Home > Blog > Tricks > How do you follow an off and online customer journey?
Applications on smartphones, e-commerce sites, social networks, marketplaces … The consumer has freed himself from the traditional ways of buying and alternates easily between physical outlets and online interactions with companies, often on the same purchasing process.
Faced with these consumption changes, the challenge is now to trace the thread of client history with the brand: by what channel did it happen? During his various trips, did he stop in the store? Did he finally stop there looking for happiness or would he have moved on? So many questions on a journey that is more and more difficult to follow and that meet a strong desire of the consumer: receiving personalized offers at the right time and on the right support. The consumer is aware that advertisers can collect their data and accepts it as long as they can benefit: win-win! Thus, we must succeed in identifying that Captain Cook of the web, it is him: Paul. Hard, but not impossible, solutions exist!
In general, you can successfully reunify the journey based on a deterministic method. The deterministic reconciliation is an approach based on an ID retrieved by an action from the user, most often: a CRM ID, an email address or a phone number (encrypted). This ID is retrieved during a purchase, an account creation, a subscription to a newsletter or an application downloaded (ID obtained by SDK or Server-to-server). The opening of email is an alternative way to link the email and cookie of the user. We generally speak of “keys of reconciliation” because it is the key that will make it possible to make the link between the journey on different environments.
Faced with this multitude of possibilities to identify clients, all that remains now is to optimize the means to reconcile them, which will, therefore, increase the rate of reconciliation. To do this, the ball is not on a side, but in two (each its point of improvement): those of advertisers and publishers of technological solutions.
Publisher side, it is the provision of technical solutions that is considered here. Thanks to an adapted tagging plan and (of course) an appropriate technological solution, you can base the reconciliation on several CRM IDs depending on the context (eg email, phone number, newsletter subscription when you visit the store) and enjoy retroactive reconciliation. You can also increase the reconciliation rate by facilitating bridges with CRM Onboarder tools, etc.
On the advertiser side, this will mainly focus on optimizing online login rates (e.g. Passwordless, ABTesting, adaptation according to the age of the target, standardization of CRM segments, etc.).
Once these actions are in place, no doubt, the reconciliation rates between the on & off universe will take off as the growth of your company.
