Today’s consumer journey often involves many touchpoints before making a purchase. Some happen online, some happen offline, and most of them don’t occur along a straight line.
According to research from Email Tool Test, the actual number of touchpoints before a sale varies between 1 and 50, depending on the prospect’s buying stage. That’s another factor to consider.
All in all, the path to purchase is blurry. It’s harder to pinpoint where you can improve your marketing and sales strategies, let alone know exactly who your customers are and how best to speak to them.
Throw in data privacy regulations that block website visitor tracking and you’ve got a recipe for frustration. But don’t throw in the towel yet.
Identity resolution is the glue that can hold it all together, and in today’s blog, we’re going to show you how to leverage customer data across channels with this ingenious marketing tool to improve sales growth.
What is Identity Resolution?
Identity resolution connects customer identifiers across channels and devices to single customer profiles for marketing and sales purposes. Each connection represents a different interaction or data point.
Identity resolution can identify customers in a few ways by:
- A combination of tagging and tracking users across channels
- Linking identifying attributes across all the channels and devices a customer uses
- Creating a complete customer profile to use across your tech stack
- Navigating around, and solving for, privacy preferences and compliance
There are two ways to perform identity resolution:
- Deterministic matching: A method that uses known, first-party attributes like email addresses or phone numbers to connect customer data, but only when common personally identifiable information (PII) is shared.
- Probabilistic matching: A method for unknown data that relies on algorithms to attempt to match data points to the same person. Because predictive algorithms are not 100% accurate, your customer profiles won’t be either. So you should factor in a margin for error.
Personally identifiable information (PII) is any personal data about a person that can be used to uncover their identity.
It’s critical to remember PII in deterministic matching because it’s more accurate and improves your chances of making a data match. For example, phone numbers are unique identifiers to connect different data points.
Another piece to the puzzle (and maybe the most important piece) is identity graphs. An identity graph is the web that weaves all the customer data together, connecting all known online and offline identifiers and interactions attached to individual users.
The identity graph used in Untitled for identity resolution
For example, an identity graph might connect a customer’s email address, mobile phone number, loyalty card, and online browsing behavior. This allows a business to recognize that the person who browsed products on their mobile app, later made a purchase in-store, and then left a review on their desktop computer, is the same individual.
As you can see, identity graphs are the basis for understanding the complete customer journey.
The Identity Resolution Process
Now that we’ve defined identity resolution and its methodology, let’s break down the process step-by-step.
- Step 1: Data collection gathers information from a variety of sources, including first- and third-party data.
- Step 2: Data cleansing removes data duplicates and corrects errors.
- Step 3: Data matching links connected data points using deterministic or probabilistic methods.
- Step 4: Profile creation generates a singular customer profile.
- Step 5: Ongoing updates continuously refine profiles with new data.
There’s another star player in this process: Customer data platforms (CDPs). CDPs act as hubs, centralizing, organizing, resolving, and enriching disparate data to create a unified view of your prospects and customers.
CDPs are also a revenue generating tool that provide the ability for companies to answer questions like:
- Who are my most profitable customers?
- Where do I have up- and cross-sell opportunities with existing accounts?
- Which of my marketing efforts are driving increased purchasing behavior?
With a 360-degree view, these questions become easier to answer and allow teams across the organization to work from the same data pool.
Data onboarding is an additional important step to this process, which involves the secure transfer of offline data into a digital environment. But take caution. Data onboarding must adhere to outlined data governance practices to ensure privacy and compliance.
Identity resolution often incorporates third-party data to enrich customer profiles. Data enrichment fills in the story gaps by cross-referencing and combining marketing data, CRM data, and first-party data sources.
The Value of Customer Insights
What is an effective advertising and sales strategy without customer insights? Identity resolution helps you transform raw data into actionable ways to improve your approach.
By taking disparate pieces of information – customer behavior, purchase history, feedback – identity resolution sews them together in real-time into a complete customer identity. This helps your business get a holistic view, allowing you to:
- Better understand complete customer journeys
- Identify trends and patterns
- Predict future behavior
- Personalize products and services
And in an age where everyone is competing for your customer’s attention, it’s critical to personalize your efforts wherever possible. By incorporating customer service data, behavioral data, and various other data points, companies can build rich, nuanced customer profiles, instead of generic profiles based on assumptions at best.
These profiles become the foundation for more effective marketing, improved products, and enhanced customer experiences.
Identity Resolution Across Digital and Offline Channels
Modern consumers have many options for how, when, and where they buy products and services.
For example, on the same day, someone might browse your pots and pans product page on their phone, visit a physical store for in-person research, and then purchase that same set of pots and pans on their laptop.
While this process might be convenient for consumers, it poses quite a challenge for marketers trying to track their behavior.
Luckily, identity resolution helps bridge the gap between offline and online channels by:
- Connecting digital identifiers (like cookies or device IDs) with offline data
- Leveraging data signals to understand cross-device behavior
- And enabling multi-touch attribution for more accurate customer journey tracking.
