Today’s consumers truly are in the driver’s seat. With so many touchpoints and channels, brands need to make sure each interaction is perfectly tailored or risk missing the opportunity to make a sale.
If you’re a marketer, you’re probably already aware of the increasing complexity of the ecosystem. You still require the ability to reach, understand, and engage with your customers, but with the proliferation of new devices and digital touchpoints, customer-centric marketing impossible to do with a static marketing tech stack.
To solve this, Winterberry Group’s recent report, Know Your Audience: The Evolution of Identity in a Consumer-Centric Marketplace, found that marketers today are increasingly investing in identity resolution capabilities to solve their customer-centric marketing challenges.
A better customer experience has always been the goal of marketing, and marketers are getting closer to achieving that goal—but there’s still more to do. Read on for our top three takeaways from Winterberry’s report.
If you’re only looking at one channel, you’re doing it wrong
Part of the reason that marketers aren’t quite there yet with identity resolution is that they’ve been taking a channel-specific approach to their data management. Until recently, audience data—and therefore identity—has only needed to be managed within one channel. Few were trying to look beyond the channel in which they were executing.
Only email marketers cared if emails were clean, only digital marketers cared about digital behavioral data or social media, and only mobile marketers cared about device IDs and location data.
And within any one channel, marketers probably think they’re doing fine with their customer-centric marketing strategy. But their customers don’t experience marketing in terms of channels. They see and experience your emails, digital ads, and push notifications as extensions of your brand.
Now, marketers are catching up to their customers and are realizing in order to have a true customer-centric marketing experience that they can’t think about identity in terms of a single channel.
Segmentation and targeting today, personalization and attribution tomorrow
So where are marketers getting it right? Well, 54% of marketers report that they’re using identity resolution to power market segmentation and are targeting use cases in advertising and marketing messages. The other common use cases include email personalization, offline-to-online targeting, and location-based targeting.
And this makes sense given that identity is typically managed within individual channels. When marketers are looking to drive their tactics in those channels, using identity resolution to extend the utility of existing data sets to other platforms is a no-brainer.
Next on the horizon was personalization on owned channels, including product development and user experiences across websites, mobile, and other owned content. Twenty-three percent of marketers responded saying that these initiatives were a key focus over the next 12 months. This was followed by 20% of respondents reporting that identity resolution for attribution was a key focus.
Privacy remains a key concern
With the launch of GDPR and the new California Consumer Privacy Act, privacy and ethical data usage remains top-of-mind for marketers. These regulations impact identity strategies in a number of ways.
Marketers consider if privacy is embedded into newer technologies and tactics, possibly slowing their adoption. These regulations also require that marketers communicate their policies clearly with their customers, and many are still figuring out the most effective way to do so and how to respect consumers’ preferences in marketing communications.
A rigorous understanding and application of data privacy regulations requires that marketers work closely with their organization’s legal and privacy teams. A respect for consumer privacy and associate regulations is vital to a successful identity resolution strategy. Overall, marketers are seeing the benefits of customer-centric marketing, and moving ahead with identity resolution. The benefit of some marketers having gone ahead is that now you can learn from their success.