The Power of Identity Resolution: Bridging Data Gaps for a Unified Customer View
The ever-evolving digital age means there’s no limit to the number of devices that people can connect to as they carry out different activities on each, including shopping. In fact, the average number of connected devices per US household reached 17 in 2023, according to a report by Parks Associates.
With many brands offering omnichannel experiences from email and SMS to mobile, any given customer may interact with your brand across these channels. As a result, brands have access to vast amounts of customer data to provide relevant and personalised experiences for their customers. However, with all this data at their disposal, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. It's essential to connect the dots between all this data from multiple sources to gain deep insights into customer behaviour.
Connecting the dots becomes even more complicated when users can’t be identified. Brands and retailers understand the struggle of identifying anonymous users who visit and then leave a website often without making a purchase. On average, 80% of traffic on ecommerce websites is composed of anonymous users.
Identity resolution is the key unlocking the identity of your traffic by achieving a unified customer view and ensuring you’re not missing out on these potential revenue opportunities.
In this article, we’ll investigate the concept of identity resolution and understand its value and importance when it comes to building enhanced and more engaging customer experiences while driving higher conversion rates.
What is identity resolution?
As we’ve seen, customers are now interacting with your brand across multiple touchpoints simultaneously which means that converting visitors into paying customers has become even more complex.
Identity resolution addresses this challenge by putting the pieces of this omnichannel marketing puzzle together. It refers to the process of identifying a single customer across various touchpoints, devices, platforms and channels.
It involves putting together a single profile for each customer across various data touchpoints. It does this by attributing each customer with an identifier throughout their different interactions, which results in a customer ID that can consistently recognise this customer regardless of device and session. From then on, this customer’s identity is considered “resolved”.
This results in a comprehensive, unified customer profile from contrasting pieces of data such as different email addresses, phone numbers, IP address and device IDs. Put simply, each time a customer interacts with a brand, an identifier is attributed to that customer. Resolving all those identifiers into a singular customer profile is where the challenge lies, and more so with the deprecation of third-party cookies.
Let’s imagine the different scenarios where a customer engages with your brand: website visits, social media, and email sign-ups. Typically, these different interactions would be treated separately, creating a different customer profile even if it's actually the same customer.
Therefore, this customer might make their purchase as a “guest” user but then this same customer could sign up for your newsletter. All these interactions are then treated as separate without a clear connection. This only leads to disparate pieces of data that make it difficult to connect together to map out their journey and understand the path to conversion. Not to mention that often users use multiple email addresses and it would be hard to determine that these email addresses belong to the same person without identity resolution.
On the one hand, you need to be able to recognise that a customer who browsed your website this morning is the same person who opened your email later that day.
On the other hand, collecting customer information becomes tricky when companies have customer data stored in multiple databases where extracting and combining all this data could take considerable time and effort.
That’s where the value of identity resolution lies. Identity resolution enables the identification and linkage of these fragmented profiles into one customer profile. In other words, identity resolution gives in-depth insights into customer behaviour by connecting all their different touchpoints, and this includes both personal and anonymous information.
What are identity graphs?
The very first stepping point into implementing identity resolution involves building an identity graph. Therefore, after gathering all possible customer identifiers, including anonymous ones, from various data sources, you can then start the process of mapping out the identifiers to each customer profile into an identity graph.
An identity graph is a database that stores all identifiers associated with each customer. It represents a web and central framework with all your customers’ personal information based on common identifiers to help organisations identify and better understand their customers.
Think of it like a map with millions of fragmented contact data-names, emails, device IDs, website visits, etc- all of which are connected. These fragments once connected represent your customers put together to form a graph.
With identity graphs, you get a complete identity of your customers from all the datasets you have access to, allowing you to tackle the complexities of customer data in the digital age.
Identity graphs enable marketers to build customer personas to effectively segment their audience and create tailored and targeted messaging based on these personas.
Types of identity resolution
One of the first things that must be determined early on in the data collection process is whether to use a deterministic or probabilistic identity resolution method to achieve that unified profile.
This will largely depend on the type of data available and the level of accuracy you're looking to achieve as well as your use case.
Deterministic matching relies on first-party data and exact matches or what it knows to be true, which means it tends to be more reliable and precise as it’s based on information the customer has provided. Thus, this type of matching links customer data based on exact identifiers such as name, email addresses or phone numbers, birthdate, etc.
For example, if a customer engages with a brand on their mobile phone and desktop and signs into their account on both devices with the same email then deterministic matching will link data from both platforms to one customer profile. However, if this same user browses from their tablet without logging in then data from that interaction will not be unified to that profile.
Probabilistic matching, for its part, uses algorithms that predict matches from among several similar data records or what it predicts to be true.
In other words, this method looks for the probability that any two records belong to the same individual. Even without exact identifiers, this type of matching works by making informed guesses about the probability that several pieces of data are associated with one individual customer.
Thus, probabilistic methods don’t solely rely on static information. They also take into account behavioural data such as user journeys, IP addresses, cookie ID and device type.
Since probabilistic matching relies mostly on probabilities and “close enough” matches, it tends to be less accurate than deterministic methods but it can lead to more matches as, by casting a wider net, it has the potential to uncover less obvious connections from a wide array of data.
