During my recent speaking session at the Digital Pharma East Conference, I shared with attendees how to make the 1:You vision a reality.
As a reminder, 1:You means delivering the products and services each actual customer wants or needs – not as a member of a segment but as a single unique person. To do 1:You marketing, you must be able to unite anonymous views of each customer with an actual robust individual profile — and deliver tailored products and services in response.
Thus, identity and a unified view of the customer are at the center of everything.
To make 1:You work, you need a proven recognition process ... we need to know who YOU are. It sounds easy. Start with customer data integration (CDI) and data hygiene, and you can get a full view of one customer, across all your data silos. But in real life, this is no easy feat.
Typically you have multiple records for each individual stored in different technologies, applications and systems and data silo’d in multiple channels. So you need a recognition system — a way to compare all these records, side-by-side, to get to that ‘golden record’.
Let’s further explore.
During my session, I presented this slide that reflects how identity is at the center.
Here, our client recognized Jane Smith and Jane Johnson as separate customer records because they have different last names and addresses. But from taking a closer look, you realize that Jane Johnson is Jane Smith’s maiden name.
With a robust data hygiene process, marketers are able to match Jane Smith to her earlier records, which unifies her identity and generates additional contact points (such as a second email address and/or phone number) so you can match even more records.
Additionally, leveraging Jane Smith’s digital identity, we can recognize her on every device she has, and at her home and multiple office addresses, and then use all this data to further dedupe records and create a more efficient view.
Integrating Jane’s online non-personally identifiable information (NPII) data with her offline personally identifiable information (PII) data gives a true 360-degree view enabling marketers to communicate on a 1:You level.
So the learning here is you can create a very robust identity story when these three things come together:
1) customer data integration (CDI) and data hygiene
2) contact data enrichment
3) digital identity resolution
This standardization, cleansing, consolidating and filling in of the identity gaps, both online and offline, enables your omnichannel orchestration and lets you to create immersive compelling individual experiences (and measure their performance accurately).
Remember, data lets you know your audience but it’s your people, the process you define along with the marketing technology that allows you to deliver.
People: As it relates to your people (your team), make sure to clearly communicate what’s coming next and avoid surprises. Consider using a RACI matrix. If employees don’t know what they own or influence, it will be chaos.
Process: For the process component, look for efficiency and clarity with your workflow and task management systems, consult early with the med-legal team and make the hard decisions on standards for how you use your content management system.
For example, many clients ask how they will ever get enough content to personalize their marketing. Often I recommend they decouple content. That is, start with a content inventory, take content that’s currently usable in only one channel and atomize it to make it reusable in templates across multiple channels. Get it tagged with how and where it can be used. Decide who it’s approved for and in what channel or country. The goal is to be able to assemble on the fly.
Technology: And last but not least, remember that your technology and actionable data are key and the identity layer is in the center. Without it, you don’t know who you’re dealing with and can’t provide customers with what they’re looking for.
So are you ready to make the 1:You change? Make it your mission, and don’t just work inside the mission of your own department. Think ‘mission holistic’. Plan your work, then work your plan. And take your time …. it’s okay to take a crawl-walk-run-fly approach.