IDs. Only then can you address real people in a tailored way—a half profile won’t do you much good.
More is always possible:
Ideally, the identity resolution software offers integration of third-party data from trustworthy sources. This gives you the big picture—an omnichannel view of your target audience.
Note: Many Customer Data Platforms (CDP) have identity resolution functions.
With identity resolution software, marketing departments are not just state of the art for a brief moment—they stay up to date continuously. Beyond that, it creates a meaningful data foundation for all your future marketing decisions. By linking your customers’ identifiers together, you have constant access to a complete and continuously updated data foundation on which you build personalized marketing building blocks.
We’ve summarized the benefits of identity resolution software for you once again in an overview:
Deep insights:
The combination of data from various touchpoints, data sources, and interactions leads to meaningful customer profiles. With these, you can improve the targeting, personalization, and relevance of your marketing campaigns in no time.
Keyword: personalization:
Because that’s what it’s primarily about. Personalized interactions with your customers are the declared goal of identity resolution.
Complete consistency:
The holistic view of your customers means you can seamlessly engage them at every step of the customer journey. This helps you avoid duplicate, unnecessary outreach.
Data protection? Absolutely:
Identity resolution complies with all GDPR data protection requirements, underscoring that your company takes data governance seriously. In addition, managing customer preferences is easier thanks to the software.
Campaign tracking at its best:
Persistent IDs for known and anonymous customers, enabled by identity resolution, allow you to map the various touchpoints and measure your marketing success more effectively. And you can only optimize sustainably what you can measure!
Doesn’t just sound like a nice-to-have, but a must-have, doesn’t it? We think: An identity resolution solution belongs in every modern MarTech stack!
Top news from the Matchilla MatchZINE – the MarTech magazine
Tips & tricks on how to use the right marketing technologies
Best practice from other marketing decision-makers in terms of MarTech
and much more!
Till Zier is CPO at Matchilla and, as a MarTech expert, reports in MatchZINE on news and trends in marketing, automation, analytics, and data.
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