The role of identity in a modern CDP

With the announcement of the deepened relationship between LiveRamp and Snowflake and the long-term trend to bring customer data into Snowflake as part of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) deployment, customers have been asking me how identity should play with their CDP. CDPs play in the world of known Personally Identifiable Information (PII), often for Customer Engagement. LiveRamp, on the other hand, is associated more with advertising and paid channels. At many brands, customer engagement and paid acquisition are run out of different teams with different tools and different goals. Still, identity can make a CDP more effective at several key functions, and teams that run CDPs should spend the time to get smart on identity. Here are 3 ways that Identity can help your CDP strategy:

Identity enables cross-channel and cross-device profile unification

Consumers have multiple devices, and often hop from computer to phone to tablet. They may not be logged in across all devices, or they may use different email addresses to log in across devices. Identity can help unify these profiles, allowing marketers to have a full picture of the consumer’s journey. For marketing done at the household level, and not at the person level, identity providers can also stitch together profiles at that level. For businesses with both online and physical channels, using an identity profile can connect the online and offline identifiers for a richer view of the customer journey.

Identity increases match rates with paid channels

Even when you have a registered user on your website, that does not mean you will be able to reach that consumer on a given ad platform. For example, a B2B company is more likely to have a work email address, so when you push that email to Facebook, where people usually use a personal email, there may not be a match. Only 14% of consumers have only a single email address, so relying on the single email address that a consumer used to register on your website is very limiting. Identity can also extend the match to use offline data, as well. So even if an email address is not matchable, information like address and phone number can also be used.

Identity allows brands to expand paid channels to communicate with customers

When considering possible paid channels to communicate with existing customers, most marketers limited campaigns to social channels. Social channels have PII on nearly all of their visitors, and they make it easy to upload a list of emails, for example, that can be advertised to. However, there are hundreds of different advertising channels, and using identity can make it easy to extend your customer marketing to channels like audio and CTV, as opposed to limiting activity to social channels.

While identity may be traditionally associated with advertising, it can also play a critical role in customer engagement efforts by enabling marketers to have a full picture of the consumer’s journey and providing a more complete view of customers across channels and devices. It can also give those marketers new and better ways to reach and interact with those customers. Therefore, teams running CDPs should make an effort to understand and leverage identity to maximize the value of their customer data and ultimately deliver the most impactful and effective campaigns.