Accurately defining customer identity is the foundation of building personalized customer experiences. It’s not getting any easier as customer expectations continue to rise. We, as customers, increasingly expect to be understood by the brands we engage with, and identity is key to this understanding. Yet marketers struggle with not only gaining an accurate picture of customer identity, but maintaining it as the customer journey continues across devices, channels, and interactions.
The challenge is further complicated by the sheer explosion in devices and applications—and that universe is expanding. The number of devices connected to IP networks will exceed the global population by 3x as early as next year, according to the Cisco Annual Internet Report. With wearables and IoT added to the mix, we are approaching about 3.6 networked devices per capita. Furthermore, the number of Martech apps has exploded in the past decade, from 150 or so in 2011 to a mind-blowing nearly 108,000+ today. The challenge for CMOs is wrapping their arms around it all and finding ways to unify their view of the customer with data their teams can trust.
This puts a lot of pressure on the marketing tasks of customer identity and enrichment. Let’s break this down a little. Identity is the process of matching identifiers across devices and touchpoints to a single profile in order to build a cohesive, omnichannel view of the consumer. Getting this right is key to creating relevant and timely communications with customers while enabling compliance with privacy laws such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Snowflake’s research, The Modern Marketing Data Stack: Your Technology Guide to Unifying, Analyzing, and Activating the Data That Powers Amazing Customer Experiences, found “identity and enrichment” to be one of the six core capabilities of the modern stack. The report identified usage patterns following an analysis into which technologies Snowflake customers use for their marketing data stacks.
Data enrichment with Snowflake Marketplace
With Snowflake Marketplace, marketers can browse an external data catalog to acquire new data sets that enhance or fill the gaps of their existing business data while keeping personally identifiable information (PII) private. Sometimes existing gaps are data sets never before considered, so data providers can also proactively publish data sets or offer data analytics services to Snowflake customers.
The use of third-party data can complement first-party data and ultimately improve understanding of existing customers and strategies for future campaigns. For example, a marketer or agency might have only basic demographic information in their own measurement dashboard, such as the age range and gender of people who purchased a product or service. By enriching their first-party attribution data with data from an identity provider, they can gain valuable insights about their customers’ household size and much more, which they can use to optimize the creative and targeting in future campaigns.
At the end of the day, getting the identity step right is important to building trust with the customer. They know when they are identified correctly and when a brand understands what’s close to their hearts. Building trust with the customer starts with trust in the data. That requires trust in the full breadth and depth of the marketing stack, which is guiding your journey to driving truly brand-building customer experiences.
To learn more, download our free report, The Modern Marketing Data Stack: Your Technology Guide to Unifying, Analyzing, and Activating the Data That Powers Amazing Customer Experiences.
