In today’s omnichannel customer interaction landscape, customers navigate multiple journeys. Imagine a customer who searches for summer office outfits on a mobile website, downloads the brand’s app, visits the website on a desktop and ultimately makes a purchase via the app. Later, they click on a banner ad, buy summer shirts without leaving the website and add sandals to their wishlist for future purchases. They receive a discounted price through an Instagram ad and eventually purchase the wishlist item. Such diverse customer journeys are now the norm, involving an average of six touchpoints. To effectively engage customers in these complex eco-system during their purchase journey, marketers must track and unify customer engagement across the various touchpoints. With this enriched unified customer profile, marketers can deliver personalised experiences, provide seamless customer service and gain holistic insights to optimise their marketing efforts.
How to Unify My Customer Data?
Here is where a CDP comes in with one of its key offerings, Identity Stitching, that focuses on building a unified customer profile. Identity Stitching connects and merges data points of the same individual across touchpoints, enabling a holistic understanding of customer behaviour. It relies on deterministic identity stitching (using unique personal identifiers) and probabilistic identity stitching (using statistical algorithms) to establish connections between disparate data points and form a cohesive customer identity.
Even though probabilistic identity stitching enhances your identity stitching outcome and can be used for some of the non-personalised communications, marketers still heavily rely on deterministic identity stitching for the personalised communications. Deterministic Identity Stitching is a more precise and accurate approach that uses known personal identifiers such as email addresses, phone numbers, customer IDs or loyalty program numbers that are common across multiple touchpoints.
Zeotap CDP’s Identity Stitching: Empowering Marketers with Granular Control
Zeotap CDP’s Identity Stitching feature empowers businesses to create accurate customer profiles. It gives granular control to marketers to define their own strategy using high and low-fidelity identifiers. A brand can have access to both high and low-fidelity identifiers for its users. The classification of high and low fidelity depends on various factors, such as the source of the identifier (E.g. web vs CRM), its persistence (E.g. email vs cookies), the environment it operates in (E.g. browser, mobile device) or if it is device agnostic (E.g. email, cell phone) or whether it is a universal identifier (E.g. email, SSN) a brand-specific identifier (E.g. user ID, household ID) also plays a role in classification.
Zeotap’s Identity Stitching capability enables marketers to implement a multi-step merge control. At the first level, brands can classify their identifiers as primary or secondary and determine whether the identifiers can participate in Identity Stitching or not. This classification serves as the framework for the Identity Stitching process. On the second level, brands can fine-tune the profile unification process by defining the priority within each classification of identifiers. This allows for a more granular approach to determining the importance and relevance of each identifier during the Identity Stitching process.
With the multi-step merge control capability, brands can easily determine which of the identifiers should participate in Identity Stitching and how would the identifiers be utilised. It offers them the utmost flexibility that they have long been looking for. This ensures that the most reliable and relevant data identifiers are given precedence when merging customer data for creating accurate and consistent customer profile.
How Zeotap CDP’s Identity Stitching Works: A Multi-Step Merge Control Approach
Zeotap’s CDP Identity Stitching capabilities gives brands full transparency and control to select identifiers for profile creation. The user-friendly interface further simplifies the management of ID stitching strategies, making it an effortless process.
To set up Zeotap’s Identity Stitching strategy, you can follow the steps outlined below:
- Identify all the customer identifiers you capture from your various first-party assets like internal business identifiers and universal identifiers like email, cellphone, SSN or cookies.
- Apply Zeotap’s proprietary two-step merge control process as follows:
Step 1 –> Classify the identifiers into Primary, Secondary and Disable categories. For example, designate accurate and persistent identifiers as primary, while others can be classified as secondary or disabled IDs.
Step 2 –> Prioritise the identifiers within each classification to apply finer controls. For instance, assign higher priority to your internal customer identifiers like user ID over other identifiers like email or cellphone.
- Now, let the Zeotap system take over. Based on the classification and priority you have set, Zeotap will resolve every incoming data record and merge them into unique customer profiles in Zeotap.
By following these steps, you can leverage Zeotap’s sophisticated Identity Stitching capabilities to effectively manage and consolidate customer data, resulting in comprehensive and enriched customer profiles. These profiles can be leveraged for various marketing and advertising purposes, such as targeted campaigns, personalised messaging, audience segmentation and tailored customer experiences. Marketers are able to optimise their marketing efforts and enhance customer engagement across multiple channels and touchpoints.
Now that you have defined the merge control, Zeotap CDP automatically applies the merge control based on the priority that you have defined and enables Identity Stitching and unification of every incoming user record into a profile. Zeotap even stitches the unknown to known user interactions without impacting the accuracy of the profile created using high-fidelity IDs.
Leveraging Zeotap CDP’s Identity Stitching for Personalised Marketing
A leading smartphone company launching its newest economic range gaming phone wants to optimise its marketing efforts by delivering targeted offers and personalised experiences to its customers. Leveraging Zeotap CDP’s Identity Stitching, here are the top three objectives that they wish to achieve.
- Targeting Known High-Value Customers: As a marketer, you have identified the high-value customers (HV customers) based on past purchase history and loyalty program data. You have classified the customer identifiers as primary (E.g. cellphone, email) or secondary (E.g. cookies, userID) and have also defined the priority amongst the primary and secondary identifiers. With this approach, you can now accurately connect customer data across touchpoints and devices, creating unified profiles for each HV customer and then use that to launch targeted marketing campaigns tailored to their preferences and behaviors, maximising engagement and loyalty.
- Personalised Product Recommendations for Logged-Out Users: By establishing the priority among primary and secondary identifiers, you can also ensure that logged-out users receive personalised product recommendations based on their past interactions using non-persistent identifiers like first-party cookies. This way you can deliver relevant and engaging experiences, even without explicit user identification.
- First-Time Buyer Discount Campaign: By excluding certain identifiers from participating in Identity Stitching when needed, you can ensure accurate targeting of first-time buyers. This would let you offer a special discount or incentive tailored specifically to this segment, aiming to reward their initial purchase and foster long-term customer loyalty.
In a nutshell
Having a robust ID stitching capabilities in your customer data platform is essential for delivering personalised customer journeys and maintaining high-quality data. With the ability to stitch together diverse identifiers and unify customer profiles, brands can unlock the full potential of their data and establish deeper connections with their audience. Embracing Zeotap CDP’s Identity Stitching empowers brands to stay competitive in today’s data-driven landscape and unlocks new opportunities for success.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Zeotap CDP’s Identity Stitching feature can help your business, you can request a demo here. We’d be happy to answer any questions you have.
