The advertising industry’s shift toward a privacy-first ecosystem has pushed marketing teams into a state of testing and experimentation. Between third-party cookies and the exclusion of standard identifiers such as mobile IDs, marketers are striving to find targeting solutions that are able to reach the right audience at scale and with a high degree of accuracy while prioritizing people’s privacy .
In 2022, the advertising ecosystem is filled with identity solutions that include ID graphs and tools from multiple technology vendors, data clean rooms, and first-party data matching via walled gardens such as Google and Facebook. Marketing teams are testing many of these tactics, considering that there may not be an end-all-be-all identification solution that provides an unobstructed view of the first-party data they’re using.
Blaine Britton, senior vice president of data strategy at Strista, a data-driven marketing cloud provider, said there is an argument against using multiple vendor IDs or walled garden solutions because it can create unnecessary barriers for advertisers.
“Targeting solutions owned by technology vendors capture the spirit the industry is trying to achieve – a unified ID that marketers can build solutions for – but they can create complications for publishers and advertisers,” Britton said. . “Each vendor is vying for their solution to become the standard, and the approach requires multiple middlemen who handle the data and the increase in ID sync complexity across channels leads to the inevitable crash. Publisher and Brand Bus They want to match their user data where they find overlap, and have the opportunity to streamline the process through having clear mechanisms for owning and using their data.
Amidst the complexities of testing new identity solutions, marketers are closer to a straightforward strategy of combining their first-party customer relationship management (CRM) data with hashed or encrypted email data to segment audiences and find new targeted advertising opportunities effectively. are coming.
Implementing Email Data in a Digital Targeting Scenario
First-party, opt-in email data is a vital resource for marketers to reach their most relevant audiences. Even if users ultimately decide to opt out of receiving future campaigns, marketers are still required to maintain data in their systems so that the opt-out can be respected if the individual has multiple emails or contacts. has other points.
“The advantage that marketers have with using their email data in a universally accepted encrypted form is that they can honor account updates and changes at the user level, rather than just individual PII variables,” Britton said. “Marketers collect explicit opt-ins from people who receive value exchange for that information. If they know who their current customer base is and who isn’t, they can more quickly update, You can add insights or remove people from campaigns without having to send visitor information through multiple parties.”
Still, a key strategy (and challenge) for marketers is finding new and creative ways to encourage people to share their emails or get back to communication. Establishing trust between users – that is, brands will use them responsibly if they share their emails, and their email data will not be resold – is also important in maintaining users’ goodwill and permission to receive future ads. Is. Solutions to in-game challenges include database technology partners that can help advertisers respect user opt-outs and provide a more comprehensive picture of who a customer is, along with details such as demographics and household information based on public data. can.
Brian Linn, senior vice president of product management and advanced advertising sales at TelevisaUnivision, taps into the company’s first-party data across all touchpoints and Sterista to support its privacy-first data strategy. He said, “The Hispanic market now represents 20% of the total population and is growing, it is imperative that marketers take advantage of data sets that are representative and of verifiable quality to ensure they reach the full Hispanic community.” reaching up.”
Britton et Striista said large companies specializing in research and consulting want to help advertisers in a variety of industries. These companies approach technology partners to help reconcile US consumers’ ability to connect to an authoritative base file and different data sets.
“Say these companies want to reach people who have expressed interest in financial markets. That data may be available, but it depends on very unique identifiers, such as a business email,” Britain said. “A company can then use a technology solution to make the base audience and layer interesting, but smaller data sets from specific data providers to create an authoritative CRM database.”
For brands that have a customer file by email but want to better understand the customer, they are working with technology partners to analyze their PII and create a more sustainable one with alternative contacts for future targeting. Developing the identity layer. From there, they can gain more insights from different data providers, building on publicly available information such as social media handles and phone numbers.
Building on first-party data and email targeting strategies
In the future, marketing teams may streamline their search for privacy-friendly targeting strategies and audience addresses by activating email data with the support of technical partners. The following insights are helping teams advance their strategies:
- Having a single email for a consumer isn’t the end-all for a brand to effectively activate that data. Marketers account for business emails, personal emails or emails that are used specifically to receive promotions to build up a complete picture of the user.
- The marketing team is looking for database technology partners who can help them be more nuanced with their PII, providing reports that display demographics based on age, gender and interests. These reports help brands prove that their partners truly understand the brand’s audience and how to reach them.
- Teams from the marketing and technical partner parties are working to improve the way user opt-outs are handled, establishing strategies to remove email from their systems as quickly as possible to respect the wishes of their customers .
Advertisers are applying this information to their email targeting strategies to more effectively and efficiently navigate the complex landscape of privacy-compliant identity solutions – a practice that is critical to reaching the right audience in 2022 and beyond. Will happen.
