Unleashing the Power of Identity Data: How to Find Your Next Big Customer

You don’t need to rely on walled gardens or third-party cookies to launch effective, personalized campaigns. Leave it all in the hands of identity resolution.

Why use walled gardens and third-party cookies when you can leverage identity data?

Identity resolution is the answer to your targeting problems–not only does it adhere to privacy laws like the CCPA, but it also allows you to launch hyper-personalized campaigns on the back of your own first-party data. As a result, you get to know your potential customers on a deeper level. 

Trying to unlock highly personalized campaigns? Identity data is the key.

So what is identity resolution–and what’s identity data? 

Identity resolution, put simply, is the process of connecting everything you know about a customer across different touchpoints and creating one identity profile with all of it.

These different touchpoints could be across different channels (like on the web, email, and social media) or devices (phones, laptops, and CTVs). All this information turns into identity data when it’s tied to one user–along with their name, email address, phone number, and so on. This online identity is then appended to offline data, too–like physical mailing addresses.

But wait–that sounds like a lot of personally identifiable information. Isn’t identity data and resolution supposed to comply with privacy laws and just plain ethics around sensitive data?

That’s where encryption and anonymization comes in. In order to effectively protect all the sensitive data that’s involved with identity resolution, all the data is effectively anonymized and encrypted–ensuring no personal data is leaked or used in uncompliant ways.

These days, identity resolution is the most privacy-compliant and available solution to many advertisers. Goodbye, third-party cookies. Sayonara, walled gardens.

Why rely on identity data?

Identity resolution vendors and platforms do the hard work for you–they connect your customers’ identifiers across different devices and channels into one profile. 

Not only is the work they do scalable, but it’s accurate and privacy-compliant. When you work with an identity resolution partner, you get a complete view of your customers and deep insight into how they act across channels.

Besides not having to rely on third-party cookies or the walled gardens of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, marketers that partner with identity resolution vendors also benefit in many more ways:

•  You get to take advantage of all your first-party data.

Identity resolution uses all the first-party data you collect, and through a process called data enhancement, improves that data through additional sources and processes. In the end, you get robust profiles of your customers underscored by the data they’ve already shared with you.

• You get a combined view of customers’ online and offline identities.

Identity platforms relate a customer’s online habits with their offline traits, tying it all to an anonymized ID profile so you can get even more insight into who your customers are and how they behave.

• You get to recognize customers across different channels.

Your targeting strategies and messaging will get a boost by becoming more cohesive and responsive to your customers’ interactions and behavior.

• You get to launch hyperpersonalized campaigns.

It’s 2025. Customers have long responded better to personalized campaigns than generic ones–and customer expectations continue to grow in terms of what they expect from the companies they follow. Personalization is simply table stakes for a good campaign, and, given growing AI capabilities, automated hyperpersonalization is going to quickly become the norm.

How do you responsibly collect and clean identity data?

Identity resolution is built on the basis of accurate, verified, first-party data. In the data onboarding process that happens when you partner with an identity resolution vendor, the data is first securely transferred, and then subjected to a process of data enhancement.

This process includes cleaning the data–removing duplicate entries and outdated or inaccurate identifiers, like email addresses that no one checks anymore or even typos. Lookalike profiles are combined and ensured to be up-to-date.

In the following steps, the data is encrypted and anonymized, ensuring it complies with privacy laws and is secure against data breaches. It’s additionally fortified with outside data that expands and fills out a customer’s identity profile–like with additional email addresses they use or whether they’re part of a household.

How do you use identity data to build accurate customer profiles?

Accurate customer profiles are ensured through the constant real-time updates and processes that occur within an identity resolution platform. Each customer profile gets a unique, anonymized identifier that is constantly updated, so customers get a singular view of each customer. The first-party data and additional identity signals are the moving parts that get connected within an identity resolution platform, fit together like puzzle pieces, and then cleaned, anonymized, and enhanced to produce the customer profiles that can underlie hyper-personalized marketing campaigns across channels. 

How do you target the right audience segments?

Once you have your identity profiles organized in an identity resolution platform, you can divide these profiles into segments that match the ideal customer your campaign is targeting–based on whichever identifiers you choose, from age and other traits to interests and past purchases. Targeting the right audience segments is a matter of knowing your audience and optimizing your campaign in real-time, in response to signals from your prospective customers across channels, which an identity resolution platform can help you achieve.

Additionally, identity platforms can help you delve into lookalike modeling, because you can use current insights on your customers to find future customers who behave similarly to them or have similar traits. Using the deep insight provided by identity data, finding the right audience segments becomes a much simpler process.

About Stirista’s solution

OMNA, Stirista’s identity resolution platform, is the industry’s first real-time identity graph. It’s built from a stack of component graphs including ABM, viewership, IP and device data–and they aren’t welded shut like with other ID graph providers. If you don’t need the entire identity graph, you can access any of our four major component graphs separately. Our privacy-compliant data collection, matching, and hygiene methodology is unique and leads to significant increases in campaign reach. 

Need an identity resolution partner? We’re right here!