Cannabis Identity Resolution and The Customer Journey

Future Proof Your Advertising Tech to Compete in A Cookieless World

If you work in digital marketing, you are no doubt recalibrating your marketing strategies to navigate the sea of data privacy laws and prepare for the loss of the third-party cookie. This is a huge deal for marketers across all industries, and cannabis is no exception.

This post will examine the available cookie-less attribution methods so marketers can preserve their precious data-tracking insights into consumer preferences and on-site behaviors.

Identity resolution, identity stitching, and ID matching are the keys to future-proofing your advertising tech and overcoming the loss of third-party cookie data. These methods allow you to gain a single view of each customer across multiple devices and visibility into the touch points that propelled them on their path to purchase.

These evolutions in tech will allow you to continue tracking web visitors and purchase behaviors so you have the data you need to optimize user experiences and increase the effectiveness of your customer acquisition and retention marketing campaigns.

Identity Resolution and The Cannabis Display Advertising Landscape

Identity resolution helps to match a single customer profile to a user's engagement history with your programmatic display ads, so you have a complete understanding of the number of touch points each customer had before making an online purchase, walking into a dispensary, or signing up for your delivery service.

Uses for identity resolution

With the number of household devices that customers use averaging 11 per household, a consumer journey is likely to occur across various devices. Here are some everyday use cases for identity resolution:

1. Understand anonymous site visitors - the average website sees 97-98% as anonymous visitors. These could be new visitors, those who haven't converted, or current customers using a different device. To understand customer behaviors and device preferences, you can use identity resolution to assign anonymous data with known visitor data.

2. Consistent customer experiences—Customers aren't using just one touchpoint in their interaction with your business. You must ensure they have a cohesive experience with your brand across mobile apps, browsers, desktops, CTV, and more. This is done by cross-referencing IP addresses, digital fingerprints, emails, etc., to any new device used for browsing or purchase. This way, you can avoid duplicating user profiles and assign any new devices to the profile that was initially created.

3. Marketing effectiveness—Recognizing that a visitor to your website is a repeat customer reduces ad spending related to poor data. Identity resolution will merge disconnected profiles from various devices. You'll be able to ensure the right customers are receiving the right advertising messages and have less wasted budget.

4. Optimizing advertising performance—Having customer information categorized in one place allows for campaign metrics like reach and frequency to be measured and optimized more effectively.

How is Identity Matching Done?

Identities can be matched into a single user profile by cross-referencing the following data points:

Device Data: IP Address, Mobile Device IDs, desktop, tablet, CTV devices.

Digital Identity Data: Web registration data, email address, social media links, etc.

Location Data: Phone number, work address, home address, etc.

The real strength of identity resolution is combining all this information for one holistic view of your client. On many sites today, the only way data is connected to a user is if they've already made a profile on the website. But that's not necessary with identity resolution technology.

With identity resolution, you can collect information and attribute it to a single user, even if they don't have a profile on your site yet. Regardless of whether a user is browsing with or without an account, identity resolution tools can file their data away in the same place. That's even true across multiple devices and digital touch points.

Why is Identity Resolution Important in the Cannabis Space?

Identity resolution is a massive boon for online marketers. Collecting and organizing data helps improve your customers' overall experience and engage more effectively via advertising campaigns.

Once you've collected and compiled all of this data, you can leverage your insights to build stronger relationships with cannabis consumers and communicate marketing messages to the right audiences at the right time and on their preferred devices.

Additionally, identity resolution can make online advertising more efficient. Did you know that $0.21 out of every dollar a company spends on marketing media is effectively wasted? It's true. However, identity resolution solves this wasted media money, creating a more effective marketing experience.

Identity Stitching and ID Matching for Cannabis Companies

Identity graphs use two types of data-matching algorithms: deterministic and probabilistic. These algorithms can be used together or separately to stitch user data and create profiles.

• Deterministic matching is used when explicit, exact matches between two data sets resolve the same user across different devices and channels. It merges new data by searching records for matches on device IDs, hashed email addresses, phone numbers, or log-in data.

• Probabilistic matching resolves identities based on predictive algorithms that analyze users across multiple platforms, channels, and devices. Depending on what predictive models are used, your business will have different levels of statistical accuracy. Data signals such as IP addresses, device fingerprinting, operating system, or location are analyzed to create potential connections between user profiles.

While deterministic identity resolution gives your cannabis business more accuracy versus scale, probabilistic will allow you to reach more people but may include users outside your target audience.

Identity stitching occurs in real time, and profiles created can be used immediately to make personalization, remarketing, and retargeting efforts more effective. Additionally, knowing where your customer is in their buyer's journey will help you create campaigns directed at critical stages of their journey.

How does Identity Matching Play Into Omnichannel Marketing and Revenue Attribution?

Identity matching can play into an omnichannel marketing strategy in several key ways. For example, this technique allows content and advertisements to be delivered based on the user’s current stage in the buyer’s journey. If a user visits your menu and adds a few items to their cart but doesn’t check out, you can serve them ads focused on retargeting abandoned carts.

Identity matching can also ensure that this personalized brand experience stays consistent across various platforms and devices. Since nearly 90 percent of customers expect personalization, identity matching is critical to your cookieless advertising strategy.

Identity matching also plays a huge role in attribution. Often, gaining insight into a campaign's ROI is challenging as data points collected don't appear to relate to one another at first glance. However, identity matching can help organize these data points into a cohesive set, giving marketers a better understanding of the key influencing moments that lead each user to purchase.

Piggybacking on this, identity matching can help marketers improve their future cannabis programmatic display ad campaigns. If you can identify what works and what doesn't during a campaign, you can create lookalike audiences and campaigns for other products later.

Conclusion

Using identity resolution and identity graphs for your cannabis business will help you engage with customers across various touch points while being mindful of privacy concerns.

There's no doubt that identity resolution will have a huge place in the future of marketing in the cannabis space, but that doesn't mean your cannabis company should learn how to perform these techniques in-house. That's a full-time job in and of itself and will take away from your primary task: connecting with your target audiences and creating amazing cannabis products.

Instead, let the experts at MediaJel handle identity matching, resolution, and stitching for your cannabis company. Our custom-built advertising platform gives cannabis businesses access to the third-party data required to connect with larger cannabis audiences and multi-touch attribution insights to make smarter revenue-driving marketing decisions.

Ready to learn more? Reach out for more information about identity resolution and your cannabis customer's journey.