Hashed Emails are the Future of Multichannel Marketing – Here’s Why

Multichannel marketing means understanding how customers interact with your brand in every channel.

What’s key is establishing a single view of the customer by using a central identifier. A universal, central ID makes it possible for companies to follow customers as they hop from channel to channel.

Enter the hashed email: the key and future of multichannel marketing.

What is a Hashed Email?

A hashed email is a cryptographic function. Hashing is a way of encrypting a piece of data, like an email address, into a hexadecimal string. Each email has its own unique hexadecimal string that remains consistent no matter where the email is used as a login.

For marketers, this means the email is the Holy Grail of consumer data. Since an email is essentially the passport to the internet, the hashed email can trace every logged-in action a customer takes.

Everyone Uses Email

From your social media accounts and online shopping sprees to your favorite guilty pleasure game app, almost everything you do online requires a login. And on every account, you use your email address to log in.

As a marketer, hashed emails allow you access to valuable data on the ways in which your subscribers conduct themselves online. You can determine which social media networks your audience is most likely to use, where they go for news, entertainment preferences and even buying habits.

Learn how to connect your customers across channels in our latest ebook.

Hashed Emails More Effective than Cookies

What can email do for us that a cookie can’t?

Until now, marketers received most information from cookies. There’s just one problem: cookies don’t work across multiple devices. Plus, cookies can be blocked and don’t connect with mobile activity. Instead, emails are quickly becoming the most reliable method of cross-device identification.

This means you can take an email address already in your database and use this information to target the subscriber in other spaces they’ve logged in with that address, such as social media and display, through hashed email retargeting. As this technology grows and becomes more prevalent, it could become a complement – or even alternative – to cookie tracking.

It’s Based on Tried-and-True Technology

For more than 20 years, email has remained a primary form of communication. In fact, the number of email accounts are expected to grow 20% by 2018, according to Radicati Group.

The hashed email serves to position email even higher in the digital food chain. In other words, you’re email database is about to become even more valuable.