Martech Starter Kit
Data Onboarding

Marketers love to collect customer data, especially email addresses. Doing so enables them to start interacting more directly with a prospect or customer. But an email address doesn’t tell you about a person, so communications and content are likely to be fairly generic. Link other insight—such as browsing history, preference data, and mobile IDs—and a unique identity will begin to emerge that allows for more targeted interactions. 

Building out a robust, holistic view of customers enables marketers to deliver contextually relevant, differentiated, and maximally effective campaigns. Data onboarding helps marketers enrich their customer data to create that single view. Let’s explore.

What it is:

Data onboarding is the process of temporarily linking owned consumer data, such as personally identifiable information (PII) found in a CRM system, with consumers’ corresponding digital attributes (e.g., cookies, IP addresses, and device IDs)—data usually provided by a third party—to create a cohesive identity for more actionable marketing.  Data onboarding is also the foundation for privacy-compliant identity resolution.

What it isn’t:

It is not identity resolution. Data onboarding and identity resolution complement each other, but the latter blends deterministic identifiers (exact matches, such as account numbers and email addresses) with probabilistic factors (inferred, modeled, or proxied connections to an individual) to improve matches to an individual consumer.

It is not an identity graph. Although they appear similar, data onboarding is a more unique process than creating an identity graph—which is a database of all the known identifiers that correlate with individual customers. An identity graph connects all of a person’s identifiers, such as email addresses, mobile numbers, loyalty numbers, and data from cookies, with a customer profile. This isn’t necessarily privacy-compliant nor a link between offline and online data.

“[Some marketers] confuse data onboarding with the identity graph and device graph solutions,” says Daniel Jaye, cofounder and CEO of Aqfer. “Data onboarding is separate but often used to help enhance those device graph approaches.”

What’s the most common misconception about data onboarding?

Some marketers think data onboarding is a simple process that delivers quick ROI. Marketers who invest in data onboarding without understanding the amount of work that they’ll still need to do may not get the ROI they’re looking for. “Once you get the data together, you’ll still need to do data analysis and modeling,” explains Pavel Dmitriev, VP of data science at Outreach. “It’s actually quite a lot of work to turn that data into action.”

Jordan Greene, Outreach’s senior director of product marketing, adds a note of caution: “An easy misconception is that you’re taking offline data, then getting it online so you can just spray and pray like it’s a new list of leads. It’s more effective to think about [data onboarding] as one of the sources that help give you a comprehensive profile so you can do a better job of marketing.”

What marketing business problems does it help tackle?

Audience targeting

Data onboarding helps marketers build rich, detailed customer profiles, taking swaths of previously unavailable online data and matching them to offline data. “If you can’t connect a customer’s previous experience, you run the risk of your marketing being irrelevant,” Greene says. “They know they’ve had interaction with you and they kind of expect that you would know about it, too.”

Omnichannel presence

Data onboarding enables marketers to more easily tailor campaigns for specific audiences across channels. “Omnichannel means I’ve got to take that person and find them wherever they are,” says Ray Kingman, CEO and founder of Semcasting. “And, I can touch them at multiple points in the purchase process.”

What opportunities does it help marketers take advantage of?

Access to third-party data

With data onboarding, marketers can use third-party data to identify specific consumers at times when they would not have been able to otherwise. For example, when people visit a company’s website without logging in, marketers can use data onboarding to identify them through non-PII third-party data (e.g., device IDs, IP addresses). “I can find you in more places. I have more access to you. I have an ability to speak to you more relevantly everywhere,” says Joshua Neckes, cofounder and president of Simon Data.

Curated messaging

Data onboarding enables marketers to tailor messaging at every point of interaction, so communications resonate with customers. “The real opportunity is…moving from generic, pie-in-the-sky messages to enhancing the experience,” Greene says.

Analytic optimization

Marketers can use data onboarding to better understand customers—through that holistic customer view—including what channels they prefer for which interactions. “A marketer might be spending a lot of money on a channel when, in the end, the true ROI isn’t there,” says Aqfer’s Jaye.

What are the main challenges or drawbacks?

