Introduction

Recognising a unique individual across all channels is key to delivering a seamless customer experience. 

But, with rapidly growing numbers of marketing platforms and channels – and with data fragmented across all these channels, online and offline – it’s harder than ever for marketers to do so. 

Identity is the critical factor in generating insights and intelligence about people, whether a brand is looking to enhance processes and operations or improve the customer experience. Therefore, it is critical to understand the complexities of identity when building a comprehensive identity solution. 

Solutions that enable identity resolution, identity matching and identity management are designed to ensure brands can master identity across their MarTech and adtech ecosystems. That means they can bring fragmented data together in an effort to accurately identify, recognise and connect with people – anywhere, at any time, across any channel, device, touch point or location to deliver exceptional experiences. 

Enable exceptional experiences with people-based engagements 

Able to recognise people across offline and digital channels, identity solutions can enable powerful people-based engagement. Accessing disparate data and assimilating it into a perspective of identity that’s consistent and persistent over time, identity solutions enable marketers to take partial data and turn it into a fully recognised individual customer view. 

And as a result, marketers can use this people-based view to inform all customer engagements across the business – whether that’s in analytics, segmentation, personalisation, customer service or other areas of the business. 

Fragmented data can ruin your reputation.  

Each channel through which your customers engage your brand – whether that’s a Facebook ad, your website, a retargeted ad, an in-store visit, digital purchase, social media post or email – holds just a fragment of insights into who that person is, their purchase history with your brand, preferences and interests. Without an identity solution to align those fragmented data points and recognise who an individual is and the history with your brand, you’ll likely deliver a disjointed, inconsistent customer experience. 

And because people today expect their favourite brands to deliver a consistent, relevant and unique experience across channels, a failure to do so can devastate customer loyalty. 

So, to reap these benefits long-term, it’s important to implement an identity solution that can deliver true identity over time. One that enables brands to maintain accurate, quality data; integrate across first-, second- and third-party data; and comply with privacy and security legislation while utilising market-leading identity resolution capabilities and linking technology. 

Fragmented Data - Stitching It All Together

Identity Solutions address a complex challenge 

Identity solutions can solve the complex challenge fragmented data presents. 

Marketers know data is fragmented across the enterprise and wider marketing ecosystem. As a result, it’s hard to get a clear view across all the many fragments of information required to help recognise or identify an individual or entity across channels and engagements. 

Identity in the digital age 

Of course, this is not a new challenge; traditionally, in the offline space, marketers have had to track identity across multiple channels and customer life events. Name changes, divorces, marriages, moves – there are many ways people represent themselves, depending on the engagement they are having with a particular brand. 

Yet in the digital age, with the proliferation of technology, the identity challenge – being able to recognise that same customer across multiple engagement and data points, to build a single customer view – becomes much greater. Now, marketers must be able to amalgamate disparate, fragmented data points across a rapidly growing number of platforms and touch points. Identifying points have gone from name and address, to mobile phone numbers and email addresses, and today device IDs and different digital representations, such as location. 

Consider that one individual can have multiple email addresses, devices and can move beyond the traditional geographic boundaries we may have expected in the past, and it’s no wonder that identity – achieving that single view of the customer no matter the device, location, or otherwise – is complex! 

These components must then be leveraged in a privacy- and security-compliant manner.

Identity may be more complex than you think 

“Identity” is a term that’s commonly used throughout the data marketing landscape. But what do we really mean when we reference identity? 

Because of the term’s proliferation, it’s important to look beyond the surface to realise the full potential – and complexity – of identity solutions. 

A real identity solution should connect data to customers in a digitally responsible by design and compliant way by establishing brand-unique identity resolution rules to create a single view of the customer across channels.   

Yet it’s often the case that a data solution that considers “identity” is simply referring to matching on an email address or a hashed email address. But that’s not true identity resolution. A true and comprehensive solution should provide a holistic customer view – for example, tying multiple email addresses to an entity that has other representations in the offline space. 

A best-in-class solution will also go far beyond the data itself, facilitating data quality and hygiene services for an accurate, enhanced data insight. 

Understanding Identity Graphs

An identity graph solution is one way to stitch together fragmented data and to enable people-based marketing across digital and offline channels and devices. 

Identity graph solutions work to synchronise customer data across the enterprise by establishing client-specific recognition rules, groups and unique global identifiers across digital and offline channels in a privacy-by-design manner. 

Enabling more effective marketing programs and better customer experiences, knowledge-based or identity graph matching uses a data set of different presentations and representations of an individual over time to recognise the real person behind the data points. It’s a necessary foundation for effective, people-based marketing. 

Keep in mind that while an identity resolution solution offers the capability to create referential identity graph services, which may be highly specialised (e.g., mobile device graphs), anonymised for adtech reach (e.g., hashed email graphs or cookie pools), or more comprehensive (e.g., offline name, postal and touch point graphs), it is also critical to consider an identity management solution that then integrates these third-party referential services with a brand’s own first- and second-party data insights as a means to truly master identity across all ecosystems. 

Deterministic vs. probabilistic matching

With customeronsumer identities quickly shifting and evolving, understanding how to achieve accurate people-based marketing across digital and offline channels and devices presents a complex challenge for marketers. Handheld devices especially present a particular difficulty as cookies do not work on them. 

Multiple new technologies have been developed in response to this recognition challenge, yet two main customeronsumer identification/matching methods sit at the forefront of identity matching: deterministic matching and probabilistic matching. 

