Consumers now have more ways to interact with brand than ever. So how do marketers keep track of ever more diverse paths to purchase? Tom Blacksell, Managing director of decision analytics and marketing services, Experian, offers tips on creating a solid cross-device strategy.
In today’s digital marketplace, where millions of interactions take place every minute, you need to know how to communicate with individuals seamlessly and personally. To succeed, organisations not only need to have access to relevant information about each individual they are engaging with, but also the ability to connect the multiple touch points and interactions to build a broader, more complete picture of the people they are trying to reach.
Well-known and tested marketing processes, such as funnels and lead nurturing, rely on this idea as activity is focused around an individual and developing the specific relationship that person has with the brand.
Recent research revealed that one third of the UK of the population (32 per cent) are ‘digital devotees’, a group which own multiple devices, spend the most time on-line and use digital services for the widest range of activities, while more than half use digital for practical day to day usage. This is a wide pool of people that have the potential to engage with a brand through many devices. But people don’t think in terms of channels. They see one brand and expect to have a seamless experience whatever device they’re on.
However, no two channels or devices have the same identifier, and tools still rely on a persistent identifier to track each individual. To apply these tools, how exactly can marketers get a link between all those identifiers?
Declarative definition
One step is to take a declarative approach, where marketers require people to tell them what devices they own, typically via a login process. This option is easy to implement and is seen as a first-party solution, relying solely on the brand’s relationship with its consumers. However, it doesn’t come without its limitations, not least the work required to transmit this insight to external execution channels. Data must be taken from each log-in, mapped and merged into the CRM, and then distributed in a consistent manner.
Using a declarative match is a scientifically valid method of linking together devices, however scalability is a constraint on its effectiveness. It is frequently the case that a brand will have a unique identifier for every device that has engaged with it but no way of connecting those together, or linking that device cluster further to a CRM System. This can be because there are not enough declarative links.
Through the declarative approach, every engagement with a brand can be tracked and linked back to a device identifier; and every engagement produces a large amount of “long-tail” contextual and device-specific data which can be tied to that device ID. The reduced costs of storage and computer processing mean it’s more feasible to store all of these data trails and start to identify meaningful patterns in these long-tail attributes.
These patterns are comparable to a ‘truth set’ – a set of devices with known linkage clusters – enabling meaningful patterns to be established, together with a weighting to indicate their statistical significance. A brand can then start to link together devices that register above a certain threshold to cluster devices without relying on a declarative match.
In-channel solutions
The delivery of insight to an execution channel is a challenge that many marketers face. It therefore makes sense to ask whether or not it is possible to use an in-channel solution, or some aggregation of those.
To connect these channel-specific views together, marketers need to link the identifiers used in those channels. However, in this case those channels don’t provide even the long-tail data needed to do this. The real sweet spot for today’s marketers is combining these two aspects together to get the most effective and efficient solution. In our increasingly fast paced and connected marketplace, those marketers who want to keep the edge need to make sure they have a solid cross-device strategy in play.
By Tom Blacksell
Managing director of decision analytics and marketing services
Experian