Leveraging identity graphs within CDPs for advanced customer marketing

Remember cookies? I do, too. And now, perhaps the most significant shift affecting enterprise marketing teams (besides shrinking budgets, customers’ demand for more personalization, and the emergence of genAI, to name a few) is Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies.

The question on every marketer’s mind is: how do we create innovative, privacy-compliant, and personalized experiences for every one of our customers without being able to use cookies?

My answer is simple: marketers should lean into zero- and first-party data like they never have before.

Thankfully, martech tools like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) offer features like identity graphs to help identify anonymous and unauthenticated website visitors without relying on third-party cookies.

Using identity graphs can improve personalization in targeted campaigns and turn unknown website visitors into actionable customer profiles and tangible business opportunities.

In this blog post, I'll explain how using identity graphs in a CDP can empower marketers to unlock personalization within their marketing playbook to drive customer engagement.

The importance of identity graphs in customer marketing

An identity graph is a comprehensive database that aggregates various customer identifiers across multiple data sources and touchpoints around what we call a “stable identifier” at Simon Data. An identity graph is not just a collection of data interconnected identities. It also helps provide a unified, 360-degree view of each customer in real-time.

The true benefit of an identity graph is its ability to consolidate many pieces of customer data from several sources into a coherent whole.

Think of it as a puzzle, where each piece represents a different aspect of customer data — identifiers like email addresses and social media handles, devices ranging from smartphones to laptops, and behavioral data capturing every click, view, and interaction on the website.

When these pieces come together, they form a complete picture: a Customer 360, the holy grail for marketers looking to understand and engage with their audience effectively.

Customer 360s help marketers make sense of a customer’s journey across various touchpoints, like website visits, social media interactions, or online purchases, all of which contribute to the narrative of that customer’s relationship with a brand.

This is why identity graphs, which meticulously connect these various dots, can elevate the customer experience, regardless of the channel or device they use.

By using CDPs with identity graphs, marketers can go beyond traditional segmentation and targeting. They can recognize and reach their customers in a more personalized, meaningful, and timely way, delivering experiences that resonate and foster loyalty.

In a world where customers crave relevance and personalization and third-party data is restricted, identity graphs are a fundamental asset in any marketer’s arsenal.

Leveraging identity graphs within a CDP

There are many benefits to using a CDP with identity graphs within your marketing team. For one, composable CDPs sit on top of Cloud Data Warehouses (CDW) like Snowflake to access real-time customer data that marketers can activate. Identity graphs within CDPs then unlock that data’s full potential to drive measurable marketing success.

Identity graphs empower marketers with better personalization

I already mentioned that personalization is more important than ever for crafting experiences that resonate deeply with customers. Leveraging an identity graph in a CDP not only ensures that marketers reach the right people on the right devices in the right channels, but it enables them to deliver messages and offers that strike a chord with individual preferences and needs.

For example, with identity graphs and Customer 360s in place, you can easily craft an email campaign that addresses customers by name, references their recent interactions with their website, and recommends products based on past purchases.

This email will feel conversational rather than transactional by showcasing your customer’s unique journey with your brand.

Another way to leverage identity graphs is through the use of behavioral segmentation, which clusters customers based on their actions, such as purchase history or website engagement events.

This approach allows marketers to tailor campaigns that resonate with the specific experiences and interests of each group. This is where abandoned carts, price drops, or product recommendation emails come into play.

Beyond personalizing individual messages, using an identity graph with your CDP can help you power onsite personalization, serve recommendations across channels, and target specific segments with relevant ads in any of your paid media spend, ultimately helping you spend less while driving customer loyalty and lifetime value.

Using identifier enrichment to amplify paid media performance

Paid media is expensive and competitive, and, without the right tools in place, unsuccessful. In my experience, marketers who leverage accurate, in-depth data, such as hashed identifiers, in their paid marketing strategies drive the most impact.

Hashed identifier enrichment plays an important role when it comes to executing paid campaigns — particularly in amplifying paid social audiences and improving the overall performance of these campaigns.

