Learn About Marketing Cloud Personalization
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the concept of identity in Marketing Cloud Personalization.
- Explain the Unified Customer Profile in Marketing Cloud Personalization.
- Recognize how Marketing Cloud Personalization stitches user profiles together.
What Is Identity?
It’s pretty satisfying to walk into a store or establishment and be greeted by name, knowing that everyone knows what you like and how you like it. This level of personalization is something customers have come to expect. But as you move away from a single point of interaction with your customers, how do you maintain a personal, connected experience, while meeting them where they are and knowing each person’s story?
To accomplish this, you need a complete picture of each customer based on the data you collect at each touchpoint: online, in store, through a loyalty program and CRM, through email, blog, or your call center. Wherever you interact with your customers, you have information about them that gives you part of their story. Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP) gathers this data in one place, creating a single customer identity. This makes it possible to understand everyone on an individual level so you can recognize and communicate with each one across channels, using strategies like personalization and tailored recommendations.
But how can you know the identity of each of the millions of customers interacting with your company and employees at different disparate touch points? After all, knowing someone on an individual level means you can better understand what resonates with them. MCP has an answer.
The Unified Customer Profile
At the heart of Marketing Cloud Personalization is the Unified Customer Profile, which is where information and identities come together to give you a detailed view of individuals and companies who interact with your brand or organization.
The Unified Customer Profile provides a comprehensive, holistic view of every visitor, customer, user, or account based on any online or offline interaction points. The data gathered from these online and offline sources can also be augmented by other data collected from other systems so you can truly see preferences, affinities, interaction history, and behavior at an individual or account level.
While the specific components of the Unified Customer Profile vary slightly by industry, you can see detailed information collected from each individual or account, including activity on your site or app, interaction timeline, purchases, geographic location, segments, and known preferences.
This single, comprehensive profile is the foundation of any data analysis effort or activation campaign. You can use it to determine things like:
- Whether each individual can qualify for different promotions
- Which product or content recommendations each individual should see
- Which communication channel is preferred
- When to send an email and which one to send based on information gathered across all channels
- Whether they are online or offline
The profile includes data to help you understand the prospect or the customer, such as purchases, downloads, subscriptions or applications, browsing history, email interactions, attributes, loyalty membership and status, interests and preferences, browser type, location, demographics, and predictive scores. It also compiles identifying data elements that provide a connection between different records, including cookies, email address, full name, physical address, phone number, and system ID.
How MCP Resolves Multiple Profiles
Your goal is to have a single profile for each individual, but it’s still possible to end up with multiple profiles for the same person. How does Marketing Cloud Personalization resolve these multiple profiles? When data comes from different sources, it needs to be stitched together into one single profile. This is simple when there’s clear, identifying information, like the same email address. But not every person clearly identifies themselves in every channel in every interaction. The separate profiles created in these examples all contain important customer data, but each one doesn’t account for the person’s true and complete identity.
- Suppose a B2B site visitor completes a form to download a report and includes her name and her email address. Marketing Cloud Personalization can now identify her when she’s on the site using that browser. However, sometime later, she uses a different browser to visit the site again. While her named profile still exists, she now has a new profile that captures her website activity in her second browser as an anonymous user.
- Now, consider a retail store shopper who makes several in-store purchases with his loyalty number. Your retail company has his name and other identifying information through the loyalty program, along with a history of his in-store purchases. Later, he browses the ecommerce site multiple times but never makes a purchase or identifies himself in any way, so his in-store profile remains separate from his anonymous website profile.
- Finally, imagine if a customer of your bank or insurance company receives an email from your firm, which she reads prior to clicking on your website. Later she phones the call center to discuss the same topic covered in the email, and she’s researching the company website. In this scenario, she may be seen as three different people based on the interaction across the company’s email, web, and call center systems. How do you weave together all the interactions your customer has with your channels to truly know their identity?
Marketing Cloud Personalization stitches profiles together when the data becomes available to do so. For example, consider a visitor named Daniel Exposito who has one Daniel Exposito profile and one anonymous profile in Marketing Cloud Personalization. Daniel’s named profile encompasses data from several different channels, including store, call center, and mobile app. Daniel also has an anonymous web profile because he never identified himself on his laptop. Marketing Cloud Personalization merges these profiles together once he identifies himself in some way, such as clicking through an email to access the website on his laptop. Once it becomes clear that the anonymous person is Daniel Exposito, both profiles are merged to form a full picture of Daniel.
To do this, Marketing Cloud Personalization constantly monitors identifying information and then uses deterministic matching to decide whether two or more profiles represent the same identity. If they do, Marketing Cloud Personalization stitches these different profiles together based on clear, unique identifiers, such as Salesforce CRM contact ID or email address.
What’s Next?
Now you know all about the Unified Customer Profile and how Marketing Cloud Personalization stitches multiple profiles together in a single, cohesive profile of individual users. Next up, learn how to configure the Identity System within Marketing Cloud Personalization.