Understanding and engaging customers across devices and channels is complex. Yet, with customer identity resolution, enhanced insights, engagement, and ROI are achievable. Learn how it drives CLV and ROI growth.
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses face the challenge of understanding and engaging customers across multiple devices, channels, and touchpoints. Traditional approaches to customer identity management, primarily centered around email addresses, fall short of capturing the complex customer journey. However, by adopting innovative technologies such as advanced identity stitching and identity resolution, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers and unlock new opportunities for improved customer engagement and better marketing metrics, and essentially better ROI. This article explores the significance of customer identity management for businesses operating in the digital landscape and discusses how identity resolution work, and how identity graph can help businesses capture the double-digit growth in customer lifetime value (CLV) and drive return on investment (ROI) with innovative technologies such as Customer Data Platform (CDP).
What is the difference between identity stitching and identity resolution?
Identity stitching and identity resolution are two crucial processes within customer identity management that play a pivotal role in understanding and connecting customer data across multiple touchpoints, devices, and channels. Both of these processes help overcome the limitations of a fragmented view of customer data and enables businesses to recognize customers across different devices, channels, and platforms.
What is identity stitching
Function: Identity stitching involves merging or stitching together various data points and identifiers associated with an individual customer, such as email addresses, phone numbers, device IDs, loyalty numbers, and cookies, to create a comprehensive and unified view of their identity.
Purpose: The goal is to create a unified and comprehensive view of a person's identity by linking together information from various sources. This helps businesses understand and engage with customers more effectively.
Example: If a person interacts with a website on their laptop, makes a purchase through a mobile app, and engages with a chatbot on social media, identity stitching would help recognize that these interactions come from the same individual.
What is identity resolution
Function: By definition, identity resolution refers to the process of matching and consolidating multiple data sets to identify and link the same individual across various data sources and devices. Identity resolution works by using deterministic and probabilistic matching techniques to reconcile and combine data elements, ultimately creating an accurate, holistic, single profile of each customer.
Purpose: The primary objective is to reconcile different data points that may represent the same person, ensuring that the information is linked correctly to create a consolidated and accurate profile.
Example: If a customer is known by their email address in one system, a user ID in another, and a phone number in another, identity resolution aims to connect these identifiers to the same individual.
As you can see, the difference is very subtle. Identity stitching is about connecting the dots across different interactions, creating a seamless and comprehensive customer profile. Identity resolution is all about accurately associating diverse identifiers to the same individual, ensuring a unified and accurate representation of their identity.
In theory, identity resolution can exist without identity stitching — it's possible to resolve identities without stitching together interactions across touchpoints. Identity resolution can focus solely on associating different identifiers (such as email addresses, user IDs, phone numbers) to form a unified profile.
However, the effectiveness and completeness of the resolution process may be compromised, hence, it is best to use a combination of identity resolution and identity stitching to achieve a more robust and accurate representation of customers. Having said that, both identity stitching and identity resolution are essential for businesses to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, deliver personalized experiences, engage with customers more effectively, and drive better marketing outcomes.
What is the identity graph, then?
While identity stitching and identity graph are related concepts within the realm of customer identity management, they are not exactly the same. The identity graph is a central repository or framework that stores and organizes customer identities based on common identifiers. It acts as a comprehensive database where customer data is linked and connected to create a unified view of individual customers. The identity graph serves as a map that maps the relationships and connections between different data points, enabling businesses to gain a holistic understanding of customer interactions, preferences, and behaviors. In summary, identity stitching and identity resolution are the processes that occur within the context of an identity graph. The identity graph serves as the foundation or framework where identity stitching takes place, allowing businesses to unify and consolidate customer identities for a comprehensive view of each individual customer.
A real-life example of how identity resolution technology helped a regional ecommerce leader increase CLV by 60%
Meiro Customer Data Platform (CDP) is sought after for its best-in-class identity resolution and identity stitching capabilities that have been instrumental in helping brands around the world achieve mind-blowing marketing results. For the sake of demonstrating the incredible business value potential of identity resolution technology, let’s take a look at a case study of a large European ecommerce giant. By identifying and consolidating customer data from different touchpoints, Meiro stitched together customer devices associated with customer profiles. With several devices known for a single customer, Meiro helped the ecommerce retailer track cross-device customer interactions and use these insights to create more meaningful, highly relevant, personalized, and timely marketing campaigns. With more customer data from multiple devices, the retailer is now able to trigger more automated emails, such as abandoned basket reminders, increasing the overall volume of marketing messages and the effectiveness of delivering personalized experiences. As a result, the pharmacy chain experienced a notable increase in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Average Order Value (AOV). Now, let’s get to the numbers. For customers with two identified devices, the purchase frequency increased by 100%, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) rose by 60%, and Average Order Value (AOV) improved by 20%. Additionally, the ability to deliver personalized communications through web and email channels increased by 75% and 50%, respectively. These outcomes highlight the power of advanced identity stitching in driving customer engagement, revenue growth, and marketing success.Impressive, right? However, not all identity stitching/identity resolution technologies out there are able to achieve this level of precision. Below, we aim to explain exactly what are the pitfalls of effective identity management and how those challenges can be tackled.
