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The Next-Level Identity Resolution Solution

Hello again EMM readers. We’re here to tell you about linking B2B email to B2C email with EMM’s product, Linkkey™! First things first, you may have questions in regards to why any organization would want to match a business email to a consumer email.

Let’s start by answering the most pressing question first and move on from there!

WHY MATCH B2B TO B2C DATA?

The answer to this is because B2B data, which would be your work email, is less commonly used in various places around the internet. What this means is that when you are shopping, watching videos of cute cats, or leaving other digital footprints around the internet by browsing, a business executive tends to use their consumer persona and therefore that data is more difficult to locate in various marketing applications.

Especially with so many professionals working from home, personal and professional lives tend to cross back and forth. Even while vacationing, a LinkedIn survey found that the majority of professionals in the U.S. check-in with the office by email or phone, which is great for marketers. This has opened the door for new opportunities to reach your prospective customers on a platform they are constantly checking!

With traditional data, you might buy a B2B email list with appended postal addresses, and while that may be a good start to a successful campaign, you would only be targeting your prospects during one part of their lives. The same goes for buying a B2C list—you’re neglecting prospects on other channels. By including both B2B and B2C data, you can reach prospects anywhere—at home or work (or checking their work email on vacation).

For example, let’s say your company has a list of prospects you want to use from a previous campaign but it only contains the addresses of B2B emails. By merging those B2B emails to B2C data, your company would be able to send emails to your prospects’ B2C email addresses, direct mail ads to their home addresses, display ads, and social media ads. This would allow you to find prospects using B2B data and reach them using B2C data.

Matched data is also a great tool for onboarding and custom audience creation. Since B2B data includes B2C email addresses, you get higher match rates compared to data management platforms (DMP) that onboard traditional B2B lists. And since most people use their personal email addresses when they create their social media accounts, B2C email addresses have much higher match rates. By using that linked B2B data to create custom audiences, you’ll reach much more of your B2B prospects on social media.

 

linking B2B with B2C

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE APPLICATIONS WHERE THIS ADDS MARKETING VALUE?

  • The first application is in “On-boarding” offline B2B data. This allows you to use your offline B2B database to match online personas, which are generally consumer in nature, more efficiently.
  • The second is B2B social media display (Facebook, primarily). People rarely use their work email to sign up for social media sites. By linking a B2C email to a B2B record you will be able to target that B2B record with display ads on social networks.
  • And finally, the linking process allows you to add additional direct marketing lift to your list or database of B2B records.

The main value that is added is the new unique emails that match 3-4x better to online persona databases than standard B2B prospecting data. These new unique emails can be uploaded to generate more impressions or they can be used in other successful offline marketing efforts.

WHAT MAKES LINKKEY DIFFERENT?

There are several common questions we receive from product managers about Linkkey and its capabilities, but the number one question from skeptical data product managers is:

“How is this any different than doing a B2B to B2C address append with my huge email database?”

Well, luckily we have the answer for you. The EMM operations team uses our considerable B2C email data asset in one phase of our matching process for Linkkey and that contributes about 30% of total match records. This step, by itself, is very similar to the append logic that is involved in doing a B2B to B2C address append as stated above. The difference is that this process is only the second process of four steps, six databases, and 26 match types that takes place when you use Linkkey.io.

We link not just between your file and a large reference set, but between your file, linking attributes, and then to our large reference files and proprietary ancillary files.

The range of match degrees is threefold, in descending levels of confidence in the match. 

  1. Individual
  2. Household or Office/Workplace
  3. Address

There are a few other fine points within an individual-level match, generally based on name and geography logic of some type. Households are usually last name and a bunch of logic types. And address matches are where a lot of logic stops.

Having all of these ranges makes the data suitable across multiple applications. Essentially, you can jump from matching B2B data to B2C data and back again.

Most of the other solutions seen in this space lever data assets that already existed, based on email marketing compliance, rendering them less effective to solve the specific problems that Linkkey.io does. Namely, increasing online B2B audience sizes.

WHAT ABOUT LINKING DATA SILOS?

Silo’d data is a considerable challenge for the modern marketer and they may not even realize it. In its most simple form, it’s the sales rep calling without a complete picture of prior interactions with the prospect.

In a more complex form, it’s preventing marketers from using programmatic display to generate more business. If you’ve ever asked yourself “Why is my match rate so low?” when importing email data into Facebook or when using a prospecting list to create an online audience, you’ve experienced data silos impacting your results.

Facebook’s data silo in this instance is primarily made up of people whose personas are “B2C”. You register your email with Facebook and generally, you don’t register your work email because you don’t want work to have ownership of that digital property. This silo’s impact is that the B2B marketer uploading their list sees very low match rates to Facebook’s audience because of the makeup of its registrations.

The same challenge applies to a marketer using a service like LiveRamp or Neustar to onboard their offline B2B data. The data making up the pools at those firms are also largely “B2C” because it is generated at registration and security forms. A marketer on-boarding offline B2B data will see similarly low match rates as compared to Facebook.

EMM’s Linkkey.io product allows a marketer to cross this gap by converting B2B data to B2C data by linking data points from within these data silos to connect the B2B email silo to the B2C email silo.

Using these linking points yields match rates of 30% and higher at an individual level and the resulting matches match at 4x the efficiency of the original offline B2B input. Clients with additional identity resolution capabilities may experience even larger increases in audience sizes!

linkkey success story

LINKKEY SUCCESS STORY

Recently, we worked with a data onboarding firm to optimize offline data for use in display. This firm supplies data for branded online audience segments within Data Management Portal (DMP). They desired to create additional records for the online audience segment to serve additional impressions within targeted business markets by linking to consumer marketing information which generally matches cookie pools at higher rates than B2B data. They needed a solution that could work with any offline data set to produce the maximum accurate number of cookie pairings. They needed Every Market Media’s solution-oriented thinking and industry-leading database reference sets.

Every Market Media was called in to lever its databases to produce a high-quality link to a consumer record. Using proprietary Linkkey relational databases and matching logic, EMM was able to lift match rates from 4% to 19%, and the efficiency of those matched records was 4x baseline. Translated, EMM turned a 10,000 record audience into 20,000 unique individuals with 4x the cookie placement rate or 80% of original audience efficiency.

In short, Linkkey and Every Market Media maximized cookie placement on business records by providing accurate consumer email information with higher match rates 4x over baseline.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Matching B2B data to B2C data can help you contact groups of individuals, households or workplaces, or addresses at individual or household level.

Use cases for Linkkey include:

  • Data onboarding
  • Recruiting offers
  • Reactivation
  • Validation and data enrichment

Every Market Media knows we aren’t the first people to build people graphs for marketers, but we think we’re the first to build it affordably without any crazy proprietary data sets.

So if you would like to increase your B2B contact data audience size in a unique way, or have us demonstrate the measurable difference that Linkkey.io can provide, contact us here today!

 

 

 

The Corporate Data Show is a podcast to helping marketing and data professionals leverage data to generate revenue for their company. To listen to all of our episodes, visit the Every Market Media podcast page or your favorite podcast player.