Why health and fitness brands need to prioritize identity resolution

Health and fitness brands have emerged as pioneers of connected devices like Peloton’s exercise bike and treadmill with built-in virtual classes and Strava’s cycling and running app with GPS trackers. As a result, they’re now rich in first-party customer data, collecting everything from popular bike trails and dieting routines to people’s heart rates and insulin doses – all to deliver highly personalized, contextual experiences throughout a user’s customer journey.

However, this wealth of customer data is only valuable to brands and consumers if associated with individual customers and then leveraged throughout touchpoints. This has become increasingly difficult to do across the many devices, channels, and platforms through which brands and consumers engage in today’s world.

With the third-party cookie’s death about a year away, brands face even more obstacles in identifying individuals and delivering personalized experiences. However, savvy health and fitness brands are starting to use first-party data – like the email address – for more than advertising. As LiveIntent CMO Kerel Cooper told MediaPost, “Many of our most successful fitness brands are leveraging email not just for prospecting, but for creating Identity graphs that help personalization on their own sites.”

As the landscape evolves, growing health and fitness brands will need to prioritize first-party data – and the channels that can help increase their data footprint – to continue reaching and nurturing their consumer relationships.

Email: the backbone of identity

Email addresses are the digital passport customers use to access streaming platforms, social sites, and subscriptions across the web. And it’s provided directly by the customer when they sign up – so it’s a transparent and privacy-compliant exchange. By leveraging the hashed email address, we help health and fitness brands leverage first-party data to safely and securely connect to the broader ecosystem through our Authenticated Bridge framework, matching first-party data to our graph at an individual level. Best of all, Authenticated Bridge does this in cookieless environments, so no need to fret over the third-party cookie’s demise.

Authenticated Bridge can help health and fitness brands achieve measurement and attribution, connect online data to offline data, drive personalization, target customers with relevant messaging, and activate audiences across their inventory.

With the power of first-party data at their fingertips, brands of all kinds can move beyond third-party cookies’ confines to resolve identity and take control of their customer relationships.

If you’d like to learn more about how LiveIntent can help you with your identity resolution needs, visit our identity framework page for more information.