Personalization is one of the most effective strategies to grow a customer base and increase sales. In our annual State of Personalization Report, we found that 56% of consumers will become repeat customers after just one personalized experience. In fact, they expect personalization.
Yet, 50% of brands find it difficult to get accurate data to power their personalization strategies. And 69% of companies plan to increase their investment in personalization, even though this challenge of collecting and ensuring high-quality data at scale remains unsolved.
Luckily, with the right tactics and technology, businesses of all stripes and sizes can effectively implement personalization to strengthen customer loyalty.
The challenge: Real-time identity resolution
Identity resolution is the process of stitching together individual data points into a unified customer profile. It’s an instrumental aspect of understanding your customers, especially as their interactions with a business become more multi-faceted (spanning multiple channels and touchpoints).
For example, an average customer journey may look like this:
1. The customer sees an ad on Facebook. They click the ad to visit the website and sign up for a mailing list for future promotions.
2. They get an email newsletter announcing a fantastic in-store deal and drive to the store to buy the product.
3. After using the product for a while, they see reviews for accessories and buy an accessory or two from the store's mobile shopping app.
There are several customer touchpoints in this journey, each with its own actionable data. The customer gives their email address on a website, their phone number on an app, and their customer loyalty card number in a brick-and-mortar store.
Ordinarily, tying this data together to show that it all came from a single person would be cumbersome. Setting up a data infrastructure to crack the code is costly and complex, and stitching together customer profiles across multiple sources can take years.
And it’s never-ending. What happens when a customer creates another data event by calling customer service for help or sending a message to a social media chatbot? This new data must be instantly attributed to that customer for continued high-level service and engagement.
The dangers of not resolving identities
What do companies stand to lose by not having the complete picture of their customers?
Turns out, a lot:
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Small companies can’t stay competitive with large brands that can afford to create and host their own in-house data centers and solutions.
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Without accurate, real-time insights, marketing spend is used in unproven ways. Science and data don't lead to decisions, so money gets wasted on campaigns that may not bring in any true ROI.
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Customers feel unseen and unserved as they are increasingly accustomed to tailored digital experiences. They turn to alternative shopping methods for competing brands that use these highly engaging experiences.
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Increasing data and marketing regulations make data governance difficult. Attempts to market with data without proper safeguards leave a company open to the risk of fines and reputational damage.
Without the big science data modeling available through tools like Segment and Snowflake, too many opportunities get left on the table.
How to use Snowflake and Segment to drive personalization
Segment and Snowflake work bi-directionally; information can flow from one tool to another to be processed and optimized by each platform's technology. Here is an example of how it works:
1. Customer event data from your e-commerce and marketing tools gets cleaned and unified in Segment, which connects each data event to a Customer 360 profile for each shopper.