5 Keys to Building Consumer Relationships Online
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The document outlines five key principles for effectively connecting with consumers across various digital channels while maintaining privacy. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing individuals accurately, achieving a unified view of consumers, and utilizing persistent identifiers to enhance marketing effectiveness. The author, Raju Malhotra, illustrates how these principles can be applied to overcome challenges in digital marketing and improve customer engagement.
5 Keys to Building Consumer Relationships Online
- 1. THE 5 KEYS TO CONNECTING WITH REAL PEOPLE HOW TO RECOGNIZE AND REACH MILLIONS OF CONSUMERS ACROSS THEIR DEVICES, MEDIA AND CHANNELS, OVER LONG PERIODS OF TIME. Raju Malhotra Senior Vice President, Products
- 2. IT STARTS WITH THE CONSUMER All marketing starts with knowing who you’re talking to. Before you can truly engage with someone online, you need to know if you’ve talked to them before (and if so, about what), and if they’re already your customer. All the next steps—and the success of your message—depend on that. Accurately recognizing individuals and reaching them continuously for a long time with compelling messages, within a privacy framework, is today’s toughest marketing challenge. As each consumer is surrounded by more and more data (online and off), it’s getting harder to build an accurate, ongoing matching solution that doesn’t compromise privacy.
- 3. ONE VIEW BEATS A FRAGMENTED VIEW To speak to each consumer with confidence, we need one view of them, across all of their channels and devices. But with the way that advertising technology evolved, getting one view isn’t as easy as it seems. Many brands end up working with a number of specialty partners, combining a DMP (data management platform), DSP (demand-side platform) and data onboarder. This fragmented approach leads to fragmented views of consumers. And the brands may not even realize it’s happening. MYTH Marketers need a specific solution for each purpose (e.g., on-boarding, DSP and DMP). FACT Using a point, fragmented solution often leads to identification errors and a big drop-off in the size of the actionable audience, versus having one view of consumers. THE DANGERS OF USING FRAGMENTED SOLUTIONS They don’t give you one view of each consumer. The data is often at the segment level and based on limited consumer interactions. They often don’t take offline & online CRM data into account. Without this crucial data to build and strengthen identities, the accuracy of each consumer ID suffers. The data is un-actionable. It offers cold, non-persistent views of consumers, so it can’t reconnect with them over their lifetimes. Marketers don’t control the chain of custody. This means that the audience is limited to the overlap between their partners’ cookies. Data Onboarder Profiles DSP Profiles DMP Profiles COMMON PROFILE POOL
- 4. THE 5 KEYS TO CONNECTING WITH REAL PEOPLE In order to truly market at the person level, any solution must excel in five key categories. Over the past 10 years, Conversant has acquired 14 patents and invested over a billion dollars in R&D on an end-to-end solution that excels in all 5 of these keys. It’s an evolution of Customer Relationship Management, pulling together CRM data (e.g., email, direct mail), anonymous data (e.g., cookies, device IDs) and transactions (online and offline) to build a complete ID that strengthens over time, without the need for PII. We’re sharing it with you now to help you achieve the same results that we’ve delivered for our clients. 1. RECOGNITION It should recognize each consumer as a person, not just as part of a segment. 5. PRIVACY The data should be anonymized and maintained within strict privacy guidelines. 2. REACH It should have enough scale to reach a significant portion of your audience. 4. PERSISTENCE It should retain persistent IDs for consumers throughout their lifetimes. 3. ACCURACY Its IDs should be varifiably accurate.
