You are here:
Unique User Profiles
To provide a unique experience for each of your customers, Marketing Cloud Personalization identifies each customer with a user profile. However, as users engage with your various channels, it’s possible to end up with multiple user profiles for the same person. When identity data comes from different sources, Personalization attempts to merge the information into a Unified Customer Profile.
Creating a unique user profile is easy when the sources contain clear identity information, such as a customer ID or email address. However, each user doesn’t always have a clear identifier for every interaction within each channel. For instance, in these examples the separate user profiles each contain important customer data, but none has enough information to provide a user’s complete identity.
- A retail shopper makes several in-store purchases by using their loyalty number. The retailer has the shopper’s name and other identity information through the loyalty program, along with a history of in-store purchases. Later, the shopper browses the store’s ecommerce site, but doesn’t make a purchase or identify themselves in any way. As a result, their named in-store profile remains separate from their anonymous website profile.
- To download a report, a website visitor completes a form that includes their name and email address. The organization can now identify the visitor when they’re on their website. Later, the person uses a different browser to visit the website, which creates a second profile that captures their website activity as an anonymous visitor.
- A bank customer receives an email with a mortgage offer, reads it, and clicks through to the bank’s website for more information. The next day, the customer contacts the bank’s call center to discuss the offer. In this scenario, they can have three separate profiles based on their interactions with the bank’s email, web, and call center systems.
Types of Users
Marketing Cloud Personalization identifies two types of users (or visitors) in Marketing Cloud Personalization —anonymous (or unknown) and named (or known). Whether anonymous or named, Marketing Cloud Personalization creates a profile ID for all users. How the Personalization system distinguishes between the two types depends on the information it can gather about them. To be considered a known user, in addition to their assigned profile ID, a user must be identified by at least one other identity value.
| User Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Anonymous (Unknown) | A user that isn’t yet validated as known by Marketing Cloud Personalization. An unknown user can have a profile ID, but this identity value isn’t enough to consider the user known. |
| Named (Known) | A user that is validated by Marketing Cloud Personalization using one or more accepted identities, such as an email address, phone number, or mailing address, along with their Personalization profile ID. |
Profile Merging
Personalization constantly monitors identity information from your users’ interactions with your channels. When identity data becomes available, Personalization uses deterministic matching to attempt to assign that data to an existing user profile. If two or more user profiles represent the same identity, Personalization merges them to create a Unified Customer Profile for that person.
For example, Mary Smith is a customer with one named user profile and one anonymous user profile in Personalization. Her named user profile incorporates data from several different channels—retail store, call center, and mobile app. Mary also has an anonymous user profile from the company’s website because she’s never identified herself when browsing the website using her laptop. Personalization merges Mary’s two user profiles when she identifies her anonymous user profile while on her laptop, such as by clicking through from an email to the website.
Personalization merges user profiles based on clear, unique identifiers, such as a system ID or an email address. If a person visits a website multiple times but doesn’t provide identity information, their user profile remains anonymous. If the anonymous person provides their email address, Personalization updates the anonymous user profile to a named user profile and merges the anonymous sessions from the same cookie to create a Unified Customer Profile.
Unified Customer Profiles
Regardless of whether a person is named or anonymous, a Unified Customer Profile defines a customer's identity using data collected from a variety of sources across all channels. This single, comprehensive user profile is central to Personalization and is the foundation of campaign personalization and data analysis.
The Unified Customer Profile includes data that helps you understand your prospects and customers. This data can include purchases, browsing history, email interactions, subscriptions, loyalty membership, interests, preferences, browser type, location, and demographics. The Unified Customer Profile also includes identity data elements that provide connections between different user profiles. Identity data elements include cookies, email address, full name, physical address, phone number, and system ID.
Using Unified Customer Profiles you can better determine:
- Whether a customer qualifies for a promotion
- Which products and content to recommend
- Which channel to use for communications
- When to send an email
Identity System and Types
To create a Unified Customer Profile, Personalization uses built-in identity types, such as email address and customer ID, to determine how to merge user profiles from various sources. If the built-in identity types don’t meet your needs, you can create additional identity types.
You set up the identity system during implementation before collecting data.
How you use the identity system for identity lookup and merging user profiles depends on the channels and systems you’re using.
| Channel or System | Configuration Details |
|---|---|
| Web events | Configure an additional setting for your sitemap to include identity types. See Set Up the Identity System for the Salesforce Interactions SDK. |
| ETL system | Personalization’s ETL system provides APIs for identity lookup and merging user profiles based on a list of identity types and attributes in a CSV file. User ETL and Transaction ETL jobs use these APIs to determine whether to map incoming data to an existing user profile in Personalization. See User ETL, Transaction ETL, and External Email Campaign Events ETL documentation for details. |
| Event API jobs | Configure an additional setting. See Identity System Setup for the Event API. |
| Mobile Apps | Configure an additional setting. See Identity System Setup for Mobile Apps. |
| Open Time Email Campaigns | Configure an additional setting. See Identity System Setup for Open Time Email. |
