by Matt Dimond,
on Jul 22, 2020 1:04:36 PM
As we all know, the world changed with the
outbreak of COVID-19 and that change has dramatically affected our customers’
buying behaviors. A recent survey found that 41% of respondents are now shopping
online for things they would normally purchase in-store. While this change in
behavior may be through necessity, it does however create many issues for
marketers who are under increased pressure to keep up with these changing
demands, and ensure they provide a personalized and meaningful customer
experience, no matter the customer’s chosen engagement channel(s).
Three of the key questions that businesses are attempting to
answer are:
·
Which customers have
made the transition to online buying/browsing?
·
Which customers are
starting to come back into our physical stores/premises?
·
Which customers have
potentially changed their purchasing behaviors forever?
For marketers, and businesses, to be able to
answer these questions it is essential that they understand their customers in
totality. More specifically, that they can track an individual customer, or
device, between the online and offline worlds.
How
Identity Resolution helps to know your customers better?
In order to gain a deep understanding of your
customers, and their behaviors, identity resolution is key.
Often customer data resides across many
different databases, systems, spreadsheets and cloud solutions. It is also
usually unclean and, where the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is not
available, it can be a challenge to link behaviors and transactions to an
individual. When you think that businesses can hold customer data in as many as
90 different systems (sometimes more), identifying individuals at scale can be
an arduous process. Identity resolution is therefore the process of stitching
these many data sets together to create unified profiles of known or anonymous
individuals. Essentially, what you are achieving through identity resolution is
the centralization of all your customer knowledge into a single,
trustworthy and usable profile that includes every click,
visit, purchase, like, return, interaction etc.
Organizations that have automated identity
resolution at scale have an advantage over their competitors because it creates
efficiencies that empower the marketing team to focus on delivering business
value, rather than contemplating how to access their data, and removes
bottlenecks between IT and Marketing by removing the reliance on technical
teams. Importantly, it also enables the business to track customer
behaviors from offline to online and back again.
Efficiencies and bottlenecks will vary by
business, but can include the removal of manual matching processes, manual
creation of campaign audiences and segments, or the removal of the waiting time
for other departments to provide marketing with the answers to their
data-driven questions.
Brands that have recognized the importance of
identity resolution will apply technological solutions such as a Customer Data Platform and
an identity graph to help solve the challenge of linking 1st, 2nd and 3rd party
data sets together. As shown in the global Customer Data Excellence survey, CDP-equipped organizations
were proven to outperform their marketing goals 2.5X more than others.
These organizations are able to understand how customer interactions through
the website, the app, or offline through a customer services call or visit to
the physical premises, link together to form the full customer journey. In
turn, this then provides positive benefits across all marketing disciplines
including advanced requirements for personalization, attribution and predictive
modeling.
Identity resolution is a powerful tool that,
when successfully deployed, will align with your specific business goals.
Whether that is to acquire more customers, deepen your existing customer
knowledge, improve retention, cross-sell, up-sell, or a combination of all of
these, your approach to ID resolution will have profound effects by enabling
your organization to be accurate and informed without all the data wrangling
that usually occurs.
What
marketers can do once they know their customers better…
Once identity resolution is in place to create
holistic and trustworthy customer records the focus for marketers is not about
how to access the data anymore but creates a transformation shift into
considering how the business can use the newfound trustworthy data foundation
to deliver an omnichannel customer experience.
1-to-1 omnichannel marketing is the aspiration
for us all because customers expect us to use the data we hold about them,
whether that is observed or explicitly shared, to deliver a tailored
experience. It is therefore important to leverage the data we’ve been
collecting over the years to deliver on those expectations.
If you think about your own browsing and
purchase behaviors, maybe when your favorite clothing brand releases a new
collection, you will look at those new products on the website. Perhaps via a
click through on an email or by jumping across from your social media browsing.
This online behavior could trigger advertisements for the new collection as you
go about your online activities.
The next part of your buying journey however,
may be to go into your local store and physically browse the new products,
looking at colors and sizes, maybe discussing a few details with one of the
in-store staff…
Let us say that this store visit usually leads
to you purchasing at least one item; this is where your experience diverges.
Some brands are able to link your in-store and online activity together so you
never see an advert or offer for the product you have already purchased.
Instead, what you do see are complementary products, or in some exceptional
cases, imagery of models displaying your purchased product alongside those
complementary products.
This is all possible because the brand is able
to resolve your identity, link you to your devices and therefore tie together
your online and offline behaviors. This of course leads you to expect the same
experience with every other brand, which then leads to disappointment when that
experience falls short.
So, when customers are demanding personalized
experiences you need to understand identity resolution or risk losing a
competitive advantage. Delivering the optimal customer experience through a
deeper customer understanding is therefore set to become the new battleground,
superseding even price and discount in the final stages of the buying process,
which begs the question - can we afford to not know our customers and
to not meet their brand experience expectations?!
In an increasingly competitive and
unpredictable market, due to external factors such as a global pandemic,
business leaders need to recognize the untapped value of their customer data
and focus on improving their customer knowledge with identity resolution. This
enables a brand to show their customers that they understand their personal
needs and desires. Brands need to be able to demonstrate this deeper knowledge
will succeed whereas others will stand still. More tactically, in the current
COVID-19 situation, it enables an organization to understand the transition of
their customers from offline to online and back again to retain, grow and
delight their customers in spite of the challenges we face.
Download a copy of 'A Marketer's Guide to
Customer Data Platforms' to understand what a Customer Data Platform is, how it
benefits the organization, and how it compares to other technologies such as
MDMs, CRMs and DMPs...
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