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Why are brands so bad at identity resolution?

Written by Tom Ryan

Photo: @damianews via Twenty20

According to recent research for Epsilon-Conversant conducted by Forrester, only half of brands are capable of fundamental identity resolution, like accurately finding customers across devices, controlling their messaging frequency and sequencing and building a unified customer profile.  The survey of 205 brand marketers found that, although 66 percent of brands have an ID strategy that is at least one-year-old, the great majority are still struggling in multiple areas: 
  • Persistence: Seventy-one percent struggle to maintain accurate IDs of their customers over time.
  • Recognition: Sixty-nine percent struggle to understand what percentage of an addressable audience is active and reachable.
  • Scale: Sixty-three percent struggle with the size of their identity program or the amount of the addressable audience they can reach.
  • Accuracy: Fifty-eight percent of respondents said their brands face challenges with how precisely their identity resolution programs are able to message the correct person across devices, browsers and touchpoints.
  • Privacy and Compliance: Forty percent struggle to ensure that opt-outs and customer privacy controls are in place.
One shortcoming revealed in the survey was the limited scope of identifiers. Most identity resolution programs rely on identifiers like email, IP addresses or login data but overlook identifiers such as offline transactional data (just 31 percent are using it). An overreliance on first-party cookies holds greater risk for privacy regulations. Other shortcomings include inconsistent connection to measurement and a failure to tie programs to performance. The top challenges were seen as determining the right audiences for online campaigns (56 percent); improving performance and measurement of customer marketing (52 percent); optimizing online campaigns (50 percent); and personalizing online campaigns (47 percent). Getting identity resolution right is important, as poor efforts in this regard can lead to problems such as reaching the wrong customer (45 percent), wasted marketing spending (42 percent), offering irrelevant products or services (38 percent) as well as lost opportunities for cross-sells or upsells, per respondents.

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