The sooner you can identify an individual and respond to their behaviours in a relevant and consistent way across all channels, the greater revenue and customer loyalty you will enjoy. However, using vertical solutions such as your ESP or Ecommerce Platform will normally have a number of limitations.

Firstly, most Ecommerce solutions can only identify a customer that has provided contact details when purchasing or setting up an account, and is currently logged in. So you’re missing out on understanding, communicating with, and converting a huge group of potential customers: those browsing your website but still unknown to you. Your ESP can identify which emails are opened by whom, and which links drive a person to your website. However, you won’t get the full picture or be able to fully tailor future experiences. For example, what behaviours did a person display in the time before they provided an email address? How does an individual interact with your website if they arrived via a different channel to email, or using a different device? And can you respond to this?

Here at Persomi we’ve created some sophisticated ways of helping retailers identify website visitors:

Step 1 - Personalise the Customer Journey for Unknown Customers

We recognise that whilst you may not know a customer’s name or email address from Day 1, personalisation should start as soon as a customer first interacts with your brand. That’s why an anonymous first party cookie is stored on a customer’s device enabling you to start to get to know them. So even if you don’t have an individual’s contact details you already have enough insight to start displaying relevant and targeted banners, content, pop-ups and recommendations on your site based on a visitor’s previous browsing history.

Step 2 - Link Past Browsing Sessions to Contact Details

As Persomi tags each email link, whenever a customer clicks on an email link you can easily identify them as they land on your website. The very first time they do this after they become known to you, Persomi links their previous interaction history with their identity, giving you a much bigger overall picture. If a visitor clicks on a link in an email from more than one device, then Persomi can link these browser sessions together. Browsing data from all channels can be used to build a larger picture of an individual, which you can use to communicate with them in the optimum way via the right channels.

Step 3 - Use Login Details to Identify a customer across all devices

Just as with an Ecommerce solution, when a customer logs into their account, Persomi can recognise a customer. Persomi takes this one step further so that the same person can be identified across multiple sessions – i.e. if they log in from more than one computer, mobile phone or tablet. For example, you could interact with a visitor on their phone based on what they did while browsing your site from a tablet, and so on. Visitors only need to login from a particular device once for Persomi to keep recognising them later on, even if they subsequently log out.

Step 4 - Tie anonymous browsing data with an email signup form

Anonymous browsing data and email signup forms can be tied together in the same way as mentioned in Step 2. In summary, Persomi uses signals from multiple channels, platforms and devices, in an articulated way, to identify and tie together your customer data into a Single Customer View in ways that go beyond what is possible when you are relying on off-the-shelf vertical systems