Identity Resolution: Driving Personalization in a Privacy-First World

This article dives into identity resolution – the technology that helps marketers combine anonymous and known customer data. This allows you to stay relevant in a cookie-free world.

For years, third-party cookies tracked customer behavior, making personalized campaigns and targeted ads easy. But when companies like Apple and Google started moving away from cookies, and privacy regulations came into play, marketers faced a big challenge: how to keep offering personalized experiences without cookies?

The Problem of Duplicate Profiles and Data Fragmentation

Perhaps you’ve noticed this: you have customer data scattered across your CRM, e-commerce platform, and marketing automation tool. One time, the customer is “Jan de Vries,” the next time “J. de Vries.” Typos, nicknames, or multiple email addresses lead to duplicate profiles. This results in:

• Incorrect analysis (you see two customers where there’s only one).
• Unnecessary marketing costs (you target the same person multiple times).
• An inconsistent customer experience (duplicate newsletters, conflicting offers).

For large companies, manually solving these problems is practically impossible. And that’s where identity resolution comes in.

What is identity resolution?

Identity resolution is the process of gathering, cleaning, and merging customer data across various sources—such as your website, apps, and physical stores. The goal? To create a clear, unified customer profile that can be used to drive relevant marketing campaigns. By leveraging algorithms, this process ensures that data from different touchpoints is effectively combined, providing a more accurate picture of the customer.

A key use case for identity resolution is enhancing data quality. By merging fragmented data points into a single, reliable profile, identity resolution helps improve the consistency and accuracy of customer information.

There are two primary ways to link data and resolve identities:

Deterministic Matching

This is a highly precise method that links data with unique identifiers like an email address or loyalty ID. Deterministic Identity Resolution is ideal for first-party data where you already have known identifiers.

Probabilistic Matching

More flexible technique, it analyzes patterns such as IP addresses and device usage to match records. It’s less precise but valuable when fragmented customer data doesn’t always match exactly.

How Does Identity Resolution Work

Imagine this: a customer visits your website anonymously on their laptop. Later, they log into your app via their smartphone. Without identity resolution, these interactions would remain disconnected. But by using tools like APIs and identity graphs, you can merge the data and recognize it’s the same person – regardless of the device they’re using. This allows you to personalize experiences across all touchpoints, delivering a consistent customer journey.

A key foundation for this is a well-structured customer data model. This model helps standardize and organize data from different sources, making it easier to link identifiers like emails, phone numbers, and purchase history to a single, unified customer profile.

The Benefits of Identity Resolution for Marketing Strategy

Identity resolution not only helps you solve data challenges but also offers tangible benefits for your marketing strategy:

• Seamless customer experiences: Whether a customer opens a newsletter or makes a purchase in-store, you ensure a consistent experience across channels and devices.
  
  
• Smart use of first-party data: In a world without third-party cookies, your own data becomes invaluable. Effective identity resolution helps fill in the gaps.
  
  
• More effective campaigns: You can advertise more precisely with detailed customer profiles, delivering relevant messages to the right audiences.
  
  
• Compliance with data privacy regulations: Tools anonymize sensitive data, ensuring you remain compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR.
  
  
• Better predictive insights: With unified customer profiles, you can train models that better predict customer behavior, allowing for improved targeting and engagement.
  
  

Implementing Identity Resolution: Tools and Platforms You Need

Many Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) offer identity resolution features to unite fragmented data across multiple sources. For companies without a CDP, an identity resolution solution can be achieved by integrating tools like CRMs and analytics systems through APIs and data pipelines. Platforms like Google’s Application Integration simplify this process by seamlessly connecting applications and ensuring consistent data flows, helping maintain robust data governance.

For example: with APIs, anonymous browsing behavior can be linked to a customer’s known email address, even when switching devices. Identity graphs can also merge multiple identifiers – like emails, phone numbers, and purchase history – into one accurate profile. This ensures customers feel recognized and receive a consistent experience across all channels.

Ready for the future

Identity resolution is a way to future-proof your marketing. By combining anonymous and known data, you build a more complete view of the customer, strengthening relationships and gaining deeper insights from your data. By merging data from various data sources, you can create a unified customer profile that enhances decision-making.

At Crystalloids, we help your organization centralize and maximize customer data, enabling you to better understand customer identity and use identity resolution to improve marketing personalization and efficiency. This ensures you’re ready for a cookie-free future.