Group-level unification (GLU) is an advanced feature that helps customers with multiple brands under a single parent company deliver consistent and personalized communication. It checks the user data across different brands. This unified data then powers segmentation and personalization within Architect journeys, allowing for coordinated marketing efforts across various channels for shared users.
Imagine a customer with several brands. They likely have customers who interact with more than one of these brands. Without the GLU solution, these companies struggle to recognize that a customer interacting with Brand A is the same person interacting with Brand B. This might lead to several issues:
Lost sales: If a customer finds one of the brands too expensive, the customer misses the chance to offer them a similar, more affordable product from another brand.
Repetitive or irrelevant messaging: Customers might receive similar or conflicting messages from different brands within the same company, leading to frustration and disengagement.
Missed opportunities: You might miss opportunities to offer complementary products or services to the same customer across your brands.
This article explains the following concepts:
Use cases
GLU helps your multi-brand companies treat your users as unified individuals, no matter which brands they interact with. This can lead to better customer experiences and improved business outcomes. With the GLU feature, you can:
Identify your shared customers
Enable targeted offers and joint conversion funnels (e.g., offer a cheaper alternative option from another brand of yours to a user who did not buy a high-priced item from one of your brands) to increase conversions
Improve communication with more relevant and personalized messages across all your brands
Gain more control over your user database as you can manage different brand databases both separately for each brand and query between each other
Below are some use case examples with various cases:
Case 1: Suppose a hospitality group company with a wide range of hotel brands from luxury to economy wants to target users across its brands. GLU can enable them to recognize customers who frequently stay at economy brands but occasionally search for higher-end resorts. This allows this hospitality group to offer targeted upgrades or special packages from its luxury brands when relevant.
Case 2: A user might browse flights on an airline company but not complete a purchase because of high prices. This indicates the user might be price-sensitive. With GLU, this airline company can recognize this user's browsing or cart abandonment behavior on its panel. Even if the users don't convert on this brand, the system can trigger a targeted campaign from their sub-brand airline company and offer a cheaper alternative. This directly addresses the user's price sensitivity and aims to convert them through the more budget-friendly brand.
Case 3: For specific marketing campaigns (e.g., assigning vouchers to increase the conversion of inactive users), it's crucial to identify users who have already purchased within the group to exclude them or target them with different offers. GLU enables campaigns to set exit criteria in the Architect Journeys, based on purchases from any brand in the group. If a user has purchased from any brand under the same parent company, they would exit the journey immediately.
Case 4: Many customers might fly with the main and sub-brands of the airline company but aren't yet loyalty members, missing out on benefits. GLU allows for specific communication strategies targeting these users. If a user has made a purchase with any brand under the parent airline company but does not have a loyalty membership, they can be specifically targeted with messages encouraging them to join the loyalty program.
How does GLU work?
Insider sets up a dedicated, entirely separate Inone panel for each customer in the Unified Customer Database (UCD). With GLU, these panels can be connected for parent companies with multiple brands for powerful capabilities as follows:
Insider uses a common identifier between the parent company brands to gather information about a single user from the unified customer database, even if this user's data is available only in one panel.
The GLU can connect, unify, and use attributes and events of a user for segmentation, personalization, and dynamic content.
How does Insider unify users across panels?
The core of GLU relies on identifiers to recognize and unify users across different panels.
For GLU to work, the value of an identifier needs to match across panels. For example, Brand A uses "Customer Email" and Brand B uses "User Email" as one of their identifiers, and the email address is the same (e.g., john.doe@useinsider.com). If these identifiers are chosen to match, the system can unify these users within the Unified Customer Database.
All panels have up to four different identifiers. To unify the users across GLU accounts, you should select one identifier to unify users across your other panels. This chosen identifier must be one of the existing identifiers within individual panels.
No user data is moved or duplicated across individual panels. The data of your brands remains clean and untainted. This means you can create personalized campaigns for each of your sub-brands.
Insider uses this identification and unification to query user data across panels for personalization only. This allows Insider to access relevant information about a user from any of the linked panels to tailor user experience without moving the user profile to your other brand.
How can you use GLU?
You can use the GLU feature across segmentation, personalization, dynamic content, exit criteria, and action elements in the journeys.
Segmentation in starters
You can use GLU in On Past Behavior, On Dynamic Date, On Event, and On Attribute Change starters to filter your events and segment users.
You can select the customer accounts to include the users from different group accounts.
After determining the group accounts for the segmentation, you can select the events. Since the filtering logic is AND, the events listed should exist in all of the selected accounts.
You can also add the Group Level to any additional segmentation section.
After selecting the accounts, you can create your segment.
The segmentation will be based on the AND operator.
The following example shows a segment targeting users whose Birthday is between 01.06.2025 - 31.07.2025 in the selected two accounts.
You can click the Add Segment Group button to create multiple segment groups with the OR operator. Therefore, both AND and OR segments can be created for segmentation purposes.
The example below takes the following users to the journey:
Users who viewed the cart page in both gluautomation1 and gluautomation2 brands
AND
(Users who purchased less than 3 products from both gluautomation1 and gluautomation2 brands in the last 30 days
OR
Users who abandoned browsing at least 3 times in both gluautomation1 and gluautomation2 brands in the last 30 days)
Dynamic content
You can use the dynamic content from GLU accounts to personalize your communications with the users.
To add dynamic content, select the customer account to use first.
After selecting the customer account to use its dynamic contents, you can choose the dynamic content. You can select the content you want to include in your messages according to the selected dynamic content.
The displayed dynamic content types (e.g., default attributes, custom attributes, events, product catalog attributes, etc.) will be taken from the selected accounts. The selected dynamic content will be populated from the gluautomation2 account in the following example.
