The holy grail of consumer marketing is first-party data: personal information that is freely offered by a customer or prospect. Unfortunately, many brands find themselves with incomplete information, and facing an increasing reluctance on the part of consumers to provide it. Paradoxically, consumers want brands to know them, understand their specific needs, and engage them in meaningful ways, but don’t feel a level of comfort to extend the inputs needed to make that possible.

This dilemma puts marketers in a difficult situation that grows more challenging with the proliferation of new privacy regulations and the loss of third-party cookies. How can brands fill in the blanks to generate more complete consumer profiles that yield valuable insights and personalized experiences? And how can they do it in a way that complies with regulations and respects consumers’ privacy?

The answer is consumer identity resolution—the complex process of linking interactions, identity data, attributes and buying behavior to a single consumer profile. Consumer identity resolution generally relies on a detailed process that provides a comprehensive view of customers and prospects. This process starts with linking associated data points to each other and to universal identifiers, then anonymizing the identities to create a data set that can transact securely with other anonymized, permissioned data sets. Next is validating data sets against a “truth set” for an accuracy check and identifying additional sources to reduce the universe of unmatched and unresolved IDs.

This is not a simple process, and while brands may be able to accomplish the resolution process on their own, several factors make it difficult, including:

Data decay (or churn): In normal times, at least 30% of a company’s CRM data becomes outdated each year. This decay can substantially diminish the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts, increase costs from wasted ad impressions, and consume resources to manually correct bad data. The pandemic has likely increased this decay-rate due to job loss, deaths, and relocations.

Data volume: The exponential growth of data means companies are storing more data than they can access and process. This “dark data” may comprise as much as 65-80% of an organization’s data stores, leaving a vast trove of data with unfulfilled potential. For consumer brands, this could consist of transactions, sensor data, social media posts, and other indicators of buying behavior.

Cross-channel touchpoints: Consumers interact with brands across multiple platforms and devices. Linking this data is a difficult, but important task for creating a truly holistic consumer profile. Tracking the buyer’s journey and recording their actions each step of the way is ideal, but not every brand can manage it.

Changes in marketing technologies are affecting consumer identity resolution, among them the  inevitable demise of third-party cookies, Apple’s IDFA privacy changes, and the concept of an anonymized unified identity via the Unified ID 2.0 initiative.

Another change affecting marketers is the patchwork of consumer privacy protection regulations implemented by a variety of states. It’s only a matter of time before this range of laws will be addressed at the federal level—and I should note that it isn’t clear whether a federal law will improve or hinder consumer privacy.

Meanwhile, surging growth in ecommerce is making identity resolution more important than ever. According to eMarketer projections, U.S. consumers were estimated to spend over $933 billion on ecommerce in 2021, up 17.9% from 2020.

As martech solutions continue to evolve, brands and marketers now have a variety of options at their disposal to either build or outsource consumer identity graphs, allowing them to link an individual consumer across multiple devices and platforms and store all the consumer intelligence that powers personalized engagements.

Tapping into the expertise and data resources of a consumer identity resolution provider allows companies to fill in missing information from their first-party data using just a single identifier to build a more accurate and robust view of customers and prospects. They’re also able to unify online and offline data, and link all interactions, identity data and attributes for a 360-degree view of consumers.

By partnering with an identity-focused third-party data provider that continually validates and updates consumer profiles, marketers can improve data analysis and gain deeper insights from marketing activities and campaigns. They can also expand their digital reach and target audiences using lookalike lists while still complying with data privacy regulations.

Engaging a third-party, original source data compiler allows marketers to focus on the messages and conversations that engage and convert consumers, rather than on the administrative aspects of maintaining data. As more and more data streams come available and data provided by consumers is more scarce, the world of managing and enriching critical customer data is increasingly complex. A well-managed, well-executed consumer identity resolution program is critical in ensuring brands turn their most valuable data assets into a robust customer marketing experience. 

About the Author

As Chief Marketing Officer, Zora Senat leads Infutor’s Marketing and Strategic Partnerships teams. Her remit is to drive revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Prior to Infutor, Zora spent seven years at Exact Data, operating in various leadership roles including marketing, sales operations, product development and operations, and customer success.