FIVE BUILDING BLOCKS OF IDENTITY MANAGEMENT

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Each time you connect with customers, they have the power. The power to listen, engage and share with friends—or to ignore, unfollow and unsubscribe. It’s up to you, as a digital marketer, to guide their choice.

The goal is simple: serve messages that your customers care about. Meaningful interactions that will lead to their next action, and ultimately a transaction.

So, how do you get there? With so much media fragmentation and rising consumer expectations, “spray and pray” no longer works. What your brand needs is personalization and continuity of voice, across devices and channels. And the foundation for that is identity management.

Identity management is all about knowing who your customers are, recognizing them across their devices and channels for years, and tailoring every message based on what they need and want. That way, they’ll feel like you truly know them—like every message is part of an ongoing conversation that grows over time.

If you aren’t managing your customers’ identities, your digital marketing can’t be effective or efficient. When we work with clients who had been doing it the usual way—spending on digital without clear customer views—we inevitably uncover a great deal of budget they’d been wasting on ad fraud, misidentification and irrelevant ads.

This guide will challenge you to take a new path, one that leads to measurable business outcomes. It’ll show you how to achieve more meaningful interactions with all your customers—helping them to feel recognized, valued and appreciated for years.

WHY READ THIS GUIDE?

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Misfires have consequencesImagine that you work at a sporting goods chain, and you’re promoting a product line marketed to college-aged men. You’re handing out flyers when a fifty-something woman walks in. Should you hand her the flyer? Maybe. But you’ll probably chat with her first, to see if she’d be interested.

Now imagine this takes place online, where your brand has less than a split second to determine who the person is, what they might want to buy and what you may have said to them in the past. If you don’t recognize them but serve an ad anyway, chances are, you’ve just wasted an impression—or worse, turned off a customer.

This is what your brand’s digital marketing looks like without effective identity management. It wastes money and creates negative brand perceptions in lots of different ways:

Promoting a product that’s irrelevant to the customer or prospect

Featuring a product that someone’s already purchased

Treating existing customers like new prospects

Tailoring messages to the wrong person (e.g., a spouse) who shares the device

Exposing someone to the same ad, over and over, across their devices

Messaging someone after they’ve opted out of brand communications

YOU HAVE AN IDENTITY PROBLEM

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We’ve found that to build strong online relationships with customers, brands need an identity management strategy that has five building blocks:

Understanding these building blocks—and being able to discuss them with potential marketing partners—will help you build the foundation for higher-yield digital marketing. Use this guide to understand how and why seeing customers clearly and consistently as real people across all their devices and channels will maximize your return on marketing investment.

REACHBe able to ID and connect with people online and offline, at scale

PERSISTENCEMaintain lasting connections with every customer, measured in years

PRIVACYProtect each individual’s personally identifiable information (PII) and maintain opt-out status

ACCURACYContinuously verify people’s identities across all their devices and channels

RECOGNITIONIdentify the correct people online and offline

IDENTITY MANAGEMENT DECONSTRUCTED

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Identify the correct people online and offline The most engaged consumers are the ones you’ll find in your first-party data. They’re the “hand raisers” you can reach directly on your addressable channels: your website, email and mobile app. And you can learn even more about them by working with a trusted data partner that observes their behavior beyond what they do with your brand.

With effective identity resolution, you’ll find those people, and your infrequent or potential customers, across all their devices and browsers. Your marketing activity will tie back to each individual, to build on your understanding of them. And you’ll identify millions of people who act like your best customers, to efficiently grow your audience.Conversant maintains an active reach of more than 200

The most common ways that vendors recognize people online are also the least effective. Here’s what they are, and why they fall short:

Site cookies. Cookies only give you a narrow, temporary (sometimes hourly) view of someone’s web activity. And some devices (e.g., Apple) don’t accept third-party cookies, so your customers aren’t reachable on them.

Device IDs. Each person owns an average 3+ devices—making it hard to know who you’re interacting with, and on which device, in order to have a continuous conversation. And devices get updated every couple of years. Recent research also shows that advertising IDs change almost as frequently as cookies, so this isn’t the answer, either.

Hashed email addresses. Many people have email addresses they never use. And while hashing keeps email addresses privacy-protected, it also prevents marketers from aligning their customers’ multiple email accounts for a single, person-level view. Also, hashed emails are the main cause of identity confusion on shared devices—so this can deteriorate your ID resolution.

None of these options gives you a full view of each customer. So what’s the best data to use? A combination of all of the above and more—including online and offline transactions, which offer the most accurate data (because they tie person-level information to physical shipping locations). All the data should be aligned to a persistent ID that never fades, even as cookies decay and devices are rotated or upgraded.

1RECOGNITION

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WHY RECOGNITION MATTERS If you can’t identify someone online, you can’t consistently reach them or give them a connected brand experience. You risk repeating your message and wasting money.

