What is Identity Resolution and Why is it important?

Marketing Intelligence

October 27, 2022

Consumer behavior patterns are evolving rapidly and constantly due to the pandemic and unstable market conditions, making it challenging for brands across the globe to keep up. Added to this is the intense competition marketers face to attract new customers while retaining existing customers.

Providing a customized customer experience is critical to ensuring loyalty and attracting new customers. But to ensure a seamless and personalized experience, marketers need a detailed customer profile that connects multiple customer touchpoints, merging online and offline behaviors. In this blog, we will look at what identity resolution is, how it enables customized customer experiences and how it can be implemented for successful marketing campaigns.

What is identity resolution?

Identity resolution is the process of connecting multiple identifiers (both online and offline) that are used across different platforms, devices, and channels to individual customers in a privacy-safe way. This helps brands gain a unified view of their customers, leading to a better understanding of their customers and improved messaging or targeting.

However, gaining this unified, or 360-degree, view of customers is not easily achieved. It involves gathering all your data from multiple sources and merging it into a single record. You also have to navigate constantly evolving privacy laws to ensure you do not compromise the identity of your customers. .

How does identity resolution work?

You might already have some level of insight into your customers using CRMs like Hubspot. This mainly provides insights on your customer’s online behavior like what page they visited, clicks, or resource downloads. But suppose, a customer who has an online account visits a physical store and registers using his phone number – would this conversion be recorded against his existing customer profile? Most probably not.

Multiple buyer identities:

This situation could lead to multiple customer profiles for single individual leading to inaccurate or relevant marketing communication being sent. A customer who has already bought a new product at a physical store where he is registered using his phone number might receive an email alerting them to a sale for that same product. This is not the ideal customer experience you would want to provide in a world of cutthroat competition.

This is solved by an identity resolution solution that de-duplicates records and stitches together data from both offline and online touchpoints, providing a single unified customer profile.

What are the benefits of identity resolution?

Identity resolution has multiple use cases across marketing and operational channels. It can help improve audience targeting, curation, and customer experience. Let us look at a few and how they can be used to improve existing processes:

1. Understand Consumers Better: By stitching together data points across multiple touchpoints, identity resolution can help you get a 360-degree view of your customers. This could include their past history with the brand, their likes, and dislikes, what pages they visit often or how consumer engagement has evolved through time. Armed with this knowledge, marketers understand consumer likes/dislikes, pain points, interests, and even spending power.

2. Improved Customer Experience: Loyalty programs and improved customer experience are crucial for the retention of existing as well as attracting new customers today. With an improved understanding of customer behavior, marketers can personalize campaigns and communications and provide a seamless experience across different channels.

3. Increase Marketing Effectiveness: According to a Forrester study, 21 cents out of every dollar spent from marketing budgets is wasted due to poor data quality. With an identity resolution, you have access to a database that is accurate and cleaned of duplicate profiles that could be wasting your precious marketing dollars.

We look at both use cases and benefits in detail in our e-book ‘Identity Resolution: The Key to Omnichannel Marketing.’ Download for free here!

Challenges with implementing an identity resolution solution

To implement an identity resolution solution, the prerequisite is to have all your data stored in one accessible place. And this first step is a difficult task in most organizations due to inefficient data storage. Most organizations face the problem of data silos due to imperfect sharing across teams and the use of isolated platforms. To overcome this problem you would need multiple stakeholders to cooperate and work together to bring all your data to one place.

Another key to successfully implementing an identity resolution solution is finding the right partner. It’s important to look for an identity resolution partner that:

Is compliant with the latest privacy regulations, including GDPR and CCPA
Can enrich your first-party data with online and offline behavioral attributes like demographics, brand affinities, and purchase behavior
Applies rigorous screening to data to ensure only the highest quality
Provides data that is actionable on its own (e.g. footfall traffic), and additional analysis that adds insight to the data (e.g. ROI measurement, competitor conquesting, etc.)

Azira’s identity resolution solution

Azira’s identity resolution solution uses a patented Persistent Identity Graph to ensure seamless and accurate identity resolution while staying compliant with privacy laws. The Persistent Identity Graph was developed for a post-cookie, post-MAID (Mobile Advertising ID) world where identification based on devices will no longer provide accurate results.

Azira’s Identity Graph provides a persistent ID for individuals instead of a device, browser, or household. It connects various real-world and online signals of a specific individual such as Mobile Advertising ID, hashed email(s), mobile number(s), IP addresses, etc. to define a persistent identifier based on all of these signals. The plurality of signals used makes the ID used resilient. Even in the event of any of these parameters such as cookies becoming obsolete, it can resolve the individual’s identity by leveraging other signals.