Data onboarding is the process of transferring offline

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted ...

to an online environment for

marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

needs. Data onboarding is mainly used to connect offline customer records with online users by matching identifying information gathered from offline datasets to retrieve the same customers in an online audience.

Process

The onboarding process involves ingesting, anonymizing, matching and distributing a customer's data. Offline data used in onboarding efforts include information such as customer names, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers as well as CRM and sales transaction data. Part of the data onboarding process is anonymizing

personally identifiable information Personal data, also known as personal information or personally identifiable information (PII), is any information related to an identifiable person. The abbreviation PII is widely accepted in the United States, but the phrase it abbreviates ha ...

to protect

consumer privacy Consumer privacy is information privacy as it relates to the consumers of products and services. A variety of social, legal and political issues arise from the interaction of the public's potential expectation of privacy and the collection and di ...

. Another key step involves matching offline data to online devices, such as a desktop browser

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or mobile device ID. Offline data like a customer's email address or postal address can also be used as an identifier to match to digital ID's, such as a

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

account. Matched data is finally delivered to a technology platform for use in programmatic marketing. Data onboarding is primarily used to reach a company's customers with more relevant marketing messages. Companies can also use onboarded data to assess the effectiveness of a marketing campaign or the purchasing trends of their customers. Overall, the process allows data-driven marketers to optimize the impact of online campaigns.

Application

The data onboarding industry consists of marketing technology companies like

LiveRamp LiveRamp Holdings, Inc. (commonly LiveRamp), is a San Francisco, California-based SaaS company that offers a data connectivity platform whose services include data onboarding, the transfer of offline data online for marketing purposes. The comp ...

FullContact FullContact Inc. is a privately held technology company that provides a suite of cloud-based software products for businesses, developers, and brands. Their main focus is Identity Resolution. Their suite of offerings include products like Enrich ...

, Semcasting,

Datalogix Oracle Advertising, formerly Datalogix, is a cloud-based consumer data collection, activation, and measurement platform for use by digital advertisers. Datalogix was a consumer data collection company based in Westminster, Colorado that provided o ...

(now part of Oracle Data Cloud), Throtle, Acho Studio, Neustar, El Toro, Circulate, and TrueData, which develops onboarding services for marketers. Businesses use data onboarding companies to determine whether their ads were seen on digital platforms and if they were effective in driving sales. In 2013, Auren Hoffman, the founder of LiveRamp, estimated that one-third of Fortune 2000 marketers were onboarding data, with most of their clients being from the retail, travel, auto, telecommunications, financial services and publishing industries.

References

{{reflist Customer relationship management software Marketing techniques Data processing