3 ways to build personalized connections between a customer and brands

A large percentage of cookies live for less than a day, and few cookies live between one and 30 days. As people grow and change, so does their identity–at least in terms of the data that represents them. Without a process in place to clean, merge, and maintain accurate linkages, identity data becomes out-of-date and invalid. Sending a loyal customer an email that says new sign-ups will get 25% off just because they have a new email address will not strengthen the customer experience and can reflect poorly on your brand.

How can brands solve the issue of fragmented and (Read more...) customer data?

Identity Resolution takes the disparate identifiers and touchpoints of an individual that may exist on multiple platforms, devices, and channels and attaches them to a single person. This allows brands to engage in a hyper-personalized fashion no matter where, when, or how your customers are reaching out.

1) Understand new customer demands

The marketing landscape as we know it is changing. Customers want to be treated as individuals, not as targets or segments. They’re real people with real desires, who want control of their lives. They want to work with businesses they trust, and they want rewarding, authentic experiences.

To enable those experiences, brands must know something about the person they’re interacting with to recognize the individual in real-time — whether it’s a call to customer service, website browsing, or engaging with an employee in person.

 2) Focus on identity to create a great customer experience

Balancing privacy and a great experience is key to building customer relationships.

Identity Resolution allows brands to know who they are interacting with and gives them the ability to create a jaw-dropping, personalized and much-appreciated experience in service to the customer.

Omnichannel Identity Resolution allows you to connect the dots across your first-party data in an accurate, scalable, and privacy-compliant way to produce a stable and persistent whole-person view of your customer.

It’s difficult to do this with an inside-out approach to identity, because it limits the completeness of resolution.

A best practice is to have great hygiene of the data a consumer permitted you to collect combined with the data from traditional Customer Data Integration (CDI), and then incorporate third-party Identity Resolution to ensure you have the outside-in knowledge.

And voila, persistent resolution.

3) Use customer data to strengthen customer experience

Brands are the central arbiter for the customer experience, which includes the identity of customers. They must use every means at their disposal to recognize and understand their customers.

This means getting your own house in order in terms of first-party data and using outside information to ensure you can persistently identify the people you interact with via technology power, tools, and optics from external providers.

Why? Because a person is not just how they represent themselves to a brand at a specific point in time. External Identity Resolution providers can see other identity fragments that brands can’t.

Maintaining proper and persistent identity

After maintaining a proper and persistent identity, brands can leverage their audience insights to activate across touchpoints. They’ll have a better foundation for unified measurement, and ultimately, marketing optimization.

Without Identity Resolution, you don’t know what’s working, you can’t prove anything, and it’s hard to even be sure that you’re talking to the right people.

Accurate Identity Resolution improves customer service, lowers the cost of new acquisition, minimizes waste, amplifies media reach, and truly understands your performance.

Getting Identity Resolution right will enhance your customers’ experience, keep you out of the cross-hairs of regulators, and improve your business performance.

Mary Hennen is the Vice President of Marketing for FullContact. Mary leads all omnichannel marketing initiatives, and utilizes past media and data-driven campaign success including retail and B2B strategy expertise.