Identity resolution tools help businesses (large businesses, in particular) accurately map identities, create complete customer views and personalize their marketing.
Right now, several trends are driving interest in identity resolution tools, including the decline of third-party cookies and consumers’ expectation of personalized, highly relevant experiences when they engage with brands.
These trends are creating several business problems for brands. Here are five problems that could benefit from an investment in identity resolution technology.
1. Disconnected customer data
Identity resolution platforms can connect disparate systems to provide a more insightful view of customers. Organizational silos increase the risk that a customer’s experience with a brand is not as targeted or consistent as it could be. An identity resolution platform helps connect these disparate systems to provide a more insightful view of customers.
Dig deeper: Download MarTech’s identity resolution buyer’s guide (registration required)
2. Incomplete customer profiles
Identity resolution platforms help marketers build more robust customer profiles by piecing together data signals from multiple data sources and interactions. Identity graphs can be a valuable source of demographic, location, financial and other anonymized data that can fill gaps in customer insights
As data collection and matching techniques improve, along with access to cooperative data sources, creating a 360-degree view of customers through identity resolution platforms may make sense.
3. Poor data quality
Effective identity resolution requires merging and attaching numerous data points to a unified customer ID. Inaccurate or redundant data causes low match rates and incorrect matches. AI and machine learning within identity resolution platforms analyze large datasets and identify patterns, improving matching when data isn’t the same on different platforms. They can also automatically clean and standardize data, correct errors, merge duplicates and find anomalies.
4. Lack of personalization
If a business can’t identify its customers, it can’t personalize its messages or experiences. Better personalization is the primary use case for many identity resolution platforms. Automated identity resolution allows marketing organizations to create a unified view of customers.5.
5. Inefficient marketing spend
Identity graphs reduce data overlap and duplication, resulting in more efficient spending on campaigns that work. Not knowing who customers are leads to misidentifying them and engaging in ways they may perceive to be intrusive or irrelevant.
Persistent IDs identifying known and anonymous customers across channels provide more accurate, closed-loop measurement and multi-touch attribution.
Identity resolution challenges
Effective identity resolution requires merging and attaching numerous data points to a unified customer ID. Scattered customer data and poor-quality data present challenges to this process.
Data privacy laws are another obstacle to personalized marketing. Marketers trying to build personalized marketing programs for U.S. users face multiple state privacy laws.
Data clean rooms can help overcome some of these challenges, but their deployment is often expensive, time-consuming and involves specialized expertise. Similarly, licensing an enterprise identity resolution platform is often a significant investment, particularly for large brands with omnichannel marketing strategies. Pricing is typically based on the volume of data records or customer profiles managed by the vendor. Some vendors also charge by the number of matches or API calls. There may also be fees for onboarding, custom integrations and training.
As part of the buying process for an identity resolution platform, marketers must ask vendors important questions about data onboarding and privacy, identity graph, martech and adtech integration, and customer support.
Download the Martech Intelligence Report for identity resolution platforms.
This buyer’s guide includes profiles of 11 vendors, pricing information, capabilities comparisons and more. (Registration required.)
