Personalized marketing across owned, earned and paid channels is more complicated than ever. Customer data is everywhere, leaving it fragmented and hard to use. Even on owned channels, brands might be missing the mark in unifying their data to give them the best view of their customers.
Brands that can effectively execute person-first marketing across channels have bigger gains and stronger customer loyalty. According to Epsilon research, "The push and pull of personalization," 82% of consumer respondents said they view a brand positively when they advertise a product that a person needs. Conversely, 76% said they view brands negatively when they include inaccurate information about them in their advertising messages.
Therein lies the problem: Brands that know their customers better deliver more effective messages, but if they can’t get a 360-degree view of their customers, they risk wasting their ad dollars sending messages to people who don’t care, won't buy and ultimately will develop a negative perception of the brand.
While customer data platforms (CDPs) are often seen as simple organizational tools of a brand’s customer file, not all CDPs help marketers master their data to make it actionable. To create a solid digital marketing strategy, you need a solid first-party data strategy.
First-party data is an essential part of a brand’s understanding of a customer, but many brands struggle to effectively use it. That’s because their first-party data is often incomplete, duplicative or riddled with inaccuracies, making it difficult to connect a customer's journey across various paid and owned channels.
This leads to a reliance on generalized audience segments and a channel-by-channel approach to marketing, where content and messages lack connection to each other and don’t truly resonate with individuals.
According to a whitepaper from the CDP Institute's David Raab, sponsored by Epsilon, there is a price to bad data. Instead of recognizing and targeting their best customers with consistent, optimal messages across all channels, "brands send ads in each channel based only on information in that channel." Raab said this degrades not only the customer experience, it wastes marketing budget, too.
Brands often turn to marketing technology to streamline and organize their first-party data, but not all solutions are made equal. A CDP can collect and unify customer data to build a single view of each customer, but the problem is that most CDPs are just an empty box that gets filled with your existing customer data—it's not filling in any of the existing gaps you may have in your data. To fill in a complete view of their customer—who they are outside of a brand’s limited view of them—a CDP needs a strong foundation of identity resolution.
Identity resolution can unify, cleanse and complete a brand’s first-party data, transforming it into a powerful tool to activate across paid, owned and earned channels. CDPs with identity solutions built in enhance profiles with other data sources, like third-party or proprietary data. Not only does this enhance individual customer profiles, it delivers better audience targeting and personalization to drive relevance.
When you’re activating across channels, you want to make sure you’re getting in front of the right customers. But what does that mean? When using a CDP with identity resolution built into it, it sets a brand up for more successful campaigns.
Let’s consider these things:
Using that strong first-party data as a foundation for a digital media activation strategy sets brands up for success. At Epsilon, our CDP is more than just an empty box. Identity resolution and proprietary data are built into our solution, giving marketers the best view of their customer. We use hundreds of industry-specific attributes spanning demographic, lifestyle and transactional insights to improve the quality, depth and breadth of a brand’s first-party data.
Coupled with AI, we help marketers create personalized marketing at scale. Our solution is designed to work with your preferred activation partner, including Epsilon Digital, for efficient, marketing-friendly campaign execution.
