Whodunit? Activating identity resolution in CDPs

Imagine you’re a digital marketer for a thriving eCommerce brand. Your days are filled with crafting targeted campaigns, analyzing heaps of data, and fine-tuning strategies to boost customer engagement.  

Daily, you’re surrounded by data — from email interactions and late-night shopping sprees to user engagement on your mobile app. But there’s a snag: this data sprawls across various systems and platforms, often missing crucial identifiers. This fragmentation makes it tough to piece together your customers’ journeys with any clarity.

Enter identity resolution, which isn’t just another quick-hit item on the Customer Data Platform (CDP) list. Think of identity resolution as the essential tool that helps you connect and make sense of a complex web of customer interactions of different channels. 

By linking these data points to a single customer profile, identity resolution transforms raw data into a comprehensive, actionable customer view — or, what we call a Customer 360.

This capability is crucial in today’s digital age, where understanding and predicting customer behaviors across touchpoints can significantly enhance personalized marketing efforts.  

In this blog post, we’ll explore the mechanics of identity resolution, highlight its role in a composable CDP, and show how it can revolutionize your marketing strategies by providing a unified, accurate view of your customers.

Understanding identity resolution

Identity resolution is the ultimate data detective. It’s the process where seemingly random bits of customer data — from tweets at 2am about your latest product to those impulse buys on payday — are collected, analyzed, and eventually logged as evidence to form a single customer profile. Whodunnit? Customer_id123 did.  

Identity resolution is a critical function within a CDP, enabling the marketer to use the platform to tailor and fine-tune marketing efforts and predict customer behavior with impressive accuracy.

Types of customer identifiers

When it comes to ID’ing customers, there are several types of identifiers:

First-party identifiers

‍First-party data is like the VIP backstage passes your customers give you during their direct interactions with your brand.  Firsty-party identifiers include email addresses, phone numbers, and customer account IDs. They’re important because they come straight from your customers with their nod of approval, and you manage them directly, which means the data has a higher chance of being accurate accurate and private.

Second-party identifiers

Imagine these identifiers are your business buddies passing you notes about what your shared customers are up to.  It’s not data you collected directly, but it comes from a reliable source, like information shared through a partnership when a customer uses a loyalty card at a partner retailer. This data helps you get a clearer picture of your customers’ activities beyond their interactions with your brand.

Third-party identifiers

Third-party data is like the gossip columns of the data world and provided by external data firms. Think cookies or device IDs, giving you the scoop on broader user behaviors across the web. However, reliance on third-party data is dwindling because of growing privacy concerns and stricter regulations like GDPR, not to mention the big farewell tour for third-party cookies.

Challenges of fragmented customer data 

Navigating the modern marketing landscape is like trying to solve a million-piece puzzle but with the added challenge of having pieces of customer data scattered everywhere, both online and offline. 

Online, your customers might drop hints about their preferences through social media, emails, or while wandering the digital aisles of your website.  Offline, they’re giving you more clues through in-store purchases, digital interactions, and returns.  

Unfortunately, these pieces don’t always fit together seamlessly. They’re often isolated from one another, leading to a fragmented understanding of who your customers are. As you can imagine, this is an issue for a few reasons:

• Multiple personalities, one customer: Without an established system for resolution, a single customer could appear as several separate entities in your database. This can lead to marketing mayhem, with redundant or off-target campaigns that might annoy your customers, which is not the kind of engagement you’re looking for.  
• Missed connections in personalization: When your view of a customer’s journey looks like a jigsaw puzzle tossed in the air, delivering personalized experiences becomes a game of chance. Personalization feeds on rich, connected data — without it, your marketing efforts could miss the mark.
• Privacy puzzles: Scattered data doesn’t just confuse marketers – it makes managing privacy a nightmare.  Keeping up with consent and data protection laws is tough when you can’t even tell where all the data pieces are hiding.

A composable CDP tackles these challenges head-on by linking and merging all identifiers related to an individual into a unified customer profile, helping even enterprise marketing teams understand every interaction that customer has with your brand and further enabling smarter, more strategic marketing moves.

Why identity resolution matters to marketers

As customers continue to demand more personalized experiences, having access to accurate identity resolution is critical for marketers aiming to deeply and genuinely understand their customers. By weaving together various identifiers into one solid customer profile within a CDP, businesses unlock a treasure trove of marketing superpowers:

• Spot-on segmentation and targeting: With a complete view of each customer, you can segment your audiences like a pro, allowing you to categorize customers not just by basic demographics but by rich behavioral patterns. This sharp targeting means your messages hit closer to home every time (pst: here’s how Simon’s CDP handles customer segmentation).
• Personalization across the board: A unified customer profile is the beating heart of personalized marketing. It ensures that whether your customers are browsing your site, getting your emails, or engaging on social media, they receive a unified experience that feels personally crafted just for them.
• Consistency is key: Consistent experiences build trust and loyalty.  When every touchpoint with your brand is informed by a comprehensive history, customers feel understood and valued rather than just another sale.
• Keep ‘em coming back: By syncing complete customer journeys with their preferences and behaviors, you reduce the risk of them jumping ship. Happy customers are loyal customers.
• Boost your marketing ROI: With a clearer view of what drives customer actions, you can spend smarter, not more, meaning you can ditch one-size-fits-all advertising and instead have targeted investments that pay off.

