Why is understanding your customers so difficult in today’s digital landscape?

With data deprecation, evolving consumer privacy laws and an ever-increasing amount of digital channels, brands struggle with holistically understanding and interacting with their customers.

Brands that can effectively execute person-centric advertising have bigger gains and stronger customer loyalty. According to McKinsey research, 71% of consumers expect personalization, and 76% of consumers get frustrated when they don’t find it.

Therein lies the problem: Brands that know their customers better deliver more effective messages. Without that 360-view, marketers risk wasting ad dollars by sending messages to people who don’t care (and won’t buy).

While customer data platforms (CDPs) are often seen as simple organizational tools of a brand’s customer file, Epsilon’s Digital CDP enhances a brand’s first-party data and paves the way for brands to deliver 1:1 messages that resonate with in-market customers on the right devices and at the right time.

To create a solid digital advertising strategy, you need a solid first-party data strategy

First-party data is an essential part of a brand’s understanding of a customer, but many struggle to effectively use it. That’s because their first-party data is often incomplete, duplicative or riddled with inaccuracies, making it difficult to connect a customer’s journey across paid and owned channels.

This leads to a reliance on generalized audience segments and a channel-by-channel approach to marketing (think about your email marketing manager, versus your paid media manager, versus your brand marketing lead) where content and messages can’t connect to one other and don’t truly resonate with individuals.  

Brands often turn to marketing technology to streamline and organize their first-party data, but not all solutions are created equal. A CDP can collect and unify customer data to build a single view of each customer. But to get a complete view of each person—who they are outside of a brand’s limited view of them—a CDP needs a strong foundation of identity resolution.

Identity resolution can clean, complete, align and enrich a brand’s first-party data, transforming it into a powerful tool to activate better media. Epsilon’s Digital CDP uses hundreds of industry-specific attributes spanning demographic, lifestyle and transactional insights to improve the quality, depth and breadth of a brand’s first-party data.   

Through CORE ID, we can connect with real people, not just anonymous cookies or devices, eliminating duplicate records and taking the guess work out of what resonates with individuals. This means higher performing ads, an overall better customer experience and a reduction in ad waste.

Activation matters

When you’re activating your media, you want to make sure you’re getting in front of the right customers, which—again—comes back to having identity resolution built into your CDP for actually executing a campaign with the latest, greatest information available on who is (or isn’t) in market. 

Let’s consider three things:

1. Knowing what’s relevant: Having a strong foundation through a CDP allows you to speak to customers as individuals, and also determine which messages are relevant to them and on which devices.
2. Most digital media vendors are speaking to devices or cookies: This can cause vendors to think one person is in fact five separate people, creating mis-messaging, ad waste and a disjointed customer experience when it comes to actually activating your campaign.  
3. Digital advertising comes at a cost: Brands want to make the most out of their media budgets. They waste money when they talk to one person as if they’re several people, send irrelevant messages and miss in-market customers ready to buy. Having strong foundational first-party data lets them streamline their digital ad spend and know that they’re speaking to the right people.

Epsilon’s Digital CDP doesn’t rely on cookies or devices because it uses CORE ID, the industry-leading identity resolution solution based in transactions. When brands go to deploy their digital advertising, they have confidence they’re spending their ad dollars wisely because they’re talking to real in-market individuals who are ready to buy now.

A trusted tech solution from start to finish

Using that strong first-party data as a foundation to a digital media activation strategy sets brands up for success, and with Epsilon, they can do both things in one tech stack. Epsilon Digital CDP has native activation into Epsilon Digital, meaning the enriched and complete data from the Digital CDP can plug directly into Epsilon Digital.

This not only helps launch multiple campaigns across multiple channels but also eliminates loss of data and fidelity. With powerful AI and machine learning, brands can connect with their most valuable in-market with customers dynamic messages and creative when they’re most receptive and ready to buy. And thanks to CORE ID, brands get persistent, person-based data.

The result? Our clients reach 2-3x more customers with more personalized individual profiles than our competitors. These insights drive better and more useful real business outcomes, reduce ad waste and drive the business’ bottom line. Epsilon Digital also features detailed transaction data that illuminates every customer’s path to purchase, meaning brands know what’s working and why.

Digital CDP and Epsilon Digital combined enable brands to meet their strategic goals, whether it’s to connect with their customers more, accurately reach more of them or to drive brand interest. A strong CDP sets the stage for better media activation and bigger reach on the person-level.