When you visit your favorite retailer online from a mobile device to check out a new pair of shoes, you create a footprint. Another footprint is generated later that evening when you purchase the shoes from your home computer. And yet another footprint occurs when you return the shoes to a brick-and-mortar store. Three footprints, but only one you.
This happens for just about every consumer. You can see why, with hundreds of offline and online touchpoints across multiple channels, marketers are challenged to create just one profile and have a single customer view.
Being able to identify customers accurately and understand who they are is critical for business growth today. It’s the prerequisite for marketing. The ability to engage a customer in the right channel, with the right offer, at the right time can help prevent fraud, optimize marketing spend, build brand loyalty and customer retention and ensure a positive user experience. It’s how businesses make better marketing decisions and have more meaningful interactions with audiences, as well as tell a consistent story across devices.
As customer expectations continue to evolve, it will become more important than ever for brands to identify who their customers are to create seamless, highly personalized—and enjoyable—experiences for them.
Here’s the challenge: Based on recent data from Experian, 60 percent of organizations plan to prioritize customer experience. However, 92 percent of businesses still don’t have a single customer view today.
Marketers are working to better identify and understand their customers, but it isn’t a simple task. They are challenged to connect offline and online identifiers to create a single customer view, build custom audience segments, implement cross-channel ad campaigns and measure campaign results. As a recent Forrester report highlighted, accurately establishing and maintaining customer identity is one of the most perplexing challenges facing marketers today.
Is data the answer?
Most marketers are sitting on massive amounts of data, but data alone is no longer enough.
Today’s consumers have new expectations. They demand a smooth, enjoyable and relevant experience. They expect the places where they do business to recognize them and not waste their time with an influx of irrelevant communications.
To do this, marketers need to use data and drive actionable insights that really matter. Quality data that can be interpreted and used in a compliant manner can help brands get closer to the precise customer identity and unlock the true power of data to help make more informed decisions.
Don’t we already have the technology?
The ability to connect the proverbial dots of hundreds of digital signals to the known identity of a customer is what allows marketers to better understand who consumers are and how they interact with a brand. More importantly, marketers will feel confident there’s a real person behind the identity, and can coordinate personalized content and appropriate sequencing for messaging that truly resonates with them.
Many marketers are challenged by disparate technologies and point solutions. To properly implement identity from the get go, emerging industry trends and success stories suggest marketers need a neutral technology service provider that can provide each of these solutions via a single, unified platform. With hundreds of offline and online touchpoints across multiple channels, marketers face a series of complex challenges when deciding on the best approach to customer identity resolution and management.
What’s the future of identity?
With a trusted name in data and information services for more than 40 years, Experian recently unveiled a new solution set that will allow marketers to accurately identify customers and provide personalized, meaningful interactions with them through a single, unified platform.
Experian’s MarketingConnect platform addresses the painstaking challenges many marketers encounter during the identity resolution process. Whether for a brand, agency or publisher, Experian has the innovative solutions to help put people at the heart of the business and make better marketing decisions.
The evolution of identity exists when marketers can easily and efficiently identify their prospects and their customers, ultimately resulting in business growth.
—
