Lead generation strategies are often exclusively focused on responders and the known client and prospect universe. The goal is typically to attract and divert inbound interest to a place of acquisition, where leads can convert via web forms and other methods of providing consent and self-identification. With an emphasis on digital channels during the times of COVID-19, marketing and sales teams are under more and more scrutiny for how they will source their next sales opportunities.
The mid-level Sales Manager will urge that prospecting is about relationship-building. They may even cite the significant jump in conversion rates found with personal sales outreach. Marketing lead gen amplifies outbound sales efforts with the sheer reach one can find in using paid ads and email nurturing, for example, but mostly focuses on campaign responders and hand raisers. List purchasing is considered a ‘dark art’ by most marketers who will caution against the negative effects of untargeted, broad messaging to third-party data. However, it is still utilized as a quick and dirty tactic with wide reach to receive an instantaneous marketable audience.
What if there was a tactic that managed the best of both outcomes; one that sources a large marketable audience of prospects who are aware of your brand, if not, warm leads?
Enter identity resolution.
Identity resolution is an umbrella term for a host of solutions that seek to uncover unknown website visitors across various touchpoints, devices, and aliases, through a combination of probabilistic and deterministic matching processes. It then connects them to a single identifiable person. Let’s look at a few use cases to show how your organization can utilize identity in lead generation:
Use Case 1: Anonymous User Recognition
On-site user recognition is a core feature of identity resolution and can help turn anonymous marketing suspects into qualified leads.
Considering more than 95% of site traffic does not convert and only about three fourths of these prospects are a good fit for your product, there remains a large majority of visitors that are viable for multi-channel re-engagement. Anonymous visitor recognition opens an entirely new pool of audiences for retargeting and provides marketers the chance to design one-to-one messages that engage unnamed unknown leads.
Use Case 2: Optimized Personalization and Marketing Engagement
Personalization is a key use case for identity solutions. Some even support personalization as a decision engine or integrate with common site personalization or content management tools. The options for developing personalized experiences are enhanced by the wealth of data provided by identity vendors.
Identity solutions come packed with data onboarding features, such as connections to various adtech partners or marketing cloud platforms. Marketers have the flexibility to activate enhanced audience profiles by orchestrating campaigns within their own ecosystem, or to expedite by launching audiences immediately to publishers or social advertising platforms.
The clients we’ve seen best harness their identity assets for marketing activation are those who utilize the advanced audience and cross-channel orchestration capabilities of a customer data platform. The CDP’s identity resolution processing features are particularly advantageous for ingesting a variety of disparate data sources and linking them to a single identifier, or for activating data through direct plug-ins to an existing identity graph managed by your data lake.
Use Case 3: Profile Enrichment
The case for an identity resolution solution does not end there. Another draw of identity providers is the rich data sets available for marketers to have a jump on profiling their user base. Many identity vendors link to thousands of proprietary and branded data attributes for ID enhancement of demographic, firmographic, financial, and lifestyle data from partners. With extended prospect and customer profiles, one can mobilize towards a variety of personalized marketing tactics or even unlock certain analytics use cases.
A trustworthy identity resolution partner is crucial to unlocking people-based marketing at your organization. Merkle’s identity resolution platform, Merkury, can power each of the aforementioned use cases for lead generation and is the only solution that can deliver PII-based IDs and data associated with consumers unknown to the brand.