Hashed emails (HEMs) are becoming more important as a key identifier, and for good reasons. This is because the cookieless future is already scheduled to arrive in the year 2023 when Chrome and 60% of the browser market will join Safari and Firefox in prohibiting the use of third-party cookies.
One way they will do this is by serving as a “key” on identity maps that enable marketers to correlate consumer behaviors across platforms, channels, and devices while protecting user privacy. But also, because hashed email data (HEMs) rely on email sign-on methods, they are more efficient than third-party cookies at enabling data-driven advertising on new channels like CTV, streaming, and digital TV. For better targeting, HEMs offer a truly scalable approach to linking web data to linked TV advertising, the segment of video advertising that is expanding quickly.
By the year 2023, browser support for third-party cookies will cease, so you must adopt alternative strategies immediately to understand your clients and prospects. Hashed emails excel in situations like this. We need to decide what cutting-edge targeting strategies to apply in this new world to keep successfully reaching their target market while abiding by newly discovered privacy rules.
For instance, a key element of Identity Resolution has hashed emails. The process of connecting and combining an individual’s identifiers across many channels and applications and mapping them within one person is known as identity resolution. This enables you to acquire unmatched recognition and insights to use throughout omnichannel marketing, allowing you to utilize your data on your clients better.
Marketers can employ advanced analytics to build a persistent ID (like FullContact’s PersonID) depending on how sophisticated the Identity Resolution is. Following the unification of an individual’s IDs, this persistent ID is utilized to generate customized, targeted messages based on the learned behaviors.
A Hashed Email: What Is It?
A survey by Radicati Group found that the average person has 1.75 email addresses. Simply taking those standard email addresses and encoding them with a cryptographic hashing process is termed as “hashing.” This procedure generates a hash, or obfuscated string of characters, to serve as the email’s new representation. Depending on the kind of hash function employed, each hash has a set number of characters. A hash is thought to correspond exactly one-to-one to an email.
The hashed email can be used in the matching process when two or more parties have the same email even if it is irreversible (i.e., it cannot be “decrypted”). It can be hashed by each side, yielding the same hashed value.
Thus, the hashed email has emerged as a popular method for securely exchanging and conducting business through emails without revealing their clear text content. It is secure and durable because of this.
In the vast world of consumer data, using hashed emails helps maintain a defined border on ethics and privacy by protecting the person’s identity and PII. This identifier can then be employed in Identity Resolution capabilities as a single, unified identity to monitor across channels and devices.
Imagine that a person’s hashed email serves as their passport in the digital world. It can monitor user interactions as they actively log into a website, social media account, or another platform.
Additionally, it’s private and secure, safeguarding the user’s privacy.
Why Leverage Hashed Email For Successful Digital Marketing In the Future?
Email hashing has been heavily debated to identify customers and prospects as third-party cookies are being deprecated. Hashed emails outperform third-party cookies as the market continues to react. Hashed emails can be tracked using a variety of tools and channels. They are a very reliable user identification method across devices with Identity Resolution.
It’s time to incorporate hashed emails into your go-to-market plan now that they’re the keystone of targeted marketing. Without third-party cookies, marketers need to combine a customer’s hashed emails with the corresponding first-party cookies of the brand or advertiser to observe online activity over time and across channels and applications and to improve campaign performance.
HEMs can also be combined with data from other sources to improve campaign targeting and effectiveness. Through CRM systems and other interfaces, data from offline engagements, including those with desk agents, call centers, and walk-in encounters, can be made available.
To increase match rates and improve personalization across channels, a variety of data gathering, aggregation, and analysis capabilities are used, such as adding multiple MAIDs/ADIDs, hashed emails, and demographics per digital identity. Major internet companies are also working on new efforts, such as identity-free targeting using brand-new machine learning models.
These initiatives provide various data sources to swap out third-party cookies and support advertisers in their ongoing development of addressable targeting. Additionally, various keywords, subcategories, SEM, and metasearch can be used to fulfill programmatic targeting requirements while expanding contextual targeting alternatives.