HOW TO MEASURE RECOGNITION Vendors measure recognition using match rates: What percentage of customers can you recognize online, and how many are active? Some vendors may cite a match rate of 80%, but the percentage of those IDs that are active may only be 20%.

WHAT TO ASK VENDORS What methods (e.g., cookies, emails, transactions) do you use to identify individuals online? To what degree of accuracy can you match customer files to your IDs? What’s your match rate at day 1 vs. day 30 of our program or campaign?

CONSIDERATIONS Industry average match rates vary between 30–50%. Ask your vendor for verification, and ask if their IDs are active users or a historical match.

AVOID PITFALLS Many vendors focus on match rates between their files and their databases. That’s why you may not be able to trust match rates in the 95% range. Find out if that number represents people you can activate and measure. You need to understand how your data matches up.

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DID YOU KNOW?Conversant maintains an active reach of more than 200 million real people in the US. We can match your customer data to our online profiles with 60–80% accuracy.

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Be able to ID and connect with people online and offline, at scaleWhen it comes to reaching audiences on a network, no two solutions are alike. All vendors have their own methods of connecting to people, and some vendors are better at it than others.

If you’re evaluating potential vendors, you’ll want to do your due diligence. Sometimes vendors report numbers (of reachable adults in the United States, for instance) higher than actual census data (252 million in 2017).1 Numbers can become inflated due to duplicate entries or imprecise matching (using cookies or devices instead of people). One person could be tied to two or more online identities.

If there are 31 million people in a population category but a vendor says they can reach 40 million, something’s off. Double-check these counts against government-maintained census data. If a vendor says they can reach more people than actually exist, move on.

WHY REACH MATTERS You need to reach all your customers (not just heavy users or clickers) as real people, not just as cookies or devices. Otherwise, you risk messaging them too frequently and damaging your reputation.

HOW TO MEASURE REACH Determine the number of people on that network (usually in millions).

WHAT TO ASK VENDORS How many people are in your network, what data sources (e.g., cookies, hashed emails) do you use to identify them and what were the steps you took to build this database? When was it established, and how long have you been building it?

CONSIDERATIONS Higher numbers aren’t always better. What’s important is that vendors maximize your exposure to the people you want to reach, and they identify them correctly.

AVOID PITFALLS Vendors may intentionally or unintentionally inflate numbers. Compare any data that your vendors share with an independent third-party source.

2REACH

1 https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-population-by-child-and-adult#detailed/1/any/false/871,870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35/39,40,41/416,417

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DID YOU KNOW?

Among the 200M+ people in Conversant’s network, the average person has 6+ points of contact (including devices and browsers) at any given time. Without strong identity management, you may misidentify each customer as 6 or more people!

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million real people in the US. We can match your customer data to our online profiles with 60–80% accuracy.

3ACCURACYContinuously verify people’s identities across all their devices and channels If you can’t accurately identify someone across all their devices and browsers, you risk perceiving them as different individuals. You may think you’re messaging multiple people when in fact you’re repeatedly bombarding the same person with the same ad. It’s only slightly better than TV marketing, when there’s only an off chance a message lands when the right person is watching.

Achieving cross-device accuracy comes down to two things: where you start from and how much you can scale. Too many brands still rely on unstable or incomplete data (such as cookies, device IDs or email addresses) to recognize consumers, so their accuracy is already flawed. Layer in the need for scale, and these methods fracture at an even higher rate.

When you get cross-device accuracy right up front, you’ll reach the right people with messages at the right moments—and do it at scale. As you ingest more data, your accuracy should improve over time.

WHY ACCURACY MATTERS Accuracy maps directly to positive customer experiences. It allows customers to receive messages across all their devices that are perfectly tailored and relevant to them.

HOW TO MEASURE ACCURACY The percentage of people who can be reached across their devices (e.g., smartphone, tablet and desktop). Continuous quality testing is critical to keep identity fracture from happening. Ask vendors how they approach quality assurance (QA).

WHAT TO ASK VENDORS How was this percentage calculated? Has it been verified by a third party? Was is done at scale, or just a small sample test?

CONSIDERATIONS With the constant changes in technology and all our devices and browsers, it’s tough to be perfect. But you should seek out a partner with an accuracy rate of 96% or higher that can quantify it across devices. Verify this number with a third-party source such as Comscore.

AVOID PITFALLS Avoid vendors that won’t disclose an accuracy percentage. Low accuracy translates to poor customer experiences, misplaced messages and high rates of wasted spend. The risk isn’t worth it.

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DID YOU KNOW?The Conversant platform vets 170 million display, video, mobile and social impressions daily to maintain accuracy. This helps us achieve 96% accuracy at matching people to all their devices (as verified by Comscore).