Deterministic matching 

Deterministic matching models rely on an individual being logged in to an app or website. They work to identify customersonsumers across multiple devices based on the information they use to log in to a publisher website (such as Facebook or a WiFiWi-Fi login screen), then search data sets to find a common identifier that links that user persona and identity with other digital representations. 

A deterministic approach offers a highly reliable, accurate identity persona and perspective on an individual. However, it can be limited in scale by the requirement for user login. 

Probabilistic matching 

Probabilistic matching models use browsing behaviour and location data – making assumptions about a cross-device user based on algorithms – to identify user identity. With the right, highly specific pieces of information, probabilistic algorithms are a powerful and accurate (up to 90%) way to link user personas across devices. 

Sometimes known as “device fingerprinting,” a probabilistic approach may consider points such as IP address, Wi-Fi ID, location and other user traits based on personal data such as age, gender and other interests consistent across all devices. 

Probabilistic vs. deterministic? 

These identity matching algorithms connect data to real people, but what are the pros and cons of each approach? 

When considered within an identity graph solution, deterministic matching offers an ethical by design and compliant foundation for people-based marketing, using a data set of different presentations and representations of an individual over time to recognise the real person behind the data points. 

Yet probabilistic techniques are also increasingly important, as understanding an individual’s location (or inferred location) provides substantial opportunity for contextual, time-sensitive messaging. 

Of course, each method comes with its challenges. Where deterministic matching relies on user login to a publisher site,  probabilistic matching relies on location data. GPS coordinates, check-ins, IP addresses, beacons and more may help infer location, but real location can only be achieved by blending mobile data with the rich demographic, attitudinal and behavioural information contained in offline data. 

Ultimately, a combination of traditional data elements (name, address, date of birth) and device-related points is required to reach people with relevant, timely messaging wherever they are. It’s a complex challenge, and one that must also be considered within the parameters of digital responsibility and compliance to ensure transparency, trust and fairness in the eyes of the individual. 

Marketing to real people not devices

As we’ve explored, the goal of effective identity solutions is to achieve truly superior people-based marketing – enabling marketers to recognise and reach real people across channels and devices in real time rather than simply marketing to anonymous personas or devices.  

The benefits of achieving this are, of course, numerous. From securing customer trust and loyalty to ensuring the best use of marketing resources and budget, utilising identity solutions must be a top priority for any data marketer seeking continued success in an ever-competitive, increasingly fragmented and constantly expanding digital world, regardless of industry.

A true people-based approach to identity is: 

Reaching real people across all industries 

Identity is an issue that has impacts across all industries.  

With customer data fragmented across multiple channels, being able to identify an individual across the right channels at the right time can be a make-or-break factor in generating customer loyalty.  

With retail, for example, a particular challenge lies in aligning the digital and offline worlds to meet ’peoples’ expectations for a cohesive experience both in-store and digitally. Consider that someone may be browsing digitally while inside the store. Marketers must be able to recognise that, and more importantly, then – in real time – offer the best individual customer experience. 

And while industries such as Financial Services have additional regulatory considerations, marketers must also be ready and able to achieve identity resolution with an even deeper level of compliance and transparency to ensure consistent trust.  

Ensuring privacy within people-based marketing  

Compliance and security by design must be at the forefront of identity. Because identity can be a challenging and changing environment, it’s important to ensure legal compliance and maintain customer trust when managing identity. 

One must strike a balance that uses identity resolution in a way that is accepted by customers – one that they understand, agree to and expect – to deliver value and an excellent experience.  

After all, customers today expect the brands to know them. They expect a familiar brand, or a brand they are loyal to, to recognise them – and deliver greater convenience and a more personalised experience.  

So, it is up to the individual at a first-party level to accept certain tailored experiences. And it is up to the brand to recognise when an individual does not want that level of recognition – and to act accordingly. 

Getting higher ROI from your advertising budget

With an identity solution, marketers and advertisers can achieve real-time, pinpoint effectiveness in their people-based marketing and advertising, resulting in a more effective use of budget and greater ROI.  

So, what does this look like in practice?  

Considering one common use case (and there are many!), let’s consider a CMO trying to make an informed decision about which advertising or marketing technology they’re going to use. It’s an important investment – making the right decision can be a make-or-break factor in terms of results and ROI.  

In this situation, identity is important because it can help the CMO, from the top down, understand precisely where to spend the next dollar by providing a clear view with multi-touch attribution. 

How? Identity solutions “seed” user impressions, from a central system, so marketers can tie everything across all channels and touchpoints for analytics and attribution on the back end. Without an identity solution, that’s a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to do.  

Achieving that informed clarity across channels to maximise ROI – that multi-touch attribution – is more important than ever, particularly as marketing (and advertising, especially) moves increasingly from off-line to digital.

Identity, attribution and real-time contextual marketing 

In marketing and advertising, we’ve moved into a new world. Where there once were just three or four traditional channels to contend with, we now have an unprecedented number of channels to utilise. With the consolidated view and level of unified, multi-touch attribution that identity solutions can provide across channels – the antidote to fragmented marketing – is necessary to ensure you get higher ROI from your marketing spend.  

This is the real power of identity solutions – enabling real-time contextual marketing. As an example, say you serve someone an ad on Facebook but then they switch devices and make a purchase through a paid search ad. Only a sophisticated, well-organised identity persona lets marketers then track that person across those touchpoints to deliver the right contextual message.