These efforts combined paint a clearer picture of your customer’s journey, allowing you to connect the dots to create a more personalized end-user experience. And the best part? It can be achieved regardless of how customers interact with your brand.
How Identity Resolution Drives Sales Growth
If it’s not clear already, identity resolution opens up a new world of customer insights. Armed with this rich information, you can tailor marketing and sales campaigns like never before and personalize interaction points that your sales team will love.
This level of personalization can lead to:
- Higher engagement rates
- Increased customer loyalty
- Better conversion rates
- And more effective cross-selling and upselling.
Toadfish Outfitters, an eCommerce brand that specializes in sustainable and innovative outdoor and kitchen products, is a great example of how identity resolution connects data points to drive ROI.
While using multi-channel marketing tools is recommended and well-rounded in approach, they needed a solution for data unification among their multi-channel strategy, especially collecting and identifying customers who landed on their page but did not check out.
Bringing in sales via the direct-to-consumer website and identifying leads is critical to their eCommerce success. That’s why they chose the Untitled identity resolution tag to monitor and capture all leads to their site, and enter them into an email retargeting campaign in Klaviyo.
By using the data captured from the identity resolution tag to create well-crafted email retargeting campaigns, they are able to convert users, market to new customers, and upsell historical customers as they develop new product lines and collections.
By using the data captured from the identity resolution tag to create well-crafted email retargeting campaigns, they are able to convert users, market to new customers, and upsell historical customers as they develop new product lines and collections.
Here’s some of Toadfish’s results after implementing identity resolution:
- Klaviyo ROAS using Untitled’s identity resolution: 6.8X
- Attributions insights and unique visitor information on hidden shoppers and net new shoppers
- Lookalike audiences expanded due to 60% of visitors being identified
- Total Spend: $2,500 / month
“With Untitled’s identity resolution feature, we identified over 2,000 hidden shoppers on our website in the first two days. We turned these into paying customers through Klaviyo. The ROI was insane. I highly recommend Untitled for any eCommerce company,” said Thor Rhodin, CMO at Toadfish Outfitters.
Increased and unified customer insights allowed them to better upsell known customers and identify anonymous website visitors and turn them into qualified customers.
Gaining a Competitive Advantage Through Identity Resolution
Companies that don’t leverage identity resolution to enhance their sales and marketing efforts risk losing out to competitors.
Today’s consumer expects personalization in how, when, and where they interact with your brand. They want to feel seen and heard, especially when they’re choosing your solution against the crowded marketplace.
When you can prove you have an understanding of your customer, businesses can:
- Deliver ultra-personalized customer experiences
- Respond quickly and strategically to market trends
- Increase brand loyalty
- And generate quality consumer trust.
Armed with data, you can be nimble and evolve with your customers, instead of against them.
Overcoming Challenges in Identity Resolution
You can’t have the good without the bad. Identity resolution is no different. Some common hurdles to expect include:
- Haggling with fragmented data across multiple systems
- Ensuring consumer trust and transparency
- And complying with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
However, you can address these challenges by:
- Implementing robust data governance practices
- Protecting PII through encryption and secure data handling
- Making it easy for customers to find and understand how you comply with data privacy regulations
- Choosing a customer data platform that integrates with your marketing tech stack
- And using a combination of deterministic and probabilistic matching to maximize accuracy while respecting privacy.
Identity resolution practices reap rewards, but it’s essential to follow these practices to keep your business in the clear and your customer data secure.
Conclusion
Identity resolution marks a fundamental shift in how businesses access and interact with their customers. It’s not just a marketing tool. It’s a process that provides a holistic view of consumer behavior that can skyrocket your sales growth and customer experiences.
The importance of identity resolution grows in tandem with consumer’s increasing privacy concerns. To avoid losing sight of your customers entirely, consider adding this customer insights method to your data lineup.
Ready to get started? Try the Untitled ID Tag free for 14 days and turn website visitors into revenue.
Identity Resolution FAQs
How is identity resolution different from traditional customer data management?
Identity resolution actively links and unifies data from various sources in real-time, while traditional customer data management pulls from static databases. Because identity resolution doesn’t rely on stagnated processes, it’s able to constantly update customer profiles across devices and touchpoints.
What industries benefit most from identity resolution?
Identity resolution is beneficial to any business, but it’s particularly valuable to industries that deal with large customer bases and complex, multi-channel interactions, including:
- Retail and eCommerce
- SaaS businesses
- Financial services
- Healthcare
- Travel and hospitality
- Telecommunications
How does identity resolution impact customer privacy and data security?
It might sound like identity resolution is a hack to curtail data privacy regulations, but in fact, it actually enhances customer privacy and data security when utilized correctly.
Identity resolution consolidates customer data, reducing the risk of broken and vulnerable data silos at risk for data breach. It also allows your business to implement more robust consent management across customer touchpoints, providing customers with greater transparency and control options over their data (like GDPR and CCPA).
However, it’s still important for any business to practice caution. Ensure you’re upholding strict guidelines around data governance practices and use identity resolution ethically and responsibly.