- 5. RECOGNITION Recognizing who you’re talking to is an essential first step. Messaging the wrong person is a poor consumer experience and a waste of ad dollars. But with the explosion of devices attached to each consumer in recent years, recognition has been even more of a challenge. CONSUMERS OWN AN AVERAGE OF 3.4 DEVICES.1 To have real conversations, you need to know who you’re talking to, and on what. EACH PERSON IS LINKED TO 19 COOKIES MONTHLY.2 If you don’t recognize that they’re the same person, across devices and browsers, then you’ll repeat your message and waste money. MOBILE ADVERTISING SPENDING IS GROWING. It’s projected to account for over half (51%) of digital ad spending by 2016, and surpass desktop by 2018.3 You can’t reach your audience on desktop alone. DESKTOP IS STILL IMPORTANT, TOO. A majority of conversions still happen on a desktop. If you start your conversation on mobile, you’ll want to be able to close the deal on desktop—which only works if you’re confident you’re talking to the same person. 1. https://www.globalwebindex.net/blog/digital-consumers-have-average-of-3.35-connected-devices 2. Conversant network numbers (user cookies divided by individuals) 3. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Mobile-Ad-Spend-Top-100-Billion-Worldwide-2016-51-of-Digital- Market/1012299 SHOPPING NEWS SOCIAL MORNING EVENINGNOON RECOGNITION
- 6. RECOGNITION Marketers have developed three different methods for overcoming these challenges and matching data with real people. PROBABILISTIC MATCHING: relies on making guesses about consumer identity, using a limited amount of third-party data. DETERMINISTIC MATCHING Perfect Knowledge (e.g., Facebook, Google): uses the data of authenticated, logged-in users for information about its users (including PII), across devices. DETERMINISTIC MATCHING Transaction-Based Data: links first-party transactional data to each consumer. Conversant uses both online and offline transactional data. THE IDEAL METHOD SHOULD BE ABLE TO RESPOND TO THE BIGGEST RECOGNITION CHALLENGES: MULTIPLE DEVICES PROBLEM: If a consumer’s devices aren’t connected to each other, they’ll see the same ads repeated, or see ads after they’ve purchased. SOLUTION: All devices should be connected to a known person (anonymously), who’s also connected to a rich data profile. GETTING THE RIGHT MESSAGE TO THE RIGHT DEVICE PROBLEM: Some people with multiple devices only make purchases on one of them. Your message may be ineffective on the device you’re running your ad on. SOLUTION: Understand which device is most important at which phase of the funnel, for each person. GETTING CONSISTENT MESSAGES ACROSS DEVICES PROBLEM: Pushing different products across someone’s devices dilutes your impact. SOLUTION: Keep the message consistent by matching at the person level, not just the device level. RECOGNITION
- 7. REACH Cross-device recognition isn’t strong if it only reaches a sliver of the relevant audience. For maximum impact, marketers need access to the right data sources that give them the scale. comScore ranks Conversant with reach that’s on par with Google. That allows us to not only recognize consumers across devices, but also reach them with relevant messages. It’s how we’re able to activate a much larger audience pool for our clients than anyone else in the market. Our reach fuels 80 billion online interactions per day (1 million every second), which in turn drives persistent recognition and understanding of individuals. CONVERSANT’S REACH Partners with NEARLY EVERY RTB EXCHANGE, plus the top social media publishers, video and app integrations Our own CONVERSANT PRIVATE EXCHANGE and private in-app exchange AD QUALITY MEASURES applied to all available inventory 6,000 direct publisher integrations across video, mobile display 3.3M websites 170K+ mobile apps REACH
- 8. ACCURACY Recognition and reach on their own aren’t enough. For marketing to work, our understanding of consumers has to be accurate enough to deliver messages that are relevant to each person. CONVERSANT’S RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY IS BASED ON VERIFIABLY ACCURATE, CLOSED-LOOP REPORTING OF ACTUAL CUSTOMER PURCHASES. Which also means that our network is built from consumers who are in-market, with disposable income to buy. ACCURACY
- 9. THE ACCURACY CHAIN We get a list of transactions from our 4,000 clients, including store, catalog, call center and website purchases. That’s 75M DAILY online and offline SKU-level purchases. We match each time our list of individuals transact, more than 3.5M TIMES A DAY. That’s 1.5x the transactions per second of Amazon. We also pull in: • 400 DAYS of each user’s web browsing and search activity. • Cross-channel marketing data: Engagement with brands ACROSS EMAIL, CATALOG, DIRECT MAIL AND LOYALTY. • Network publisher activity: 80B+ DAILY INTERACTIONS across web, mobile, video and social. AS A RESULT, OUR MATCHES ARE BASED ON THE HIGHEST QUALITY NAMES AND ADDRESSES. ACCURACY
- 10. ACCURACY Conversant’s solution solves the biggest accuracy challenges that marketers face. Here are some mistakes that other solutions make. 1. MATCHING ONLY WITH EMAIL ADDRESSES PROBLEM: Most Internet users have multiple email addresses, leading to duplication of IDs. SOLUTION: Marketers should match with online and offline transactional data, too. When consumers make purchases, they enter their real email and home addresses at checkout. It doesn’t get much more accurate than that. 2. A MATCH POOL THAT’S TOO SMALL PROBLEM: Reduced campaign potential. SOLUTION: Marketers should use a quality match pool, filled with people who have high household incomes and a history of transacting online. 3. MATCHING WITH THIRD-PARTY COOKIES PROBLEM: Since Safari rejects third-party cookies, these matches exclude 35% of educated, high-income individuals. SOLUTION: Marketers should work with a partner that knows how to reach users on all browsers, including Safari, on display and mobile. ACCURACY
