It’s common knowledge among digital marketers that customer journeys traverse multiple channels – online and offline. It’s also becoming a common expectation that those same customers expect the journey to be seamless from channel to channel – the so-called “Omni-channel” experience we’re hearing so much about.
The time is now for digital marketers and IT to work together to implement common customer ID’s as the basis for an Omni-channel strategy. If you use the Adobe Marketing Cloud, the introduction of the Marketing Cloud Organization ID (MCOrgID) is something that you should seriously look at using.
Investing in establishing and maintaining a customer ID is necessary for a variety of reasons because it lays the foundation for a modern digital marketing effort. Let’s take a couple of examples.
Vendor Management — More Accurate Attribution Models
First, you will be able to see how users move from one device to another. This is the basis for being able to have a more sophisticated attribution model beyond “first touch” or “last touch”. You can then create an attribution model that allows you to negotiate with vendors who compete over credit for conversions and leads.
For example, initial product investigations, social campaigns, and search generated traffic may do a great job of initiating a customer into a sales funnel on a mobile device, but people rarely purchase items from their cell phones on a first visit. Remarketing efforts and email campaigns (CRM) potentially could bring the customer back to complete the purchase on a laptop/desktop. Without a method of stitching these sessions together as the same person, the campaigns that initiated the process would not get any credit, and only those that closed the transaction would get attributed. This isn’t how customers behave in an omni-channel world.
Personalization
The customer ID is a critical piece of an omni-channel personalization strategy. If you engage prospects and customers across multiple devices and channels, personalization will be very limited without a customer ID. Every visit to a new channel means starting the relationship all over again. Your knowledge of the customer doesn’t flow from one device to another.
To be clear, personalization for digital marketers means “segment-based optimization.” As users enter and exit segments (usually based on some combination of actions taken, geography, and other easy-to-gather factors), the user-experience (UX) changes – different content, offers or even flows are presented. These changes are driven by historical knowledge of what works for the given segment (using tools like Adobe Target, Optimizely, Maxymizer among others).
For example, let’s say you have an ecommerce sporting goods store. You’ve created a segment of users who purchased kids snowboard boots last season. You know that kids quickly outgrow these boots with every season. There is an opportunity with that segment of customers every season. Maybe you create a “trade in” program. A customer ID would allow you to serve up that promotion across multiple channels at the right time.
Just the Beginning
This is just about scratching the surface. Enabling your organization to have the capabilities of finding insights by enabling this one metric available to your analytics group is crucial for your Marketing and much more. From design to targeting, the Customer ID is an essential piece of the web analytics puzzle that shouldn’t be missed.
If you happen to have Adobe Analytics and are using Dynamic Tag Management, you can take a look at our other blog posting about how to set up the Adobe Marketing Cloud ID. https://numericanalytics.com/adobe-marketing-cloud-visitor-id-implementation-with-dtm/
Further Reading
If you’re interested in Tag Management
Choosing a Tag Management System Part 1
Tag Management Use Cases: Choosing a TMS Part 2
Does TMS Create Independence from IT?
3 Reasons It Might be Time to Consider Tag Management
