Identity resolution is the science of connecting the growing volume of consumer identifiers to one individual as they interact with brands across channels and devices. It’s critical to marketing success and essential for compliance with privacy laws such as the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CCPA.
Identifying consumers at scale requires an identity graph — a profile database housing all known identifiers correlated to individuals. Identifiers may include email addresses, device identifiers, phone numbers, and mobile IDs.
What is Identity Resolution?
Identity resolution connects consumer identifiers (including email addresses, device identifiers and mobile IDs) across channels and devices. It enables marketers to build a holistic profile of individual customers in a privacy-compliant way.
Getting a complete, accurate and current customer data set is a top priority for most brands. To do this, they need to unify all their data sources into one source of truth.
This is possible by implementing an identity resolution solution to connect a growing volume of consumer identifiers. These identifiers can include emails, devices, and mobile IDs, which are increasingly used by consumers to interact with a brand.
To achieve this, organizations need to integrate these identifiers into a single, holistic identity graph that can then be activated by marketing, analytics and compliance teams.
As customers become increasingly aware of their rights under GDPR and CCPA, it is essential to have an identity resolution solution in place. This ensures that the company follows the law while controlling all data they collect on customers.
Ultimately, identity resolution technology helps marketers deliver personalized, consistent, relevant messages at the right time. This can increase the likelihood of conversions and improve the bottom line. Organizations of all sizes, including startups and AdTech companies, major brands, lead generators, financial services and lending firms, higher education institutions and nonprofits, use identity resolution to optimize digital strategies.
Why is Identity Resolution Important?
Identity resolution connects unique ‘identifiers’ to create a single, real-time, persistent customer identity across devices and touchpoints. This enables marketers to understand their prospects and customers and deliver more personalized and relevant messaging at scale.
With the growth of digital marketing, social media and mobile technologies, brands have access to massive customer data – from shopping habits to travel patterns. With an identity resolution solution, brands can use this data to create a branded experience for each customer.
The challenge for marketers is identifying and communicating with the right people at the right time. In a world of cutthroat competition, marketers must recognize who their customers are and deliver personalized experiences at scale in moments that matter.
Marketers must connect various identifiers across different platforms and devices – from email addresses to phone numbers to login data. With the rise of new privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, it becomes even more critical for marketers to balance protecting privacy while delivering relevant, empathetic customer experiences.
To do so, marketers need a platform that can provide the following:
- Near-universal connectivity.
- Data transformation.
- Data cleansing and quality monitoring.
- The ability to work across their entire enterprise.
These capabilities make it possible to address massive organizational changes and global growth, reducing the risk of data loss, mismatches and inconsistencies across international business applications.
How are Platforms Adapting to Privacy Changes?
Data privacy changes impact how marketers approach marketing campaigns, and knowing how they can affect your business is essential. Marketers who understand how to adapt their strategies to these new restrictions and regulations will be able to stay competitive in the marketplace.
Over the past year, new data privacy regulations and restrictions have been introduced across websites, social platforms, and apps. Laws like GDPR and CCPA, as well as recent scandals around Cambridge Analytica, have caused concern about how companies collect and use user data.
As a result, digital marketers are racing to pivot their marketing efforts in response to these changes. But there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.
Platforms are responding to these privacy restrictions by taking steps to increase transparency and constrain data collection. For example, Google planned to phase out third-party cookies on its Chrome browser in 2020.
Apple has also taken similar steps through its App Store and APIs to increase transparency and limit data collection. The company launched App Tracking Transparency in 2021, which requires app developers to get permission before tracking a user’s activity across apps owned by other companies.
These updates are significant, but they need to address the underlying problem of how social media platforms harvest, analyze, and share their users’ data. It’s an essential concern because this data is used to algorithmically drive users’ engagement and sell behavioral advertising–often with harmful effects on individual consumers.
What are the Key Benefits of Identity Resolution?
Identity resolution is a vital part of customer data platforms (CDPs) that helps marketing organizations build a more complete view of a customer. This holistic view enables more targeted campaigns, better attribution and improved customer service across the buyer’s journey.
Marketers need a unified view of the entire customer ecosystem to deliver the best-personalized experience for each individual. By matching customer data with digital, offline and terrestrial identifiers, identity resolution can help marketers achieve this goal.
For example, an insurance provider could use identity resolution to ensure that the correct records for a person are used when a claim is processed. This helps reduce waste and improves the overall quality of the customer experience.
Another use case is for healthcare providers who want to ensure that all records are updated after a change in address or contact information. This allows them to avoid delays and hassles when updating records for Medicare, a disability program or other benefits.
Identity resolution can be applied to many industries to help with various business challenges. These include improving attribution, tracking and decision-making to drive better campaign outcomes. It also helps to ensure that customers’ personal information is secure and privacy compliant. This can also help prevent fraud and recognize high-value customers.
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