The death of the third-party tracking cookie is imminent. Yet, consumers still want personalized experiences, and brands need a way to deliver.

The integration of Salesforce’s Customer 360 Audiences (C360A) customer data platform (CDP) and Merkle’s Merkury identity resolution and data platform now provides brands the ability to offer privacy-safe, real-time customer experiences in a soon-to-be cookieless world.

Why Does This Matter?

Traditionally, we’ve used third-party cookies to track consumer behavior, target audiences with ads and personalized content, and measure marketing effectiveness. But as third-party cookies become obsolete, we need to continue to deliver 1:1 interactions at every touchpoint.

The way to do that is through identity resolution. Using tools like Merkury and Salesforce’s CDP to create a large identity graph that combines first-party data IDs — like an email ID with an address and connected TV (CTV) ID — you can effectively target customers across multiple channels.

How It Works

Merkury enables Salesforce C360A clients to unify their first-party data and enrich person-based customer profiles for segmentation and cookieless media activations.

This consumer-recognition, real-time identity resolution occurs live while we’re online. For example, let’s say you visit a retailer’s ecommerce site but don’t log in as a customer. Using the consumer-recognition tag powered by Merkury, the retailer might know who you are based on your email address and can surface that ID to the website. It can also be used to create dynamic experiences using Salesforce Interaction Studio and trigger emails within Marketing Cloud if you’ve opted in as that retailer’s subscriber.

That tag can also read and write to Salesforce C360A as needed to store or retrieve data about you as a customer of that retailer.

The retailer can then push audience segments from Salesforce C360A to Merkury and vice versa to gain enhanced and enriched data using the identity resolution platform. They can also activate those records with Merkury’s cookieless partnerships, delivering effective, personalized marketing across channels.

Enhance Your Identity Resolution

Turn anonymous site, media, and email engagements into unified customer IDs with Merkury and Salesforce C360A. As a leading identity resolution company, our experts have helped brands clean and link offline and digital records for databases, data lakes, and technology platforms.

Don’t wait for the cookieless future to arrive. Proactively optimize cookieless IDs with high-quality, person-based data for insights, segments, and models that grow your business.

As a member of dentsu, the number one Salesforce Agency Partner, we understand driving personalize experiences. To learn more about how Merkle and Salesforce drive personalized, cross-channel experiences using first-party data, request a demo of the solution at marketing@merkleinc.com.