What is Identity Resolution and How Does It Support Marketing?

Customers want a personalized experience every time they interact with your company. Whether they’re accessing your website on their laptop or clicking an ad on their mobile device, they expect businesses to know who they are and what they want. Identity resolution makes such personalization possible.

But, possible doesn’t mean easy. Multiple touchpoints and devices make it harder to tell whether a user is a new visitor or a long-time customer. Evolving privacy regulations have made this difficult task even more challenging by limiting third-party cookies. Today, marketers need robust identity resolution tools to build useful user profiles.

What is Identity Resolution?

Identity resolution is a marketing data management process that links all of a customer’s online behavior to a unique customer profile. It attributes the data from multiple touchpoints and devices to create a clear picture of an individual customer.

Consolidating all of this information into one profile saves time and money, while helping you meet customer expectations effortlessly.

Identity resolution equips you to:

• Maximize conversions with personalized marketing. One-size fits all messages often miss the mark. When you know exactly who you’re talking to, you can provide accurate product recommendations and targeted offers each customer will love.
• Engage unknown visitors to turn them into customers. Visitors to your site don’t always sign in, or may visit from unusual devices. Avoid creating a whole new profile or missing the conversion by analyzing unknown visitors and matching them to existing customers.
• Improve data quality to maximize return on investment for advertising. Don’t spend money to show the wrong ads to someone unlikely to convert from them. Know who your customers are across platforms so you can spend your ad budget wisely.

Identity resolution can even help you to comply with privacy regulations. Most modern privacy regulations offer the user the opportunity to ask that their data be removed from a specific website if requested. If you don’t know which data belongs to which user, you may unwittingly run afoul of the law. Unique, comprehensive customer profiles help you avoid this pitfall.

How Does Identity Resolution Work?

You have dozens of pieces of information about your customers, but it’s often siloed in specific areas. The ads team might know that a certain user clicked a Facebook ad. The sales team might know that Sarah Smith made a purchase, and somewhere in your website data is information about which pages user #96372 visited.

Your ads, sales, and web design teams might be able to make some basic assumptions based on that data, but the real value comes from knowing that all three of those users were Ms. Smith and then using that knowledge to create customized offers for her.

Every time she visits, you gather a little more information about her needs and behavior. Before you know it, you’ve become her favorite place to shop, because you seem to know what she needs before she does.

Identity resolution is a complex task, one that most CRM tools just aren’t equipped to handle. Identity resolution platforms aggregate client identifiers to build an identity graph - a unique profile of the customer and their behavior. Then they track customer interactions to continuously refine and enhance the profile.

All of this is easier said than done. Consumer privacy regulations and the demise of third-party cookies  makes it more difficult for you to gather information about your customers. Meanwhile, customers are accessing your website from multiple devices.

Fortunately, you still have access to a source of high-quality information about your clients. With Ignite by Launch Labs, your website can collect first-party data that you can manage.

Ignite Your Identity Resolution

From the moment visitors land on your site Ignite starts building their customer profile. Every action they take, from visiting a product page to clicking on a special offer, is analyzed and added to their profile. Ignite can use what it’s learning about your visitor to deliver personalized messaging that engages.

Visitor profiles seamlessly convert into leads that are delivered directly to your CRM — All the customer behavior information you need, all in one place. Then your sales team can follow up with customized offers and messaging. With data-backed decision making, you can maximize return on investment for every marketing decision.

End the struggle with fragmented data and test and hope decision making. See how seamless identity resolution can be with Ignite by LaunchLabs. Book a demo today.