By syncing additional hashed identifiers for a particular audience, marketers can significantly amplify their reach, which in turn can have a substantial impact on paid media match rates.

Hashed identifiers, such as hashed emails (HEMs) and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs), act as secure, privacy-compliant ways to match users across platforms without exposing personal information.

When these hashed identifiers are integrated into paid social campaigns, they enable marketers to connect with their audience more effectively, ensuring that the ad reaches the right individuals, on the right platform, at the right time.

Simon Data’s Match+, for example, offers a seamless way to do just that: enrich customer profiles with HEMs and MAIDs and sync them to paid media channels with the click of a button.

So, how exactly are HEMs and MAIDs beneficial? HEMs allow for secure, anonymized matching of users based on their email addresses across platforms and devices, while MAIDs offer a device-specific way to reach users, particularly valuable in mobile-centric campaigns.

These identifiers, when used correctly, respect user privacy (goodbye, cookies!) while providing marketers with the means to create coherent, cross-platform narratives.

One of the most compelling benefits of identifier enrichment is the substantial increase in paid media match rates. Match rates — which indicate the percentage of users from the target list that can be accurately identified on the advertising platform — are crucial for the success of retargeting campaigns.

Higher match rates mean that a larger portion of the existing customer base can be reached, ensuring that marketing spend is strategic. Ultimately, it minimizes waste by ensuring that ads are delivered to the customers most likely to engage and convert.

Using identity graphs to de-anonymize unknown website visitors

Anonymous website visitors can be the bane of a marketer’s existence. But, if you’re able to identify them, they can quickly become a boon to your business. The de-anonymization process transforms these unknown entities into recognizable, and, more importantly, actionable individuals.

Identity graphs can help achieve this by piecing together fragments of data that visitors leave behind, like digital breadcrumbs. When integrated with a CDP, these scattered data points coalesce, forming a clearer picture of who these visitors are.

In Simon’s case, we leverage our trusted partner’s identity graph to power Identity+ to enable our users to reach more known, unauthenticated customers on their website, then plug these interactions directly into their existing abandonment campaigns.

What’s the big deal? Well, not only can marketers activate who they thought were anonymous customers, but they also have the opportunity to put more customers into existing abandonment journeys, further increasing ROI.

By integrating identity graphs into your martech stack, you can enhance the base of your first-party data foundation and increase the size of the prize, so to speak.

Here’s what I’ve seen: on average, our Identity+ clients experience a 37% higher abandonment campaign send volume than non-Identity+ clients.

This means that these clients can reach 37% more people with their most lucrative, high-intent campaigns because an identity graph enables them to identify existing customers who are browsing and adding items to their carts in an unauthenticated state.

Linking anonymous visitors with hashed identifiers via identity graphs

While identity graphs enable marketers to activate existing customers who are browsing the site but are not logged in, CDPs can help take de-anonymization a step further.

Similar to hashed identifiers, a CDP uses an identity graph to link anonymous visitors with various identifiers such as HEMs and MAIDs. This connection empowers marketers to target these previously unreachable audiences by creating hyper-personalized ad campaigns, bridging the gap between unknown visitors and loyal customers, all the while amplifying match rates in downstream marketing channels.

Here's a quick example. Imagine you could capture 90% of the anonymous visitors that land on your website, create a personalized site experience for them, and sync them to paid media channels like Google Adwords, TikTok, and Meta. This would improve ‌customer experience, ROAS, conversion, and critical metrics like CLTV and CAC.

Conclusion

Being a marketer in today’s world is extremely challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. Using identity graphs within CDPs can help marketers create data-driven, customer-centric strategies that impact the success of a brand’s customer experience and overall success.

The insights and strategies outlined above go beyond concepts — they are strategies I’ve seen succeed during my time at Simon. With identity graphs, marketers can better identify and cater to customers, turning every interaction into an opportunity for engagement, loyalty, and growth.

If you’d like to learn more about identity graphs within the Simon CDP, book a demo today.