Today’s online-savvy, continuously connected consumer demands a personalized customer experience (CX) in every channel, and brands have – for the most part – willingly obliged when it comes to addressable channels, because they know that relevance drives revenue. Addressable channels such as email, SMS, direct mail, and call centers are where targeting based on personally identifiable information (PII) is permitted.
However, privacy regulations require that many types of consumers’ online behavior data, such as ad targeting, exposure, and response data are never linked to an individual’s identity. For display on the open web, brands are never permitted to link ad campaign data to a specific consumer – regardless of the consumer’s status with the brand.
The dilemma for a brand is how to deliver high-touch personalization in non-addressable channels to satisfy the consumer demand for personalization across every channel and touchpoint. Consider a recent Harris Poll survey, commissioned by Redpoint, where 63 percent of consumers said that personalization is a standard service they expect, with 43 percent saying they expect a brand to know them as the same customer across all online and offline touchpoints.
Brands do not have the luxury of waiting to deliver a personalized experience until the customer appears in an addressable channel. In the Harris Poll survey, 37 percent of consumers said they will stop doing business with a company that fails to offer a personalized experience.
Digital Acquisition Platform
An enterprise-grade customer data platform (CDP) makes it possible to work with anonymized data and create a personalized customer experience in non-addressable digital channels. The Redpoint Digital Acquisition Platform, powered by LiveRamp, gives clients a privacy-compliant environment for working with anonymized data.
Through our partnership with LiveRamp, Redpoint clients can onboard PII-based records to LiveRamp, which removes all PII and anonymizes the data. Clients can then activate these audiences across any of the 500+ destinations LiveRamp supports.
In addition to activating audiences across the AdTech ecosystem, LiveRamp can also return anonymized audiences to a Redpoint client’s auxiliary anonymous database. Using this anonymous version of their CDP, clients connect different data types such as transaction, promotional history, and impression data to the anonymized records to give a more robust picture of advertising audiences. Anonymized records are never re-identified in the Redpoint Customer Data Platform. Companies can apply many of the same marketing capabilities they use with PII-based records such as modeling and segmentation.
Brands interested in personalizing a customer experience across all touchpoints can now create and operationalize models for acquisition, reactivation, retention, and suppression – activating them in non-addressable channels to optimize the customer experience for specific business goals.
Recognize and Personalize for First-Time Website Visitors
Some brands have struggled with personalizing content for first-time visitors to their website. Consider research from Quicksprout, which found a benchmark average bounce rate between 40-60 percent for content websites and up to 40 percent for retail sites. Given the significant acquisition costs associated with driving traffic to your site, there’s significant ROI to reducing the bounce rate. Relevant content from the very first visit accomplishes this.
Thanks to real-time engagement from Redpoint clients can use an IdentityLink to personalize site content. When a visitor arrives without a cookie, a pixel requests an IdentityLink from LiveRamp. Within milliseconds, the site takes the IDL, locates information associated with it within the anonymized database and customizes content based on attributes or preference data. This means a sporting goods retailer could show racquets to a tennis player and golf clubs to a golfer who’ve never visited the site before. A generic experience, on the other hand, will not move the needle. According the a recent report from Merkle, 52 percent of consumers surveyed said that they have left a website while shopping because of a poor site experience.
Know Everything There is to Know About a Customer
From the customer’s perspective, seamless personalization across addressable and non-addressable channels reduces friction and enhances loyalty. A first-time visitor to a website presented with personalized content has a higher propensity of becoming a second-time visitor. Brands that extend consumer insights gained from their CDP into the anonymous ecosystem not only reduce waste and improve relevance, they’re also rewarded with the profitable growth that comes from loyal customers.
Personalized inbound marketing has its challenges, but the challenges do not outweigh the customer’s expectation for personalization across a dynamic customer journey. Taking the easy way out by waiting to deliver personalization until a customer appears in an addressable channel is no longer tenable in an environment where the consumer has control over the customer journey and expects it to be unique according to their preferences and interests. Consumers say that they value personalization over price and product, and brands need to take this desire to heart to differentiate in today’s hyper-competitive market.
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