An email address is not an identity. It’s just a string of letters attached to a domain that allows marketers to reach customers. Those customers — along with their wants, needs, and behaviors — are what really matter.
So, if all you have in your marketing toolkit is an email service provider, you likely only have part of a complete solution. ESPs are great at sending messages and basic customer segmentation. However, they lack the real-time behavioral insights needed for those messages to be most effective.
Remember the goal you’re after here is not just sending a message. It’s using that message to engage customers. For that to succeed, the message you send needs to connect with the customer in a meaningful way.
Marketers looking to drive growth through personalized engagement need more than just an email address. They need identity — the ability to transform anonymous visitors into known customers whom you can talk to using behavioral insights, even if you don’t yet have their email address.
An ESP cannot recognize first-time site visitors or even returning customers who don’t log in. But an identity network can do this by recognizing the device used to access a site and matching it to your existing first-party data.
ESPs can manage basic triggered flows, such as cart or product abandonment, but these are based on limited data, such as the data collected on a brand’s owned website. Identity networks can recognize up to 10 times the number of contacts than a standard ESP, as well as capture real-time browse, click, and purchase behaviors… all at an individual level.
By applying AI capabilities to this data, it’s possible to identify aggregate behavior across contacts to surface insights, suggest actionable campaigns, and make optimized offers via owned channels.
This gives companies the power to leverage specific intent signals and then tailor messages accordingly based on the interest a customer has shown in specific categories or products. By identifying more behavioral touchpoints across the full spectrum of the customer journey, identity resolution gives marketers a greater ability to act on customer signals through more personalized and impactful communications.
While an ESP can send an abandoned cart message, pairing an ESP with an identity network enables it to identify valuable intent signals like specific product views, category interests or repeat visits… even for anonymous visitors. This opens up the ability to send nuanced messages that leverage specific browsing patterns,purchase history, and individual preferences.
With more customer data, companies can amplify their triggered messages in ways traditional ESPs can’t. By gaining access to the tools needed to create seamless, effective campaigns in direct response to an individual customer’s journey, companies can enjoy significant increases in abandoned cart recovery, browse abandonment response, and even new-product notifications.
These capabilities are particularly crucial in an age where third-party cookies are under increasing attack from new technologies and regulations, and heightened sensitivity around privacy. By delivering intent-based capture tactics, identity resolution allows brands to build and maintain direct relationships without paid advertising, leveraging privacy-compliant first-party data. It’s a far more sustainable marketing model, built to withstand privacy and third-party cookie instability. In short, it’s a future-proof strategy that puts the brand in control.
To be clear, identity resolution is not a competitor to ESPs. The two work together, enhancing each other and giving marketers a more complete toolkit to generate the best results. Adding identity resolution to an existing ESP transforms a capable solution into an exceptional one.
For these reasons, serious marketers interested in boosting customer engagement, personalization, and, of course revenue are turning to identity resolution at an unprecedented rate.
In a rapidly evolving landscape where first-party data is essential, and third-party cookies are on the decline, identity networks offer a sustainable, data-driven foundation for long-term customer relationships. By continuously capturing and analyzing behaviors within a compliant, secure framework, identity not only boosts immediate engagement but also fosters customer trust.
For more details, including firsthand accounts from marketers who have successfully implemented identity resolution solutions, click here.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Glomb, VP of Digital, Content, and Product Marketing for Wunderkind
Tim Glomb is VP of Digital, Content, and Product Marketing for Wunderkind. As a 20-year brand marketer, his experience is rooted at the intersection of content and technology with senior roles in music, TV, and most recently enterprise technology.