Pop quiz. How valuable is a customer’s contact information?
Answer… it depends.
Without knowing what matters to a customer, contacting them with useless information and offers is an exercise in futility. This is something that spammers never figured out. Spam is a volume play that blasts the same message to an unfathomable number of people in hopes that a tiny few convert.
The only reason spam is still a thing is because it’s cheap and easy. It creates the illusion of marketing without putting in the work needed to succeed.
Third-party (3P) cookies suffer the same illusion. With cookies, brands can easily retarget customers wherever they go with lookalike ads for whatever product they recently viewed, searched for, or added to an abandoned cart. It’s ad-spam, only unlike spam, cookies are actually expensive when you consider the cost of advertising needed to take advantage of them (especially during an election year, when costs spike 10 – 20%).
Good marketing requires an investment in knowing all that is knowable about customers in order to deliver contextual and personalized experiences to them. And while that’s hard, there are ways to make doing so a little easier.
Identity resolution is one of those solutions. Identity resolution is the practice of aggregating information about consumer behavior across devices and touchpoints into a single profile that brands can access to identify on-site visitors.
The key word there is behavior. A common misconception about identity resolution is that it’s used to collect customer contact information into a shared database that any brand using it can access. But since when is your email your identity?
It’s far more valuable to identify behaviors and preferences associated with a given device, and use that information to actually benefit customers by giving them what they’re likely looking for when visiting a brand from that device.
Identify Resolution In Action
Here are two scenarios for how a brand might leverage the same identity resolution benefits in different ways based on whether you know a customer’s contact information or not…
Scenario 1
A customer who has previously provided their contact information and has opted into communications from your brand visits your site. They browse a few items, and then leave. With an identity resolution platform, you can not only send a follow-up email, but leverage historical contextual data to send it at the optimal time, and with an offer that beats that of any competitor the customer may have visited previously.
Scenario 2
A customer who has not yet provided their contact information visits your site. They browse a few items and are about to leave. Using an identity resolution platform, you can generate a pop-up in real time with an offer likely to appeal to that unique visitor (rather than a generic popup) which the visitor can accept by willingly providing their contact information.
In both instances, the status of the customer’s contact information is not the point of value here. It’s certainly useful, of course. But the value comes in knowing what the customer wants and offering it to them in a way that makes the communication a welcome surprise rather than an annoying interruption.
Cookies Don’t Cut It
Many marketers cheered Google’s decision not to sunset its third-party cookie technology as planned. But the mere threat of them going away over the last few years caused the entire industry to reassess their reliance on cookies, with identity resolution emerging as a top contender.
With identity resolution, brands can better activate the customer data they have, and more effectively collect the data they don’t, and enrich their understanding of customers. And best of all, identity resolution data is not reliant on cookies. In fact, they fill the gaps in data that third-party cookies can’t provide.
Cookies may be here to stay, but they have limitations that are growing only more glaring as technology and privacy regulations evolve. As noted earlier, cookies are expensive, which give the big brands with the big marketing budgets the biggest advantage. And no matter how much you spend, results are never guaranteed.
Cookies are incomplete. They may store a little data about your customers (the device they use, what sites they visit), but it’s a casual relationship that can’t paint a complete picture. They’re also temporary, so once they expire or are cleared from a customer’s cache, you wind up asking them the same (now annoying) questions the next time they visit your site.
Between the limitations of cookies, or the reality that customers engage with brands from multiple devices, recognizing and matching anonymous traffic to a single profile is growing increasingly difficult. Yet doing so is equally crucial to create seamless, personalized interactions and maximizing the effectiveness of marketing strategies. Consumer demand for more personalized experiences from brands is on the rise. But it’s impossible to create a personalized experience for someone you don’t know.
That’s why good marketing means developing more than just a one-size-fits-all message that follows customers wherever they go. It requires contextual information about each person in order to determine which are your most valuable customers, why they’re interested, and what messaging they’re most likely to respond to.
That’s why identity resolution focuses on context, not contacts. Reaching a customer is only helpful if you know what to say. The right message is what the customer needs to hear, as well as when and how they want to hear it… not just what you want to say.
