Imagine a typical marketing scenario: You are trying to reach a specific set of customers with the perfect message. But your data on that customer is scattered across different places – their email address might be in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool and/or your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP); their purchase history in an order fulfillment tool; and their social media activity in yet another two or three platforms. This fragmented view makes it tough to understand who your customer really is and what they want. Here is where identity resolution comes into play. 

Identity resolution is the process of accurately identifying and linking various data records that refer to the same entity across different data sources or within a single source. Think of it as your detective that pieces together all of that fragmented customer data from various sources to give you a complete picture of who your customer is and how they interact with your brand across different channels. It allows marketers to consolidate and organize disparate data about individuals or entities to create a unified view, which is crucial for data management, analytics, and decision-making processes.

With identity resolution, marketers can benefit from understanding their customers better and delivering more impactful marketing campaigns. And that’s all good news for the bottom line. 

Identity resolution helps with:

  • Unified Customer View:
    Let’s state the obvious. By aggregating all your customer data, marketers can enjoy a 360° view of their customer interactions. Take a simple customer journey: A customer browses your website on their laptop, reads your emails on their mobile device, and visits your store in their local area. Without identity resolution, your systems will capture these events as separate interactions without visibility to the whole picture. Identity resolution connects the dots between online and offline behavior, creating a single, comprehensive customer profile.  It improves the quality of data by ensuring that all records referring to the same entity are correctly identified and linked, and as a bonus, reduces duplicates, errors, and inconsistencies in data.
  • Deeper Customer Insights:
    By linking data across touchpoints, marketers gain a holistic view of their customers. This leads to better understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and needs. In turn, better understanding allows the marketer to better target campaigns and messaging that resonates with the customer’s preferences, needs, or stage in the buying journey.
  • Accurate Personalization:
    In today’s marketing landscape, customers expect to be recognized by the brands with whom they interact. Accurate identity resolution facilitates better customer experiences. Marketers can personalize marketing messages and create seamless customer journeys across all touchpoints, both on- and offline. By tailoring interactions based on the comprehensive understanding of each individual, messages will be more relevant and more timely. This tends to lead to quicker and larger sales wins.
  • Optimized Marketing ROI:
    Identity resolution helps marketers measure campaign effectiveness more accurately and understand which channels are most effective for reaching their target audience. This allows them to allocate their budget more strategically and maximize their return on investment (ROI).
  • Fraud Detection:
    In this age of data breaches, hacks, and spoofing, identity resolution has been a major help in detecting and preventing fraud. When you have a unified customer profile, you can more easily pinpoint suspicious activities or inconsistencies in data patterns that could indicate fraudulent behavior.
  • Privacy Compliance:
    With the rise of privacy regulations, traditional methods of customer identification are becoming restricted and complicated to maintain accuracy. Today, when a customer asks to be removed from marketing communications, many marketers have to cycle through a minimum of three siloed databases to opt them out of communications. With identity resolution, marketers can identify that customer from one privacy-compliant data location and can often push subscription or privacy status updates out to all connected systems. Identity resolution helps marketers comply with privacy regulations while still gaining valuable customer insights. Additionally, your customers can be assured of accurate and secure handling of their data.

In short, identity resolution is the key to unlocking the full potential of your customer data. It empowers marketers to deliver targeted messaging, create personalized experiences, and ultimately build stronger customer relationships. It also plays a crucial role in enhancing data management, analytics, and decision-making capabilities in a privacy-conscious manner, which ultimately leads to improved operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. This translates into increased brand loyalty from your customers, and a boost in marketing ROI. Who among us doesn’t want that? 

Whether you want to learn more about identity resolution or you’re ready to get started implementing an identity resolution solution, Relationship One is here to help!