Why post-cookie marketing will lean on deterministic customer identity resolution

We’re heading toward a new phase: the post-cookie era of marketing. And while most of us in marketing and advertising know it’s coming, many haven’t taken steps to address the shift that will soon be necessary.

Whether brands are ready to face the music or not, third-party data-driven marketing is on its way out. Thanks to changing consumer privacy demands and tightening legislation, businesses are being challenged to see the end of cookies as an opportunity to embrace a privacy-first, customer-centric approach to personalized marketing.

Even then, 40% of marketers are still completely reliant on third-party cookies to power their engagement initiatives. And as Google looks to ban cookies altogether by 2023, those who are cookie dependent risk losing touch with their customers, wasting budget, and surrendering their ability to create meaningful brand interactions.

So, how can marketers reclaim their stake in winning, personalized customer experiences? By using deterministic identity resolution to build highly accurate, unified and complete customer profiles based on consent-friendly first-party data.

So, what exactly is deterministic identity resolution?

According to MarTech, identity resolution describes “the science of connecting a growing volume of consumer identifiers to one individual as he or she interacts across channels and devices.”

Unifying customer data can often be among the biggest challenges for marketers trying to deliver a consistent, personalized experience across devices and channels. But with deterministic identity resolution, the engine powering that personalization is always fueled.

When brands use deterministic data (or data known to be true such as first-party data) over probabilistic data (based on assumptions) to resolve customer identities, they merge behavioral history into one unified customer profile. They become equipped with reliable, cookieless customer identifiers. To boot, deterministic identity resolution becomes the dependable, always-accurate foundation allowing the business to create granular audience segments that marketers can activate in their downstream tools.

Why is deterministic identity resolution so important for marketers?

You may be thinking, “deterministic identity resolution makes sense, but it sounds like it may be an issue for the IT team to handle.” If you are, here’s a quick recap of why it’s so important in marketing:

• Seventy-one percent of brand marketers struggle to maintain an accurate consumer ID over time and throughout changes (Forrester)
• Almost half of marketers say the information they are trying to access when building marketing campaigns is hard to find.

It’s also a major challenge currently plaguing marketers who want to grow their reach and improve messaging relevance and accuracy.

As covered in a previous blog, within the context of digital advertising, deterministic data is used to track identified users’ activity across different sites and apps for improved targeting. For example, a user’s identity can be resolved when the email address provided by a publisher matches the email address in a graph database of a logged-in user.
So — want deeper insights into your customers’ behavior? Want to get granular and to understand the role each channel or device plays in conversions? Then you need deterministic identity resolution powering your personalized marketing communication.

Why choose Lytics for deterministic ID resolution and better marketing?

In a world where anonymous visitors account for the vast majority of all web visitors, it’s time to make the most of accurate ID resolution and let poorly performing ads or wasted marketing budget go the way of the cookie.
With Lytics Decision Engine, marketers can use graph databases and deterministic first-party data to resolve user identities and create a better customer experience.

To explore how it works, try Lytics free for 30 days and see the power of the platform and the enhanced performance of your customer engagement for yourself.