For brands and agencies that want to deliver and operate a truly customer-focused business model, the personalized experiences of customers can be a much-needed resource. The key to this resource is what has come to be known as identity mapping, which not only connects the dots across screens but also offers a better understanding of the needs, desires and actions of customers. Such marketing that is focused on people’s needs can happen anywhere, and not remain confined to a particular geography or niche.
So what makes identity solutions so important for marketers? To begin with, customers interact and transact with brands in more ways and across multiple places than ever before. The same customers could be found using different devices and it’s a challenge to avoid duplicating messages to these customers across devices. Finally, a growing number of customers today are not obsessed with brands and don’t show the kind of loyalty toward brands as before; instead they are showing an increasing preference for personalized services. In other words, they have redefined the typically held views about value for money.
Now, where does identity mapping come here? Merely gathering all of the data from the different points of interaction with customers isn’t enough as it just offers data from all interactions and transactions with those customers. This is where identity mapping becomes critical because it allows marketers to identify customers as individuals and not just the device they use. The process begins with a persistent identifier that is created on the basis of the data at hand. When this persistent identifier is used to map customers to second and third-party data, a much more vivid, actionable picture of the customers emerges. This is what empowers the marketer to engage customers, one-on-one, via people-based marketing, narrowing it down to the customer’s preferences in ways that were never tried before.