The limitations of traditional approaches to customer identity
Traditional customer identity management approaches rely on single PII identifiers, typically email addresses, to define customer identities. However, in today's digital environment, customers interact with brands through various devices, channels, and touchpoints, both online and offline, unauthenticated most of the time. This outdated approach leads to blind spots in the customer journey, resulting in limited insights and compromised marketing performance. To overcome these limitations, businesses need to adopt new technologies capable of resolving the "customer identity crisis."
Understanding the complexity of customer identity
Identifiers
A customer's identity is multifaceted and extends beyond a single identifier. It consists of multiple data points, including email addresses, phone numbers, device IDs, CRM IDs, loyalty numbers, and browsing cookies. To create a comprehensive understanding of customers, brands must adopt advanced identity stitching and identity resolution technologies.
Definition of the customer entity
Another complexity is the definition of a customer entity for different business models and industries. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to identity management, as various factors, such as the nature of the business, goals, customer interactions, and data sources, contribute to this complexity. For example, in some industries, like retail and e-commerce, a customer entity may be defined as an individual consumer or a household. For B2B scenarios, a customer resolution will work differently as the customer entity may refer to an organization or an account rather than an individual.
The power of Meiro CDP’s identity resolution
Advanced identity resolution solutions, such as Meiro’s, offer a transformative approach to customer identity management. These solutions utilize sophisticated algorithms to stitch together customer identities based on multiple identifiers beyond PII data, such as an email address. Meiro’s identity graph is able to collect and match virtually any common unique identifiers and connect them with historical data such as user behavior, browsing activity, purchase history, transactional and other data. With every new customer interaction, the graph accumulates new data in real-time, increasing the resolution of customer identity over time. The matching creates a single, holistic 360 view of customer interactions across domains, devices, and online and offline touchpoints. What makes Meiro unique is the ability to combine deterministic and probabilistic matching approaches and the flexibility to define and configure a customer entity. As various industries and businesses would treat a customer entity differently (as a single customer, a household, an account, etc.), we help them to set up the stitching algorithm in congruence with their use cases and KPIs.
Benefits and use cases of advanced identity resolution
Onboarding a Customer Data Platform with advanced identity stitching and identity resolution offers significant benefits for businesses aiming to improve customer engagement and drive better marketing outcomes:
Intimate understanding of your customers
By consolidating customer identities across devices, touchpoints, and channels under a single customer view, businesses gain a holistic understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and purchase patterns. This enriched view enables personalized and targeted marketing strategies that resonate with individual customers.
Seamless cross-device and cross-browser tracking
Advanced identity stitching enables businesses to track customer interactions seamlessly across different devices, browsers, and touchpoints. This eliminates data silos and provides a more accurate representation of the customer journey, allowing for more effective marketing campaigns.
Real-time insights and improved addressability
By merging and consolidating data points and identifiers associated with individual customers, businesses can overcome fragmented views and accurately recognize customers across different touchpoints and devices in real time. This way, marketers never lose sight of their customers’ interactions and can engage with audiences at scale.
Personalized experiences at scale
A unified view of customer identities empowers businesses to deliver personalized experiences to customers on a larger scale. By understanding customer preferences and purchase history, businesses can tailor marketing messages and offers, fostering stronger relationships, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving marketing metrics and KPIs.
Improved conversions
Being able to track and stitch non-PII data, Meiro creates unified customer profiles even for users that have never authenticated themselves. This makes it possible to create a relatable customer experience for anonymous users and target them with personalized web banners or pop-ups aimed to convert them and move them down the marketing funnel.
Final thoughts
In today's digital landscape, businesses face a pressing need to adopt advanced identity management technologies to address the customer identity crisis intensified by the deprecation of third-party cookies. Advanced identity stitching and identity resolution solutions offer a transformative approach, enabling businesses to gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers, enhance customer engagement, and achieve better marketing outcomes. Sophisticated identity resolution technology, exemplified by Meiro Customer Data Platform (CDP), demonstrates remarkable results and business value, such as increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Average Order Value (AOV), and overall Return on Investment (ROI) for businesses across industries. Traditional approaches to customer identity management fall short of capturing the complexity of the customer journey, making it imperative for businesses to embrace innovative technologies. Advanced identity stitching and identity resolution provide a holistic view of customer interactions across devices, channels, and touchpoints, empowering businesses to deliver personalized experiences and improve marketing metrics. By investing in these solutions, businesses can navigate the evolving digital landscape, elevate customer experiences, and drive growth and success in an increasingly competitive market.
Source: Meiro