Simon’s philosophy on identity

Without a robust identity foundation, your best shot at engaging customers might just be throwing generic email blasts into the ether, hoping something sticks.  

But in today’s world, hoping to engage your customers meaningfully without starting with identity is like trying to hit a piñata blindfolded — when the piñata is in another room. No capability is more foundational, yet there’s so much confusion in the market around identity, specifically the technologies that resolve identity, who owns these systems, and how they work together.

The full identity suite and the types of identity resolution

There is more to Identity than resolution. Before we even get to resolving identities, we have to make sure our data is dressed for the occasion: clean, tidy, and properly modeled. This is crucial to a CDP’s performance because, as the saying goes, garbage in equals garbage out.

While the Simon Data CDP itself does not specialize in cleansing or normalizing data, we’re connected to and integrated with a vast network of data agencies and MDM providers who are experts in this space.

Deterministic matching

Deterministic identity resolution uses specific rules and exact matches across identifiers such as email addresses and phone numbers to identify records corresponding to the same individual. This method relies on absolute certainty – if and only if the identifiers line up can they be considered a match.

Probabilistic matching

Probabilistic identity resolution plays the odds by using statistical models to make educated guesses about whether different records might refer to the same entity based on various attributes, even if they’re not identical.

Third-party data integrations

Additionally, Simon Data is connected to and integrates with industry-leading identity graph providers to ensure our customers can seamlessly enrich their first-party customer data with additional, privacy-compliant identifiers such as Hashed Emails (HEMs) and Mobile Advertising IDs (MAIDs). These identifiers can be activated within Simon to accomplish several use cases:

Real-time de-anonymization

• Identity+: As customers browse a client’s website, Identity+ will identify them as known customers even if they’re not logged in, increasing segment counts and flow adds with contacts who otherwise would have been treated anonymously & dropped.
• ROAS+: As anonymous contacts are browsing a client’s website, ROAS+ enriches their anonymous profiles with deterministic user_ids, HEMs, and MAIDs for use in paid channels while also seamlessly transitioning contacts from anonymous segments to known as they convert into real customers.

Event-triggered audience expansion

• Identity+: As customers interact with a client’s website, Identity+ will identify them as known customers even if they’re not logged in, increasing abandonment campaign and other event-triggered campaign audience sizes with contacts who otherwise would have been treated anonymously and dropped.

Offsite retargeting

• Match+: Enriches known customer profiles with HEMs & MAIDs for use in paid media campaigns, with the goal of amplifying audiences and increasing match rates in each end channel.
• ROAS+: As anonymous contacts browse a client’s website, ROAS+ will enrich their anonymous profiles with HEMs & MAIDs for use in paid channels.

The future of ID resolution in customer marketing

One marketing trend is clear as day: the cookie jar is closing. What used to be a reliable way to track user behavior across the vast expanses of the internet is going the way of the dinosaurs. Thankfully, this isn’t an apocalypse, it’s an evolution in martech stack capabilities (beyond just AI and ML) and in marketing strategy.

Customer data privacy has also become the billboard of modern marketing due to increasing regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This heightened vigilance means that the way CDPs handle identity resolution needs to be squeaky clean.

Simon Data’s recipe for future-proofing

With third-party cookies checking out, first-party data is stepping up as the MVP.  The good news is that marketers are in control of cleaning, accessing, and activating reliable customer data that aligns with new privacy laws. 

Simon Data helps you harness the power of your first-party data to maintain a continuous, rich dialogue with your customers to make every interaction count. 

We also thrive on connectivity. Our platform is designed to play nicely with an entire ecosystem of data providers, identity graphs, and tech stacks, ensuring that you can seamlessly integrate and synchronize your data sources while maintaining the integrity and privacy of your customer profiles.  

Instead of tossing you a DIY identity kit and wishing you luck, our seasoned Solutions Architecture team, along with our partner network, is ready to roll up their sleeves and dive into the data with you. We help you craft, finesse, and perfect your identity model to suit your business needs.

Conclusion

Without a solid identity foundation, marketing in today’s complex digital ecosystem has become more difficult than ever.

Why do we harp on about identity resolution? Because it’s the core of effective marketing within any composable CDP. It collects and synchronizes fragmented customer data, with each identifier perfectly aligned to compose personalized marketing, operational agility, and privacy compliance. 

And why choose Simon Data? Because we don’t just hand you the keys to your CDP and wish you luck. Our team works closely with you to ensure you’re set up for marketing success. With our clear, SQL-based services approach, we ensure that your marketing campaigns hit every note. To see our CDP in action, book a demo today!

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