Imagine being able to consistently identify a specific customer whenever and wherever they interact with your brand: in your commerce channels, your marketing channels and your service channels.
Now imagine that the underlying technology will also capture important details about that interaction in real time and sync it with a full history of the customer-brand relationship.
What could marketers do with that kind of always-active, enterprise-wide technology? You’d be able to maintain a continuous conversation with each customer that is personalized and relevant to their interests, providing the type of proactive helpfulness that dramatically deepens brand loyalty and customer engagement.
Here’s an example. Sally has just viewed a how-to video on summer styles on a cosmetics retailer’s website. Sally’s in the gold tier of the brand’s loyalty program, and her full browsing and purchase history is accessible, along with the fact that her last in-store makeover session was more than a year ago. The brand’s marketing ecosystem can now recognize Sally at a wide variety of touchpoints and surround her with relevant offers:
- Brand website alerts. “Here are products you’ve previously bought that you can use to create this stylish spring look.”
- Mobile ads. “Check out our best-reviewed products for creating this look and here’s a link to buy them” (with a deep link to the right page in the brand’s ecommerce app).
- “Sally, your loyalty has earned you a $3 coupon and a free makeover — here’s a link to schedule that at your preferred store location.”
- Store visits. When Sally walks into the store and asks for “that eye shadow in the summer video,” a store associate can instantly access Sally’s profile in the chain’s clienteling app and say: “I see exactly which video you’re talking about. Let me help you find those products you already put into your online shopping cart and make sure you have everything you need.”
Sure, the brand may not use — and Sally may not pay attention to — every one of these marketing touchpoints. But the more chances the brand has to recognize Sally and be personally relevant to her, the more Sally is likely to develop an affinity for the brand. And the more highly-engaged customers a brand has, the better insulated the brand will be against competitive encroachment and customer churn.
That’s what we mean by disrupting the status quo, and it’s just the beginning of what you can do when you have a customer identity solution at the foundation of your marketing strategy.
Unify your view of the customer with an enterprise-wide identity solution.
It’s really important for a brand to maintain a consistent, persistent view of customers like Sally, including both historical interactions and the most up-to-the-second view. To do that, brands need a customer identity solution that brings all the relevant data about a given customer to the critical moment of engagement, so that Sally feels recognized and valued.
But in today’s highly fragmented marketplace, it’s increasingly difficult for marketers to recognize and be relevant to their customers at every point of engagement. It’s particularly challenging to connect the customer experience across the paid media space and the brand-owned space of websites, apps, emails, stores, customer service centers, etc. The only solutions available to marketers have been focused solely on the paid media space. There’s been no connection back to the customer experience within the walls of the brand-owned environment. Until now.
Identity isn’t a marketing problem, a service problem or a commerce problem. Identity is an enterprise problem.
Originally published May 10, 2017