Connected Recognition

Merkle’s Connected Recognition process manages and associates identifiers across channels and media to fuel the execution and optimization of integrated marketing and sales activities.

There is an astounding amount of available data about every person. From traditional census data to emotional and personality-driven insights, it is theoretically possible for a brand to paint a highly detailed, accurate picture of each of their customers. But this promised land of insight requires several often-siloed departments to share information, not to mention significant technical and process implements to collect, store, and interpret the data.

As a result, marketers resort to sub-optimal point solutions. For example, many brands use a small purpose-built data integration or feed email remarketing. This typically leverages an email identifier only. Similarly, for site optimization, marketers are beginning to leverage personalization, but typically ignore the rich CRM data that should inform decisioning. Each approach ignores valuable amounts of data related to the history of activity, depth of the interaction, and breath of insights available through more robust linking approaches. Connected Recognition (cR) overcomes this and more.

The Identity Map

The solution creates an identity map across all party or user identifiers that become tied to an individual. This map becomes your reference base by cross-referencing all identity attributes related to both “known” and “unknown” data. A master party (or customer) identifier is generated to leverage all possible information from both strong and weak identifiers.

• Strong identifiers are those that can be linked to an offline user identity in a customer data file (such as name and address). These include transaction IDs such as online order, registration or lead IDs, as well as account login numbers, customer numbers, service tags, etc.
• Weak IDs are the primary identifiers found in digital interactions. By their nature, they are anonymous and often very transient. Examples of weak IDs include IP addresses, cookies, device fingerprints and social login or handle.

The Connected Event Stream

Once the identity map is created, the Connected Recognition solution creates an event stream where all customer engagement is tied back to the master identifier. This event stream is created for all “known” parties, whether they are repeat customers or anonymous parties that visited the website. All consumer interactions can be tied to the event stream to support integrated, cross media and channel marketing decisions. This includes outbound marketing touches such as direct mail, display impressions, email, or mobile texts, and inbound interactions such as important events that occurred while a consumer browsed the website – downloading a white paper, registering for email, browsing a product or filling out an information request form. The final output is something that looks like an active timeline for each consumer with the brand.

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