Consumers increasingly demand personalized experiences across all channels, and will look elsewhere if a brand fails to deliver. In the recent Harris Poll survey commissioned by Redpoint, 43 percent of consumers expect a brand to know they are the same customer across all touchpoints, and 63 percent say they consider personalization a standard service. In an Epsilon survey, 80 percent of consumers say they’re more likely to choose a brand that offers a personalized experience.
Personalization is clearly an imperative to engage with and retain customers, and ultimately to drive revenue. While there is a consensus that personalization is indeed important, there is less agreement over what form it should take. A personalized email or direct mail piece is a start, but limiting personalization to a single channel fails to satisfy the consumer expectation that a brand knows who they are across every touchpoint.
Personalizing the experience when a customer or prospect makes an anonymous, first-time visit to a brand’s website – when there is no first-party cookie attached to the browser and no log-in – is an advanced form of personalization that more than satisfies consumer expectations.
Turn More Prospects into Existing Customers
Consider a camping aficionado researching tents and gear for an upcoming trip to the backcountry who makes an anonymous, first-time visit to the website of a sporting goods retailer. A landing page with an image of a lakeside campsite and discount offers on camping accessories will likely be of far greater interest to the prospective customer than a generic landing page – and help lower the estimated average bounce rate of 46 percent for an ecommerce store website. The Redpoint Digital Acquisition Platform, powered by LiveRamp, provides brands with the capability to meet the challenge of a personalized website experience for the first-time, anonymous visitor.
To execute on website personalization for first-time visitors a brand starts out by onboarding a list of prospect records to LiveRamp. A prospect list can consist of known website visitors – perhaps lapsed customers, or those who’ve yet to make a purchase – as well as external lists the brand purchases from a third-party.
LiveRamp strips away any personally identifiable information (PII) that the brand may have that exists in a customer data platform (CDP) – name, physical address, phone number, date of birth – and creates an IdentityLink. An IdentityLink is the result of LiveRamp’s approach to identity resolution. Minus PII, it resolves all first-party and third-party cookies that exist across the web to an identity – the IdentityLink, which becomes anonymized – known only as a series of letters and numbers, such as “XYZ123”.
When a visitor makes an anonymous website visit, the brand fires a pixel off to LiveRamp – essentially asking LiveRamp if an IdentityLink exists for the browser/device. LiveRamp returns the IdentityLink in milliseconds, which the brand looks up in its anonymized database (without PII) to find an attribute to use for personalization. In this case, the prospect is a hardcore camper – and will thus see website content that is customized accordingly. The site continues showing camping equipment to campers, golfing equipment to golfers, and running gear to runners all in order to improve conversion rates and drive revenue.
Make a Difference with a Single Point of Control
Managing anonymous audiences has long been a struggle for marketers who, despite recognizing the value of personalization, often lack a single point of control over customer data. Multiple data sources and siloed legacy solutions have traditionally made it exceedingly difficult to create a unified customer profile, or golden record, which is the foundation for creating a personalized customer experience.
The Redpoint Digital Acquisition Platform provides marketers with the single point of control that is needed to essentially anonymize a golden record and personalize first-time, anonymous website visits. The adage that you only have one chance to make a good first impression is just as true for the impression you provide a first-time website visitor as it is for an in-person introduction. A personalized experience helps turn first impressions into what brands really covet – conversions.
Editor’s note: This is the first part in an occasional blog series that will focus on use cases for the Redpoint Digital Acquisition Platform, powered by LiveRamp.
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