- 11. PERSISTENCE Consumers’ activity is always changing, online and off. Data only stays strong if we maintain a persistent link with them over time. As we mentioned earlier, each person is linked to an average of 19 cookies monthly. And those disappear an average of every 7 weeks. Conversant doesn’t rely on cookies alone; we tie other online activities, plus transactions (online and offline), to our consumer IDs. This not only allows us to carry on conversations with the same customers for years (even in the face of cookie decay), and also allows us to make year-over-year comparisons. Inability to reach consumers over the long-term, eliminating the chance of a true connection. Deleted Cookies New Home Address Lost, Broken Replaced Devices Behavior That Isn’t Compatible With Cookie Tracking PERSISTENCE
- 12. PRIVACY Excelling at recognition, reach, accuracy and persistence is difficult. But it’s even more of a challenge to do it in a privacy framework. Data should always be scrubbed of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) before it’s used. This is an industry best practice that allows data to safely reach across networks. Conversant solves privacy in 17 steps, including having a company-wide Chief Privacy Officer and complying fully with voluntary industry guidelines for Consumer Privacy Notice and Choice. CONVERSANT PRIVACY AT A GLANCE We use anonymous, non-PII Our client data is stored with logical separation We’re Certified Information Privacy Professionals We’re participants in the Digital Advertising Alliance’s AdChoices program PRIVACY
- 13. CONVERSANT’S SOLUTION BASED ON ONE VIEW Now that we’ve explored the five keys to connecting with real people, compare how well Conversant’s solution stacks up against a fragmented solution that uses a DMP, DSP and onboarder. FRAGMENTED SOLUTION CONVERSANT RECOGNITION Only offers a segment-level view of consumers Recognizes consumers at the person level REACH Only reaches consumers as they interact in one place Reaches consumers across channels and media where they spend their time ACCURACY Low accuracy rates due to matching with cookies Verifies accuracy with actual consumer purchases PERSISTENCE Cold, inactionable profiles that don’t update Profiles update continually, as consumers take more actions online and off PRIVACY No guarantee of long-term privacy Maintains an opt-out over long periods of time
- 14. AN EXAMPLE OF OUR SOLUTION IN ACTION A major office-supply retailer was having issues with connecting to consumers. They were using a combination of a DMP, DSP and onboarder to match their 12 million customer records. This fragmented solution allowed them to match and reach only 25% of them. We quickly matched 73% of their customers. And the following year, we could still connect with 80% of the verified consumers, vs. their previous 32%. OVERALL, WE INCREASED THEIR YEAR-OVER-YEAR VERIFIED AUDIENCE 8 TIMES OVER. THAT’S OVER 3.8 MILLION PEOPLE WHO WERE UNREACHABLE BEFORE OUR PARTNERSHIP. 5.4M 3.0M 1.8M RECOGNITION 12-Month Buyers REACH Last 90 Days ACCURACY Verified Individuals PRIVACY PERSISTENCE 365-Day Retention 45% Matched CONVERSANT FRAGMENTED SOLUTION STARTING WITH 12M CUSTOMER RECORDS Maintain an opt-out over long periods of time No guarantee of long-term privacy 8.8M 5.8M 5.5M 4.4M 73% Matched 570K
- 15. CONCLUSION With the endless amount of consumer data out there, it’s a challenge to grab it, sort it and match it to the right people, to message them one-to-one at scale, in real-time. And the future will only bring us more data and more ways to reach people, with smart TVs, appliances, wearables and other touchpoints. But by working with Conversant, the challenges become opportunities to expand your reach. You can always message your audience at the person level, increasing your ROAS and brand love. Good relationships with consumers take more than good algorithms. They take the work of experts to combine large data sets, multiple devices, the right privacy infrastructure and a massive media network. When looking for a partner to help you speak one-to-one with millions, don’t settle for anything less than the best.
- 16. THE 5 KEYS TO CONNECTING WITH REAL PEOPLE HOW TO RECOGNIZE AND REACH MILLIONS OF CONSUMERS ACROSS THEIR DEVICES, MEDIA AND CHANNELS, OVER LONG PERIODS OF TIME. ABOUT CONVERSANT Conversant is the leader in personalized digital marketing, transforming the industry through cutting-edge technology, bold creative and a staggering amount of data. Its roster of 4,000 clients includes 400+ blue chip brands and 65 of the Internet Retailer Top 100. Coupled with the world’s largest affiliate marketing network, CJ Affiliate, they drive incremental sales better than anyone. Conversant is a division of Epsilon, the global leader in creating customer connections that build brand and business equity. For more information, please visit conversantmedia.com Phone: Toll Free: (877) 361-3316 Tel: (818) 575-4500 Email: sales@conversantmedia.com CONVERSANT, LLC. 30699 Russell Ranch Road Suite 250 Westlake Village, CA 91362 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Raju Malhotra is Senior Vice President, Products for Conversant and is responsible for all global product investments and development. Mr. Malhotra is a leader in the advertising technology industry and has an impressive track record of launching innovative products during the past two decades as a product and engineering executive. He’s worked in senior positions at Microsoft, McKinsey and several other companies. He has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an undergraduate degree in computer engineering from the National Institute of Technology in India. You can follow Raju on Twitter at @RajuMalhotra or contact him at rmalhotra@conversantmedia.com.