For example, if an anonymous user is browsing a website on two different devices, but connected to the same wifi network, then a probabilistic modelling algorithm can connect these two interactions to a single customer.
Identity resolution doesn’t have to be black or white. It’s possible to combine both these approaches to get the most comprehensive and accurate view of your customers.
Bring your entire customers into focus: The value of identity resolution
Without identity resolution, brands are left with nothing but incomplete customer profiles, making it difficult to create personalised, relevant experiences to get customers on the right path to conversion.
Meanwhile, identity resolution gives a holistic profile and 360-degree view of each individual customer where you can connect all these different behaviours across various touchpoints to a single customer.
Often, brands tend to rely on one-size fits all marketing strategies that may not be so relevant, which may lead them to miss out on valuable conversion opportunities. By understanding consumer behaviour across multiple devices and channels, brands can build more engaging, personalised experiences for their customers by gathering information from multiple sources.
For example, a customer could browse a website through their mobile device then make a purchase through their desktop. Without identity resolution, you’re essentially overlooking a key insight into how this customer’s journey unfolded as these interactions using two devices would create two different profiles for this one customer.
In short, identity resolution empowers marketers to optimise and personalise their campaigns and deliver targeted messaging, driving better customer engagement and ultimately customer loyalty.
It’s important to keep in mind that the process of identity resolution complies with consumer privacy laws. Typically, solutions that offer identity resolution would have built in these capabilities to help clients collect this data responsibly.
What kind of insights can you get from identity resolution?
As we’ve seen, incorporating identity resolution is the key to truly understanding your customers and delivering engaging experiences by enabling you to identify and then segment potential customers into distinct groups to create more tailored experiences.
Here are a few things you can achieve with the power of identity resolution:
- Create more consistent and personalised omnichannel user experiences
The more data obtained from multiple sources, the more insight you get into your customers’ behaviour and preferences. This means you can create enhanced omnichannel experience by tracking customer activity across all touchpoints and channels in a company, helping to eliminate data silos. That way, customers are getting the best possible experience no matter the device they’re using.
In other words, with identity resolution, you can map customers’ omnichannel journey to create optimised, personalised experiences to increase chances of conversion. Otherwise, customers will end up receiving different offers and communications on each device. As a result, customers won’t receive the personalised experiences they have come to expect these days.
The better you’re able to recognise and meet your customers at every stage of the customer journey regardless of the device, the more likely you’ll be able to craft personalised, relevant messages at the right time in the right channel.
- Understand your customers better, even anonymous ones
Many visitors stumble upon a website and start their browsing experience without creating an account, especially if it’s their first visit to a website.
Identity resolution enables you to identify those anonymous users even as they switch devices by making a link between their activities across these different devices. In other words, identity resolution enables you to reconcile anonymous visitor data with known visitor data to recognise and understand these visitors before they click away from your website and they’re lost for good.
Let’s say John downloads your app but doesn’t make an account as he browses through your different product categories. John then adds an item to the cart and that’s when he registers for an account to complete the purchase.
Instead of treating the logged out “visitor” and logged in John as two different people, a customer data platform offering identity resolution capabilities would recognise the logged in and logged out visitor as John and that’s when you get a clear view of John’s shopping journey as well as his behaviour and preferences. Combining known and anonymous profiles creates richer unified individual profiles for use in segmentation and retargeting campaigns.
This way, you get a complete overview of “anonymous” users based on their behaviour on multiple devices, enabling you to send personalised and relevant communications to these users.
- Set up more effective marketing campaigns
The aim of identity resolution is to take disconnected pieces of information to ensure you have the most accurate view of each customer. This allows for more informed decision-making.
This essentially means that brands know the right kind of targeted messaging to send while avoiding sending ads for items which are irrelevant to a certain customer, leading to a marketing budget poorly spent.
Nothing puts off a customer more than receiving an ad for an item they never expressed in and are irrelevant to their interests, or worse for an item that they’ve already bought- which can often happen when you don’t have identity resolution and you cannot reconcile the person who’s bought the item with the targeted messaging you’re about to send out to encourage customers to buy that same item.
Consequently, this allows businesses to maximise their ROI as they get insight into which channels are more effective at reaching potential customers and allocate their marketing budget effectively and strategically.
Reach new heights with SaleCycle: Transform anonymous traffic into known visitors
Nowadays, more and more customers have come to expect relevant experiences from brands. Likewise, the most successful marketing campaigns are those that are in line with customer preferences and interests.
The number of touchpoints and customer expectations are at an all-time high but very few typical CRM platforms have the capabilities to track customer activity across these many touchpoints.
Building customer profiles based on first-party data is typically more reliable than third-party data, which can affect the quality of the data as you would have less control over how it’s collected and there’s always the privacy issue.
SaleCyle, for example, enables clients to instantly identify anonymous users from the moment they reach a website for immediate personalisation by collecting both zero-party and first-party data on behalf of clients, all in compliance with GDPR.
With SaleCycle, a large portion of visitors becomes reachable. Thanks to our identity resolution technology that complements your CRM data, you can identify both guest and anonymous users, boosting your reach by up to 67%.
Reach out to us today so you too can unlock the potential of the unknown.
