5 Tips to Approach Identity Resolution

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu advises his readers to “know your enemy” if they want to succeed on the battlefield.

As digital-era marketers, we need to not only know our enemy (the competition), we must, above all know our customers in order to succeed in the art (and science) of marketing.

So, how well do you know your customers? Would you even recognize them if you saw them on your website? Do you know enough about them to meet consumers’ expectations – or more accurately, demands – for improved personalization and CX?

The first major barrier to recognizing and knowing your customer is the sheer amount of data each individual customer or prospect produces as they traipse through the digital universe on any number of devices, from laptops to mobile phones to streaming services like Roku and Amazon Fire Stick, smart speakers like Amazon Alexa or the Google Nest, and smartwatches, to name a few. (To illustrate, in 2021 there are more than 10 billion active IoT devices and that number is expected to reach 3.5 billion by 2023.)

The second major barrier is connecting all this digital activity across various devices to the individual customer so you can leverage it to drive better customer experiences and deliver marketing ROI. This is a complex process that involves purifying a customer record by, for example, identifying customer X as the originator of an IP address, a work phone number, a ZIP code, a mobile device, and even a television, and assigning a persistent key marker to all data points for immediate Martech ingestion and analysis.

Fortunately, the tools for managing vast troves of data and creating customer identity across devices are available right now. These include a CDP, or Customer Data Platform, and an identity resolution solution, like Allant’s XDID, which work in concert to provide you a clear picture of your customers and make the data available for powerful analytics and data-driven insights that drive personalization.

Let’s explore how to get started with a CDP and an identity resolution solution.

A Road Map to CDP in 5 Tips

With so many vendors and solutions to choose from, how do you find the right CDP partner for your marketing organization? There are two critical preliminary steps to getting started:

• Understand your current MarTech stack and capabilities. You can save a lot of money if you can leverage what you already have in your quest to solving the personalization, segmentation, and privacy issues that necessitate the CDP. 
• Be clear about your goals. The best way to do this is to define your top three use cases. All marketers know where the low-hanging fruit is—it’s what makes us marketers! If you can define these use cases, you will be able to make intelligent decisions about building vs. buying, data sourcing, data readiness, and much more.

Once you achieve these, it’s time to start talking to vendors.

1. Connect with Allant Group for a list of vendors. We can help find the CDP platforms that meet your need for customer data integration, profile management, real-time segmentation, and actionable insights. CDPs are still very differentiated, with some focusing on data ingestion and harmonization, while others focus on vertical industries or loyalty. There is a range to choose from and you want to narrow your list to the CDP partners who are a good fit for your company’s size and focus.

2. Understand the implementation process. Some CDPs offer professional services, most do not. That means a budget must be secured for implementation. You can streamline the process by ensuring that the implementation partner understands your data, organizational structure, existing skills, and MarTech stack.

3. Acknowledge that partnership with IT is vital. Defining and analyzing customer data at the level required for meaningful results requires acute technical acumen. While CDPs are designed for marketers to use with relative ease, you’ll need a good relationship with IT for security review, data flows and integration, implementation as well as maintenance.

4. Plan thoroughly before you execute. We like to say that at least 50% of the work is done upfront and on paper. Implementing a CDP is challenging for everyone involved. It requires a lot of collaboration and cross-functional buy-in in terms of sources of data, partnership with internal “owners” of data, uses of the CDP, and more. Too many CDP deployments have failed due to inadequate planning and organizational issues. CDPs are only as effective as the breadth and depth of the customer data they ingest from all the various available sources and the marketing activations that generate revenue.

5. Demonstrate value across the organization. A CDP is for marketers, analysts, executives, and any function of an organization that works better with more information. In other words, they break down silos within organizations. Once you get familiar with what a CDP can do, you can have a tremendous impact on helping other departments solve problems and become more data-driven. And, your customers will start seeing fewer but more effective marketing campaigns, thanking you with their hard-earned dollars.

Conclusion

CDPs and Identity Resolution solutions have one goal: to achieve a single, cross-channel customer profile that enables real results through segmentation and personalization. They’ve changed marketing departments by unifying customer data, collecting anonymous profiles, and converting them to known ones at speed and scale while complying with customers’ privacy preferences.

CDPs are evolving and creating more value in our increasingly digital and data-driven environment. It’s a great time to take advantage of this technology’s ability to deliver the kind of meaningful experiences your customers appreciate. You don’t have to go it alone: As a widely respected CDP implementation and management partner, Allant Group can help ensure that a CDP is first and foremost a fit for you based on your needs. And more importantly, help you deploy it successfully so that it meets your expectations. To learn more, contact us today.