I recently attended my first baseball game of the season. It was a great game and a beautiful day at Wrigley Field with the Chicago Cubs hanging on in the ninth inning to come out with a win. The first game I attend each season is always my favorite because there is always so much hope and excitement that this could be the year the Cubs could win it all…that is before the realities of mid and late season kick in.
One of the key factors that successful baseball teams leverage these days is data. Data about how every player performs in any situation is used to make key decisions such as which relief pitcher to bring in or which pitch to throw to a specific hitter in the given game situation.
This data has to be comprehensive and actionable. If the data is incomplete or not properly aggregated, the analysis will be flawed and subsequent decisions can lead to sub-optimal outcomes. This is similar to the issues marketers face when planning, executing and measuring their campaigns.
Instead of understanding which pitch or which pinch hitter will give a team the best chance of success, marketers need to know who to market to and in which channels to communicate with them. They also need to understand which marketing activities made up the path to purchase to be able to drive future campaign success. The key to getting these decisions right is to have an accurate 360-degree view of customers and prospects across all channels.
Having disjointed data can impact decisions across all aspects of campaign creation and measurement. Imagine a high-value catalog responder opting in to an email loyalty program on a website. Not linking that information to his or her previous transactions could lead to redundant communications across channels in a best case scenario and at worst, conflicting messages.
The good news is that there are solutions available today to assist marketers in resolving their customer identities across channels to enable complete, aggregated, actionable profiles. Using referential data, marketing service providers are able to create linkages between disparate customer data points and can fill missing channel identifiers.
Getting this data management activity right sets all of your marketing activities up for success and allows marketers to ensure that the hope and excitement at the start of each campaign results in championship outcomes.
For more information about cross-channel identity resolution, download our latest white paper, Crossing the great divide: Resolving customer identities across online and offline channels.