Privacy regulation

With the advent of GDPR in Europe and privacy regulations in Canada and the U.S., it has become riskier to handle consumer data, especially third-party data. Marketers need to be sure that the data they’re using is being gathered, stored, and used in privacy-compliant ways.

The “creep factor”

With data onboarding, marketers run the risk of stepping past relevant interactions to ones that seem too personal or targeted, potentially making customers uncomfortable. Marketers can avoid this in part by the way they and their partners handle data. “We’re taking identifiable data and adding segmented attributes that are anonymous to the non-PII data, as opposed to just throwing it all in one bucket,” Jaye explains. “Making sure you do that in a way that doesn’t cross these fuzzy lines is important.”

What types of companies can get the most from data onboarding?

Companies that interact with consumers across a wide variety of channels are most likely to use data onboarding. Those that reach out to consumers through one or two channels have less of a need for it. 

Additionally, large companies often use data onboarding because they tend to have a larger, more diverse audience. A company might only match 10 percent of its offline customer data with online data, so companies that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers are the ones likely to maximize ROI from data onboarding.

Which marketing discipline is it primarily intended for?

Most marketing disciplines can make use of data onboarding. “All the various channel groups and other disciplines within a marketing organization have a responsibility to make sure [their messaging] is relevant and contextual,” Outreach’s Dmitriev says.

What’s the projected time to ROI?

The answer, of course, is: It depends.

“The more sophisticated campaign manager within an organization should be able to expect a measurement of ROI by the end of a campaign if not all along through the campaign,” Semcasting’s Kingman says. “They’re more likely to have put the tags in place and done the work to make sure that they have, if not a deterministic measurement, then a directionally or trending measurement of the effectiveness of the onboarding process and the campaign itself.”

Outreach’s Greene takes a different stance: “From a practicality perspective, you’re going to need to set expectations that ROI is going to take some time.”

What are typical results?

Increased conversion rate

Many of the missed opportunities in marketing are due to not knowing enough about the customers being targeted, so campaigns miss the mark. Savvy marketers use the detailed profiles that the robust data from onboarding provides to adjust their campaign to be more contextually relevant. 

Greater efficiency

Compared to traditional data licensing or syndication, data onboarding usually carries with it a lower cost, which can be amortized over a number of different campaigns. Plus, marketers can potentially cut wasteful marketing by targeting more appropriate audiences in the optimal mix of channels.

Unique messaging

The unique mix of data points a company will gather using data onboarding should enable its marketers to deliver messaging that’s well differentiated from its competitors and more relevant to its specific customers and prospects.

How often do you need to onboard data?

It depends on the frequency of your marketing operations. Marketers producing high volumes of content every day or week might set up onboarding as an automated process. Marketers running campaigns at infrequent or variable times will likely run the onboarding manually and make one-off purchases of third-party data when they do.

What does it take to add data onboarding tools to a marketing organization’s existing tech stack?

Estimated implementation timeframe

It’s an ongoing process, but initial results may take three to six months because it takes time to get the optimal data quality. “It’s almost never perfectly clean data,” Dmitriev says. “They don’t just put it together and get a beautiful data set.”

Dedicated administrator?

Yes. Data onboarding is typically interdisciplinary, so there should be someone who can manage it and ensure that it aligns with broader marketing goals.

Typical users?

Typically, a marketing ops organization takes the lead and may pull in data analysts and scientists from other departments as needed. The data collected can be useful for other areas, such as sales, where they can use it to predict conversion rates.

The number of users will vary based on the size of the company and what it’s using the data onboarding for. But it tends to be used by groups of people within the marketing organization, rather than by one person.

Notable process changes?

Marketers need a process for ingesting third-party data and ensuring that the data and processes are privacy compliant, Simon Data’s Neckes advises. “Other than that, it’s a fairly standard data append,” he says.

Who “owns” it?

Typically marketing, although other departments such as IT may get involved as necessary.

How often should you consider changing partners and tools for data onboarding?

The technology that vendors use keeps evolving, so it is advisable to check regularly for any updates and to track the market for any significant changes among the vendors in the space.

Some of the vendors that serve this space:

LiveRamp

Experian

Aqfer

Oracle

Neustar

View more vendors on the 2020 Chief Martech Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic