95% of in-store transactions are anonymous and 1 in 4 CRM records fails to match on any ad platform. Here is what Profile Enrichment and Transaction Matching delivered across three retail brands.
Every day, millions of shoppers walk into your stores, tap their cards, and leave without ever telling you who they are. They buy. They return. They churn. And you have no idea, because the data they leave behind is a receipt, not a relationship.
This is the Retail Identity Gap: the silent chasm between what your data contains and what your marketing actually needs. For most retailers and grocery chains, it is enormous, and it has a direct revenue cost.
Three gaps. One cost.
- Anonymous transactions95% of in-store buyers leave no identity traceEvery card swipe and basket of groceries tells you what sold, but not who bought it. That leaves the people behind those transactions commercially invisible: the weekly shopper, the customer drifting to a competitor, the loyalist who goes out of their way to choose your store. Without knowing who they are, you can’t reach them, reward their loyalty, or act before they churn.
- Broken CRM activation1 in 4 CRM records fails to match on any ad platformMissing emails, stale phone numbers, outdated addresses. Your CRM is full of real customers you cannot reach on the platforms where you spend your media budget, and you are paying match fees for the privilege of uploading them.
- Loyalty blind spotsLoyalty programs can capture as little as 5% of actual purchase behavior.Your loyalty program may feel comprehensive, but it only tells part of the story. Much of what happens outside it — across cash and card transactions — remains invisible to your targeting, attribution, and measurement. And even recognized customers can be tied to outdated or shared information, from old phone numbers to family accounts that no longer reflect the person actually making the purchase.
Organizations lose 15–25% of their annual revenue due to poor data quality. The cost extends far beyond bad records, it appears as wasted marketing spend, missed opportunities from inaccurate targeting, operational inefficiencies, and customers who can't be identified, reached, or measured. The identity gap isn't theoretical. It's measurable in every campaign, every transaction, and every dollar left on the table.
Two solutions. One outcome.
Deep Sync closes the Retail Identity Gap through two complementary capabilities, each solves a different layer of the problem. Together, they make your entire customer universe, known, expanded, and previously invisible, fully addressable
- Where you startMost of your customers are invisible
- Step 1Profile Hygiene and EnrichmentKnownReachableYour CRM and loyalty customers are real, but incomplete. We fill the gaps: missing emails, phones, addresses, device IDs. Every record becomes more complete, more verified, more reachable.Best for: any retailer with an existing CRM or loyalty database
- Step 2Transaction MatchingAnonymousKnownYour customers are buying. You just can't see who they are. We connect anonymous purchase data to real, addressable individuals, turning raw POS data into audiences you can personalize, retarget, suppress, and measure.Best for: retail, grocery, mass-market, and any business with high anonymous in-store transaction volume
- The outcomeEach step closes a different layer of the identity gap. Together, they make your entire customer universe fully addressable.
Case study 0126% blind spot in a 141.7M-record CRM
If your data problem could be solved by having more data, a leading U.S. retailer would have solved it long ago. With approximately 75% of its customers enrolled in its loyalty program, it had 141.7 million customer records, a world-class loyalty program, and decades of purchase history. Yet when the company uploaded its CRM to the platforms where it spends its media budget, roughly 1 in 4 customers simply did not match, not because the customers were not real, but because the identifiers were incomplete.
To find out how large that gap really was, the retailer ran its full CRM file through Deep Sync enrichment and re-tested it across the five platforms where it spends its media budget, measuring both match rate and addressable audience before and after.
The platform-by-platform numbers, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat and UID2, live in the case study.
The same file. The same customers. But after Deep Sync, the retailer could reach 177 million more devices on Google alone. That is not a marginal improvement, especially given that Google has the most reach on the internet. That increase makes it a fundamentally different marketing capability.— Lindell Bennett, CCO of Deep Sync
Enrichment answered the first question: how many customers can you actually find. But a match is only the entry point. Once a customer is matched, the number of devices tied to that person decides whether you reach them once or everywhere. The next retailer measured exactly that.
