The digital marketing landscape is rapidly changing, and guess what, there is just no sign of slow down. Consumers have adapted themselves to a multi-screen world, they behave much differently today and their demands are totally sky-rocketing. Marketing is quickly moving away from untargeted push-messaging to people-based marketing, yes, one-to-one marketing is the new norm of the marketing world. So how are marketers connecting with consumers across different channels and platforms and at the same time managing relevancy? It’s with Customer Identity Management.
Identity is the prerequisite in people-based marketing, but, the multi-screen world has led to growing problems for the marketers. Data Management Platforms (DMP) solves all the challenges in people-based marketing by helping the marketers make connections across all online and offline touchpoints and create a unified and neutral, view of customer identities. Let’s enter the hasty rise and growing popularity of Customer Identity Management and the DMPs.
Identity Management
Identity management is an essential component of the marketing ecosystem. In simple terms, it is the ability to capture, source, integrate, cleanse and link data to recognize different consumers. Identity management solutions empower the marketers to consolidate online and offline data sources to support unique identification of consumers and create a complete picture of their identities and preferences.
Why do brands need Identity management?
Identity management is just not about managing data, but it’s about powering the data. Such data not only enables the brands to deliver personalized experiences across all channels and media, but also use it to evolve their customer strategies. Here are some benefits of having an identity management system in place:
- Provide Consistent Consumer Experiences – When a brand is unable to connect the dots between marketing silos, they fail to provide consistent experience to their consumers. By implementing identity management practices, they can break down such silos.
- Contextual View Of The Consumers – By synchronizing disparate customer details and associated data, businesses prevent disintegration of customer information, improve analytics, campaign results, basically avoid the elusive view of the consumers and provide more context.
- Anticipate Customer Needs – By knowing who they are communicating with, the brands can easily anticipate their customer needs and also adjust their marketing offers based on past experiences.
- Secure A Sustainable Competitive Advantage– Brands that invest their time and resources in recognizing their customers across diverse channels and devices secure a long-haul sustainable competitive advantage. They typically attain the bliss of “right message, right time, right place, right now.”
If marketers really want to be effective and understand their customers, they need to take identity more seriously.
More Customer Identities = Data Silos
Two decades ago, ‘identity-based marketing’ was essentially ruled by email. Today, the customer journey has become incredibly dynamic, it moves across several channels and devices which are continuing to multiply. It is important to note, that as consumers adopt new channels, it also means that they create a new identity and new data. Basically, with the advent of new platforms, channels, and devices, the number unique customer identities have also grown out of control.
Today, most of the brands prefer engaging with their consumers on social networks like, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Reddit, Flickr and many more. Also, the time consumers spend on mobile devices has totally beaten the time spent on PCs, another thing we cannot ignore is the increased used of new connected devices, like watches, cars, glasses, home appliances and more. Remember each channel represents a new identity which means a proliferation of customer data and increased data silos – i.e. one of the major challenges in people-based, personalized marketing.
Lots Of Data But Lack Of Context
The explosion of customer data is imposing another big challenge on the marketers, i.e. deriving the right context from it. Today, consumers are sharing and creating more data about themselves which represents an opportunity for the marketers to know them but decoding silos of data is more of a mission impossible. As a result, marketers understand customers in only a limited context and hardly holistically as individuals.
Role Of A DMP
DMPs help marketers solve the problems of the multi-channel marketing world in real-time. DMPs assemble, aggregate, and manage first-party and third-party data which helps marketers effectually segment, enhance, and orchestrate their marketing interactions across several platforms and devices. Here is the role DMPs play in identity management.
- Data Onboarding
DMPs allow ingesting and organizing all the first-party data including CRM and customer analytics data into one single customer profile. But, onboarding CRM data to data systems is one part of the game, to leverage data to its full potential one needs to also ensure that data is accurate. DMPs follow a stringent data onboarding process which eliminates low-quality links making the data more accurate, scalable and secure.
- Merge Profiles
DMPs enable the marketers to tie multiple identifiers to a single customer, this makes their media strategy more efficient and effective across multiple channels. DMPs allow marketers to merge customer profiles and create a unified view of their customers’ activity across multiple screens and devices. With a 360-degree view of the customers, marketers can deliver more engaging experiences which narrate relevant stories across a diverse set of screens.
- Customer Scoring and Segmentation
This feature empowers the marketers to segment and creates audience segments which are high performing. It ensures that the marketers reach the right customer, with the right message in the right markets. DMPs also allows the marketers find and target real audiences, grow their reach, drive engagement and increase conversions.
- Customer Intelligence
Growing amount of customer data and identities via proliferation of consumer touch-points and channels makes it difficult for the marketers to scale their marketing efforts. DMPs provide a framework which links customers identity across their buying journey, delivers enriched and up to date identity data across the business and provide greater control and personalization.
DMP Use-Cases For Identity Management
Check out below some specific uses:
Targeting – By providing understandings into specific user brand engagement, identity management helps to advance targeting and optimize media spend.
Omnichannel Marketing – Consolidating data being the prerequisite for identity management provides the marketers with real-time analysis which is vital to an omnichannel strategy.
Contextual Marketing – Greater insights allow the marketers to create customer experience which fits timing, context, content, and channel to specific users.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance – Better management of data enables the marketers to provide their consumers a clear view of what data is being used and where, this also makes adherence to privacy regulations much easier.
Return On Investment (ROI) of Identity Management
ROI for Customer Identity Management has both short-term and long-term benefits. In the long run, traditional marketing campaigns which comprise one-way push-messaging will fade. The future, marketing will be based more on relationships, it will be more about understanding who your consumers are and what they care about. On the other hand, in the short-run, Identity Management can influence established metrics like clicks, open-rates, downloads, leads, and subscription rates.
Final Thoughts
The marketing world continues to transform in big ways, to survive you need to start strategizing, think about your ability to sense and respond quickly to your customer needs across channels and devices. Remember this knowledge and capability can increasingly come from a best-in-class DMP solution. Time to contact Cuberoot.
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