What is identity resolution?

Resolving identities whether, it’s the identity of an anonymous user or known customer, can be a crucial process in running your business — especially as more consumers behave across devices and channels. But what exactly is identity resolution?

What is identity resolution?

According to CDP.com, identity resolution “is the process of creating an addressable customer profile by analyzing and resolving data across multiple touchpoints, attributes and systems.”

It has to do with anonymous information as well as personally identifiable information on people. Generally, businesses will combine and resolve huge amounts of customer information using computerized analysis, which helps to develop customer IDs that persist throughout your various marketing campaigns. Along the way, you and your team will need to make sure that you remain on top of security and privacy concerns, to safeguard the information under your care.

What follows is a guide that explains what identity resolution is, describes its importance, and discusses best practices for implementation.

Why is identity resolution important?

Who are your customers, and how do you really know who they are?

When considering the value of gathering and maintaining detailed information about customers, you also have to keep in mind best practices for implementing identity resolution.

To illustrate just why identity resolution is so crucial, you should remember that the total number of connected devices in U.S. households is 22, per data from Deloitte. This means that you may not know exactly who is picking up a tablet or smartphone or laptop and doing searches on the internet for the goods or services that your organization offers, or if multiple members of a household are using the same device.

What’s called for in this scenario is to obtain a single, unified customer view. If you’re not familiar with this aspect of marketing, it’s also referred to as a “360-degree customer view”. Here, marketers will collect information about customers and then gather it into a single point of data, as noted by Tech Funnel. With all of the data in a single “touchpoint,” you can obtain a holistic view of these individuals, no matter if they are interacting with your website or search engines and social media using an app, a website or in a brick-and-mortar store.

A single customer view becomes invaluable to you for helping your business make personalized recommendations. For example, using the content affinity engine from Lytics, you can obtain a total picture of each user on your website, to gain a better understanding of what motivates them, and to predict what their purchasing habits will be.

This is key for further marketing endeavors, such as targeted ads and targeted emails based on their current interactions with your site, and while analyzing all of the affinity data and other signals from shoppers.

How does identity resolution work?

A good way to better understand the nature of identity resolution is to examine the idea of the entity graph.

An entity graph helps you see the relationships between data. For example, you can compare your own web browsing behavior, which will use different cookies as you visit sites using your personal laptop and not your work laptop. On the other hand, your grandmother only uses an older desktop computer and she does not even know what cookies are or how they wind up on her computer as she browses.

She will have far fewer connections to other sources of information. This helps to distinguish the kinds of expectations each person has. Sending your grandmother an email after she browses for bathrobes will make the connection between her initial searches and her response to the coupon she found in her inbox.

When it comes to Customer Data Platforms for marketing, identify resolution works in three main phases: Collecting data, connecting it and activating the data.

1. Collecting: You will obtain this information yourself, such as from each new visitor who offers an email and other info.
2. Connecting: You put together all the disparate sources of information, such as tracking a person’s wishes and desires via cookies, searches and other signals.
3. Activating: You activate this valuable data by putting customer data into context with a solutions like a data warehouse hosted in the cloud. You can then sync the data with a myriad of popular connections, with data from LinkedIn, Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram, for example.

Deterministic vs. probabilistic identity resolution

Firstly, it’s important to note that any business involved in managing customer data or obtaining data about the customers they want to market to will need to be aware of the differences between deterministic and probabilistic identity resolution (and how to use them).

There are two main types of identity resolution:

1. Deterministic identification

Deterministic identification involves matching customer records for equal data over identifiers including user name, phone number of email address, as noted by CDP.

      2. Probabilistic identification

Probabilistic identification is a form of customer data profiling where your software estimates just how likely it is that two identities are actually referring to the same customer. Data points used in this can include the operating system of the device, the device type or IP address.

You’ll typically rely on deterministic identification when you have first-party data available to search through. In contrast, if you lack access to suitable first-party data or when you have an urgent mandate to expand your reach as quickly as possible, you’ll tend to work with customer data via probabilistic identification.

The benefits of identity resolution for businesses

The major benefits and advantages of identify resolution for marketers include:

• You can now build a better audience for your personalized marketing campaigns.
• With machine learning, your team can make better informed decisions for outreach to buyers, since you will have a better idea of what each customer might want to purchase now.
• Audience suppression made possible by having detailed information about the customers in your list means you can save money by not marketing to those who will likely be less receptive to your messages. You instead spend more attention and money on the more open buyers.

The benefits of identity resolution for consumers

Likewise, there are benefits to consumers too, when identity resolution is part of the process:

• By knowing who the visitors on your site, they will receive customized content.
• You can make recommendations to the customers based on precise information about their previously known desires and interests.
• Presenting them with the information they need at their specific point in the buyer’s journey makes for a more pleasant shopping experience. For example, your customers may still be narrowing down selections according to brand, price or options, so you can present them the additional information they want at that point in their decision-making process.

Identity resolution and security compliance

Being able to market more effectively to your customers and future customers will depend on you being able to ensure security compliance through identity resolution. Keep these considerations in mind:

Customers want your reassurances that you will protect their personal information, as pointed out by Security Info Watch. Ask for real-time feedback on how the data could affect them personally or their decisions. They need to know that they can take control over their data upon demand. So, you’ll need consent before using people’s data, let alone sharing it. Your identity resolution software needs to be regularly updated to ensure that you are always following industry best practices.

What is the status of your organization’s system and process for identity resolution? If you don’t have a protocol for making sure you are in compliance with security guidelines and safeguarding the details of consumer identities, now would be the perfect time to consult with the experts at Lytics. We have built a world-class data platform and we are standing by to assist you with your identity resolution marketing requirements. Doing so will help ensure that your outreach and marketing campaigns will be in compliance with data regulations and that you are doing what’s needed to protect the sensitive information you need to use to grow your business.