Identifying your customers' needs and providing an experience personalized for each customer is one of the most effective ways to achieve customer success and stay ahead of competition. Identity Resolution (IR) is one of the many data management strategies used by businesses to manage and provide consistent product experience for their customer base.
Identity Resolution helps connect the data about your customer's behavior across online and offline sources, which you can incorporate in your marketing campaigns, advertisements and analytics to align your product with customers' needs, gain loyalty and increase conversions.
This article will discuss in detail what identity resolution is all about, its definition, how it works, practical use cases and what services and platforms you can use to carry out a typical identity resolution for your business.
Overview
- What is Identity Resolution?
- How Identity Resolution works
- Practical Uses: Identity Resolution for Marketing and More
- Finding The Right Identity Resolution Services and Platforms
- Identity Resolution is Key in a World Full of Data
What is Identity Resolution?
Identity Resolution is the process of gathering and compiling data points of an individual, business or entity from various sources and touchpoints, into a single, understandable profile to create an identity that represents their behavior and interactions with a product, using identifiers.
Touchpoints are ways or channels through which consumers can interact with a product, business or organization. These include applications, websites, emails or any other form of communication. Identifiers are pieces of information that describe a person or entity. Examples include email address, phone numbers, physical address, social media accounts, IP addresses and so on.
There's a rising need for Identity Resolution by businesses today, and the reason for this is partly due to the rise in the number of devices with which we could be interacting with a single piece of information. We are also interacting with information online using varying digital persona and identifiers. For example, we sometimes use different usernames, set different content preferences and engage with different kinds of information across websites and applications. And businesses need to collate and make sense of these fragmented data in order to provide personalized and unique experiences for each of their customers.
How Identity Resolution Works
To better understand what Identity Resolution really is, let's take a moment to go through a relatable real life scenario. Say you needed a pair of headphones for your upcoming road trip so you went scrolling through webpages checking out reviews for a pair of headphones. And then casually, you are on Instagram scrolling and liking photos away, and you came across an ad from a brand about headphones, you clicked in. Later that day, you decided to check out the brand’s website and added one pair of headphones to cart.
Now is when Identity Resolution comes into play. In all three instances above, you were digitally a different person. Browsing info on three different platforms, at different times, using different logins. Your past interactions with these websites and applications will be important in how other businesses and applications, for example an e-commerce, display headphones ads on your screen.
Or think about the time you're on Netflix and your Netflix recommendation feed suggests what to watch based on your past activities on the app. All of these instances show how businesses incorporate Identity Resolution in delivering the best experience for each of their customers.
Practical Uses: Identity Resolution for Marketing and More
Now that you understand how Identity Resolution works, let's look at some of its applications in marketing and other business-related scenarios.
Marketing Efforts
The most direct and most useful use of Identity Resolution is in marketing efforts. This is where teams make sense of all the data points through their touchpoints, to figure out who their customers and audience are. Businesses can gain insights into customers' purchasing processes and how they engage with a brand's touchpoints or communication channels by using such data.
Additionally, companies may create precise, effective, and most crucially, targeted outreach and advertisements using the profiles consolidated from identity resolution, which leads to a significantly higher marketing return on investment (ROI) through customer acquisition and retention.
Sales Activities
Another important and effective use of Identity Resolution is in sale activities such as product pitching, lead generation, cold calling and so on. For example, you can use Identity Resolution to create a targeted outreach to individuals from the same company or team who interact with your websites and business, and are all looking for the same thing. This makes Identity Resolution really significant because you might be expanding efforts unnecessarily talking to different individuals who are all from the same company looking for the same thing.
Finding The Right Identity Resolution Services and Platforms
Using the right tools for the job is one of the most challenging components of conducting Identity Resolution, and the fragmented data prevalent in today's world is the main reason why Identity Resolution is now extensively embraced. And for this reason, it is of utmost importance to have a sound data management process to utilize every data collected for proper Identity Resolution.
Identity Resolution usually deals with sensitive and personal user data. When collecting client data, a number of crucial aspects, such as the legality of the data collection methods, should be taken into account. Engaging a vendor that is non-compliant might land you in big trouble.
Proxycurl is a great Identity Resolution provider you can work with. They have a large database of individual of whooping 401M, and their various APIs can return personal information about persons and businesses such as work experience, email, phone number, location, name and more! These are important and common identifiers that you can then use to do Identity Resolution and connect the dots of your customers.
Most importantly, you can be rest assured of your safety as they are CCPA, GDPR and SOC 2 compliant - the strict standards of legal compliance of major cities.
Identity Resolution is Key in Today's World Full of Fragmented Data
In today's world of dispersed and extensive data, achieving Identity Resolution may seem difficult and time-consuming if you're just getting started, but it's undeniably an essential component of business-customer relationships. It's a strategy that surely will pay off huge benefits when incorporated in business marketing and advertising. Understanding and acknowledging its significance is key for any business that aims to excel with its marketing campaigns.
