CDP Institute

Yesterday’s report on V12’s product to identify anonymous Web site visitors was vastly more popular than I expected. So it’s less surprising that just 5% of respondents to this Merkle survey say they identify unlogged-in customers extremely well. A shocking 68% say they can’t personalize their customers’ experiences even though 91% agree that getting digital experience right is critical for brand survival.

Marketers’ famous herd instinct is synchronizing their response to coronavirus. First came a rash of announcements offering remote conferencing and collaboration systems, then a slew of chatbots answering coronavirus questions. This week’s trend is studies on coronavirus’ impact on consumer behavior, including increased online sales of groceries, fitness equipment and computers; more video streaming; distrust in government (especially in the U.S.); and expectation that employers will act responsibly. Click for studies from Adobe, Amperity, Edelman, First Insight, Kantar, Placer.ai, Toluna, Upfluence, Yotpo, and Yotta.

Few things about online marketing are more frustrating than attracting someone to your Web site and watching them leave without identifying themselves. Marketing data company V12 has launched Signals WebID, which it says can identify up to half of visitors and then reach them through email, direct mail, and social campaigns. The magic comes from their consumer data sets.

What about attracting those visitors in the first place? SEMrush has that down to a button-push: they just released Traffic Jet, which automatically creates, tests, and optimizes online ads across platforms including Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Users just specify a URL category, target locations, and budget. Setting up a campaign takes ten seconds.

Of course, the button-push you really care about is the shopping cart checkout. Fast lets buyers do that in one click on any Web site that uses their technology. Or they will, when Fast Checkout launches in the coming weeks. Oh, and they just raised a $20 million Series A.

As customer data gains more attention for corporate IT departments, traditional data management vendors are stepping up their game. Here’s a set of updates from Informatica, including expanded data parsing, cleaning, and deduplication. Most intriguingly, they’ve also added connectivity Salesforce and to Microsoft’s Common Data Model.

Your new best friend, Zoom, has been gossiping about you behind your back: Vice discovered that Zoom’s iOS app sent behavior details (but not identities) to Facebook when people used the Facebook log-in. That particular leak has now been fixed but Zoom has a history of privacy issues. Here’s some advice from Wired on how to reduce your risk. https://www.wired.com/story/tips-for-using-zoom/

And for a bit of instant nostalgia: remember when we traveled to industry events and saw live people up close? Event tech vendor Bizzabo just published a survey about such craziness, finding that 85% of respondents considered events critical to success and nearly two-thirds planned to increase event budgets this year. One big trend was increased integration between event systems and CRM and marketing automation platforms.

Let’s take a break from coronavirus to remember the other apocalypse: the end of third party cookies. Apple just moved that date forward by announcing that its Safari browser will now block all third party cookies by default. But Safari’s market share is under 4%. https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx Google Chrome, with 68% share, has said it will stop supporting third party cookies next year.

You may or may not mourn the loss of third party cookies. Some unambiguously cheerful news is that CDP Blueshift has added channel engagement scores to its predictive modeling studio. The customizable models estimate how likely each customer is to engage on each channel and can be used to automatically pick the best one.

Back to coronavirus. CDP Optimove has launched a live daily webcast on how the pandemic is impacting marketers. Other CDP vendors are also addressing the topic but I’m not aware of anyone else doing it daily.

Many marketers are torn right now between putting out messages that show they are addressing coronavirus and just saying nothing.