COVID-19 has caused businesses to revisit their relationships with consumers. More consumers are shopping online for essentials, and more companies are embracing digital transformation to get closer to their customers. It is becoming important not just for e-commerce companies, but also for traditional brick-and-mortar brands to have online shopping experiences for their customers.  E-commerce companies and traditional brick-and-mortar brands alike are now charged with accelerating their pace by building customer relationships online and finding ways to keep customers engaged with their physical stores. An identity graph is one type of database tool that makes this possible- and it can only be made better by enriching with customer behavior data.

An identity graph database tool houses all the known identifiers that correlate with individual customers such as email addresses, postal addresses, mobile numbers, mobile ad identifiers (MAIDs), logins, usernames, and cookies.  Identity graphs aggregate data from various sources – 1st party customer data, web browsing activity, demographic data and more combined with 3rd party deterministic data and probabilistic data – to connect, unify, and assemble a profile for an individual website visitor in real-time.

If you’ve ever visited a website on your mobile phone, added items to your cart, then returned the following day on your tablet to find your shopping cart saved, there’s probably an identity graph at work behind the scenes. An identity graph enables a consistent customer experience across multiple devices, can help inform website content and recommendations, or improve offer targeting and customer support. Identity graphs are becoming more important than ever as customer behavior is shifting due to COVID-19. Location data, which tells us about the places that consumers  go to and the events they attend there, enables these and other use cases. If you’re not already evaluating location data to enrich your customer identity graph, here’s three reasons to start:

Other data sources might give you age range, address or income level, but location intelligence gives you information about the places your customers visit in real life, then uses customer behavior patterns to reliably identify their affinities and interests such as ‘Cable TV Customers‘, ‘New Pet Parents’, and ‘Tech Early Adopters.’ Not only can you tailor your onsite messaging to potential customers using these attributes, but you can better understand who your best customers are and set the stage to reach lookalike audiences.

Location intelligence gives you improved insight into advertising campaign performance. If you’re a brand with both a website and physical stores, this is especially important: you can understand which of your customers already shop at your brick-and-mortar locations and vice versa, even when they didn’t make a purchase. If you’re running an ad campaign targeted towards potential customers, you can identify who saw your ad and later showed up at your store, letting you understand which ad creative and messaging worked and what didn’t, and allowing you to better optimize your personalized messaging to new customers in the future.

In addition to having foot traffic data for your store locations, you can benchmark against foot traffic at other neighborhood locations. Is a neighborhood spot a favorite of your customers? If you find a neighborhood or other locations that your customers frequently visit, you can better understand their customer journey. Where do your competitor’s customers go? This customer data can also allow you to uncover information about your competitor’s customers that you didn’t know about and gives you an opportunity to create messaging to reach them.

By using an identity graph, brands can instantly understand who their customers are. They can use this information to enrich online customer experience, enhance customer engagement, and create relationships with their customers (both offline and online). When done well, there would be no distinction between a customer’s online and offline relationship with the brand as these will integrate together to create a frictionless customer experience. Yet an identity graph is only as robust as the customer data that powers it and integrating the online experience with the brick-and-mortar experience requires having the right kind of data on hand.

Customer identity graphs allow marketers to gain insight into the behavior of their customers. Your customers should always be your priority. At Gravy, we want our clients to stay up-to-date on customer behavior, which is why we created Gravy Navigate.