One of the most prominent challenges marketers face today is getting the attention of the distracted consumer. For decades, marketers have served ads and other promotions to demographics such as 18-24-year-olds. But, no one identifies with being part of an 18 to 24-year-old club. SheerID has found that college students associate with one another and recognize one another as part of a community.
Inviting college students to participate in something truly exclusive to them – such as a student discount on a pair of ASICS shoes – sparks interest and word-of-mouth. SheerID’s research has shown that, after receiving a personalized offer, 90% of students would share the offer with others they knew were eligible for it.
This phenomenon exists with students and people in other tightly-knit communities such as teachers, military, healthcare workers, and first responders.
93% of teachers and 98% of healthcare workers would share an offer with others they knew were eligible for it.
This word-of-mouth (WOM) lowers acquisition costs and makes Identity Marketing campaigns deliver a return on advertising spend as high as 25-to-1.
Honoring someone’s identity also creates an emotional bond with the person. For example, we know from additional survey data that teachers identify more strongly with being a teacher than they do with their nationality, cultural background, or their political affiliation.
Thus, building gated VIP programs for people who share the same profession or life stage opens up a new way for brands to create meaningful connections with people based on their identity.
SheerID’s Identity Marketing Solution
SheerID’s Identity Marketing software-as-a-service platform allows brands to instantly verify eligible consumers for gated, personalized offers to specific communities. This allows a brand to create a personalized offer campaign based on meaningful identity attributes, such as a consumer’s stage in life or profession. SheerID verifies whether or not a customer qualifies for discounts or special offers by acting as a bridge between a client’s website, POS system, mobile app, and/or internal customer service sales system and authoritative data sources.
Through several strategic partnerships, SheerID has access to 20,000 data sources and can verify the identity of 2.5 billion consumers globally. An authoritative data source is the owner of the information, such as the office of the registrar for a university or the Department of Defense for the military.
How Identity Marketing Campaigns Work
There are typically five steps in an Identity Marketing campaign. Many brands find that they can launch one in less than seven days and without any IT support.
- Identify the community that best aligns with your brand. For example, athletic apparel and fitness companies often focus on teachers, military, or first responders, while streaming media companies find students a natural fit for their services.
- Create a gated, personalized offer for the community backed by SheerID’s verification technology:
- The offer links to a form where the shopper provides information about herself to prove she is a community member. The verification form, like the offer, is integrated into one or more of your Web properties so the shopper never has to leave your brand experience:
- Invite consumers to take advantage of the offer: you can promote the offer across all of your existing channels to raise awareness and encourage eligible offers to opt in. Remember to activate word of mouth through your social channels. Consumers report that they often find out about these offers from peers in their community.
- Verify eligible consumers. After the shopper enters their information on the form, SheerID’s technology instantly checks their data against one or more authoritative data sources. Once the shopper is verified as part of the community, she resumes shopping, and the discount is automatically applied when she checks out.
- Re-engage to build long-term relationships: integrate the rich information shoppers provide into your CRM and nurture them through your loyalty program. Because this information comes directly from the consumer and has been verified against authoritative data sources, you can be confident of its accuracy.
You can use SheerID’s dashboard to monitor the progress of your program:
The ROI Impact Page provides a real-time view into the success of the program, including Total Program Revenue, Conversion Rate, and Likely Fraud Prevented:
You own all the data you collect—not a third-party vendor who will use it to grow their business. SheerID never sells or shares your data. Information regarding how SheerID keeps your data safe can be found here.
Read More About SheerID’s Data Privacy
Identity Marketing Case Studies
SheerID’s customers include 300 B2C brands in retail, telecommunications, streaming media, internet services, software, and hospitality, including Target, Amazon, Comcast, Youtube, Spotify, and ASICS. T
- ASICS: one of the most successful parts of its OneASICS loyalty program are offers that the company makes to specific communities of customers based on their profession or affiliations, such as discounts for first responders or members of the military. In the first 25 days of the campaign, it drove 26,000 purchases and 15% of total sales for the month, while increasing average order value by $12. SheerID digitally verifies these consumers, which makes it easy for shoppers to self-identify as members of the targeted community and redeem their discount.
View the SheerID ASICS Case Study
P.volve: the subscription fitness company uses SheerID to acquire and retain customers within the following communities: students, teachers, first responders, and healthcare workers. Knowing the offers were secure enabled P.volve to give these customers an exclusive 30% discount on its products and services. P.volve has found that the new subscribers they acquire through these campaigns churn up to 4x less and stay 70% longer than with other marketing campaigns they employ.
View the SheerID P.volve Case Study
SheerID Return on Investment
In comparing two dozen e-commerce sites and consumer brands, SheerID has found that the average conversion rate of these campaigns is 3x higher than the industry average.
The reason these campaigns work is because brands are in effect saying, ‘we have a great offer for you if you’re willing to let us verify your identity’. With this model, everything is out in the open, providing brands a new way to start a relationship on terms where consumers have control over their data. This form of permission-based marketing resonates particularly well with today’s privacy-conscious consumer who sees through most traditional marketing tactics, such as retargeting and other forms of surveillance marketing.
Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerID
Those interested in learning more can schedule a demo here.