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4PERSISTENCEMaintain lasting connections with every customer, measured in yearsImagine someone raising her first child. It’s a relatively easy life event for a retailer to identify—for example, you notice when she buys a crib. But in a couple years, she’ll be looking to upgrade to a toddler bed. You want to be the first to give her advice and recommendations.

Consumer activity is always updating with trillions of daily actions, online and offline. The usefulness of your data depends on your ability to stay in lockstep with each customer: what they buy (from you and other retailers), what they read and view online, where they go and what events are happening in their lives.

You’ll only get a full picture of them if you capture this data for years—not just a quick snapshot, or the past 30 days. If your marketing partner can’t maintain long-term connections, they lack the persistence you need. You’ll send ads for products that customers bought months ago, or try to acquire people you think are prospects but just haven’t bought from you recently.

And you miss opportunities to prove to customers—like the mom whose kid has just outgrown his crib—that you have the perfect product for them, even before they’ve considered it themselves. New-to-category introductions is one of the best ways to build your brand.

WHY PERSISTENCE MATTERS Persistence makes it possible to carry on conversations with the same customers for years, allowing for lasting relationships and comparisons of your return on investment over time.

HOW TO MEASURE PERSISTENCE Calculate the percentage of customers who are capable of being reached and messaged online after a period of time has passed.

WHAT TO ASK VENDORS What are your persistence rates at 30 days, 90 days, six months, one or even two years? Can you confirm that you can still identify and reach our customers after that time? It should be growing over time. If it’s not, ask your vendor why.

CONSIDERATIONS Digital identities linked to cookies, device IDs or email addresses are prone to short lifespans and multiple identities per person. The best partners maintain accurate, long-term connections, built on stable, privacy-protected data such as transactions.

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DID YOU KNOW?Conversant can find and message 80% of a brand’s customers after two years. Most vendors lose connections every time a cookie decays.

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5PRIVACYProtect each individual’s personally identifiable information and maintain opt-out statusEveryone deserves privacy protection—and in some cases, laws require brands, marketers and ad networks to remain in compliance with government policy. For these reasons, data should always be scrubbed of personally identifiable information (PII) before it’s used. This is an industry best practice that allows data to safely reach across networks.

PII includes:

Names

Addresses

Email addresses

Financial account numbers

Government-issued identifiers

Marketers now live in a world where the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will become the standard for privacy and data protection. The challenge for any brand will be to maintain a privacy-protected environment without risking the quality of their identity management.

High-quality identity management is critical for maintaining opt-out status, which is the cornerstone of privacy regulation. For that reason, choose a vendor that’s committed for the long haul—or your brand could be at risk.

WHY PRIVACY MATTERS Customers care. Governments care, too. Laws are going to get stricter.

HOW TO MEASURE PRIVACY 100% privacy protection of your data should be the gold standard.

WHAT TO ASK VENDORS How do you protect the privacy of people whom brands can message on your network or platform? What safeguards are in place?

CONSIDERATIONS Figure out where your partners are storing PII, if they have access. See if your vendor plans to sell or repurpose any of your data.

AVOID PITFALLS We highly recommend working with vendors that respect consumer privacy. This means keeping PII out of their systems and participating in AdChoices, which gives consumers the ability to opt out of advertising.

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DID YOU KNOW?Conversant never relies on PII to recognize people. Our clients’ data is de-identified and pseudo-anonymized by a third party before it comes to Conversant for use in brand marketing.

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CONCLUSIONWith the endless amount of consumer data out there, it’s a challenge to grab it, sort it, match it to all the right people and message them one-to-one. The future will only bring us more data and more ways to reach people, and consumers will continue to want seamless experiences with privacy protection—which means you need to flawlessly share the right messages with them.

Identity management is the critical foundation of the digital marketing that your customers expect. And the job is never done. It demands continuous improvement, even if it’s just a little bit, every day. But if you slip up anywhere—with respect to recognition, reach, accuracy, persistence or privacy—your foundation will be flawed, and everything downstream in your marketing will be, too.

Good relationships with consumers take more than good algorithms. They take the work of experts to combine large data sets, multiple devices, the right privacy infrastructure and a massive media network. When looking for a partner to help you speak one-to-one with millions, don’t settle for anything less than the best.

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ABOUT CONVERSANT

Conversant is a leader in interaction management, empowering brands to transform ordinary customer experiences into meaningful, human experiences. Our connected suite of personalized digital media products and services combines leading-edge identity management, data science expertise and privacy by design to create human connections that count, everywhere. We do this with truth, proof and transparency at our core. As part of Epsilon, Conversant employs more than 2,100 associates in 17 offices worldwide.

For more information, visit www.conversantmedia.com or follow us on Twitter at @Conversant.

WANT TO GET IDENTITY RIGHT?Contact Conversant to take the Identity Challenge today.

This document is intended solely for distribution by Conversant. Do not copy, distribute or otherwise share.© 2019 Conversant LLC. All rights reserved. All names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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