Case study 0283.5% match rate and 4.9× device IDs per customer
An outdoor and RV retailer, the largest U.S. seller of recreational vehicles, gear, and outdoor living products, brought a CRM file of nearly 885,000 records: real customers who had purchased, browsed, or engaged with the brand. The question was not just how many could be matched, it was how much bigger each match could become across devices, phones, emails, and IP addresses.
For every 1 customer Deep Sync matched, we returned nearly 5 device identifiers, so a single known person became reachable across nearly 5 digital surfaces.
The full identifier breakdown, multiplier and match rate by type, lives in the case study.
All retailers have CRM data to start with. But what happens when that file only covers a sliver of who actually shops with you? What happens when 95% of your buyers walk out the door completely anonymous? That's where Step 2 begins.
Case study 0343.8 million anonymous transactions, turned into real people
A fast-growing national grocery chain is one of the most data-challenged retailers in the country. As a low-friction, no-frills grocery model, it does not have a traditional loyalty program. That means the overwhelming majority of its in-store transactions are anonymous: a basket of groceries, a payment, and nothing else. The chain processes over 43 million in-store transactions every month, approximately 95% of which had no customer identity attached.
The standard industry answer, launching a loyalty program, is a multi-year, multi-million-dollar undertaking. Transaction Matching is a fundamentally different answer: resolve the identity of the buyer using the transaction signal itself, with no customer opt-in required.
The three-pass resolution process and the full monthly waterfall live in the case study.
Transaction matching doesn't just improve data quality. It fundamentally changes what the retailer can do with marketing: personalization, suppression, attribution, retargeting, capabilities that were impossible before because 95% of their customers were completely invisible. By resolving roughly 70% of those buyers into known, addressable individuals, Deep Sync transformed invisible purchase activity into measurable customer intelligence.— Courtney Hano Stein, Director, Partner Development, Deep Sync
Across the three files, the pattern is the same: the customers were never missing, only unidentifiable. What changes when they become identifiable is not an abstraction, it shows up in three places on the P&L (Profit & Loss).
What the identity gap is costing you, right now
Three financial levers, media efficiency, loyalty accuracy, and attribution, each represent recoverable value that is slipping away every day the gap goes unmeasured.
- Recover wasted media spendIf your CRM match rate on Google Customer Match is 74%, approximately 1 in 4 records you upload is wasted: it contributes to match fees and upload overhead but generates no impressions.
- Make your loyalty program more accurateLoyalty programs are only as valuable as the identity data beneath them. Transaction Matching lets you see the full purchase pattern of customers you thought were anonymous, and recruit your highest-value anonymous buyers into your loyalty ecosystem.
- Close the loop on attribution and measurementWhen transactions can't be tied to known people, media attribution breaks. Resolved transaction files make closed-loop attribution possible for grocery and general retail, connecting digital ad exposure to in-store purchase events.
Ready to close your identity gap?
- 01Run a match testSend us your CRM file. We run a free test against our identity graph and show you exactly what your match rate and enrichment potential look like, before you commit to anything.
- 02See the lift reportWe test your enriched file across your target activation platforms (Google, Meta, UID2, and more) and deliver a side-by-side lift report like the results in this article.
- 03Activate at scaleMove to production enrichment or monthly transaction matching, with full support from the Deep Sync team at every step of integration and ongoing optimization.
The gap in your data is costing you money every day it goes unmeasured.
The identity gap is real. The solution is proven. Want to see your own numbers?
We run free match tests against your CRM, loyalty, or transaction file. You get a side-by-side report showing your current match rate versus your enriched potential, across every platform you activate on.
Julia is Director of Product Marketing at Deep Sync, specializing in identity resolution, customer data, audience activation, and go-to-market strategy. She helps brands turn complex data into actionable insights that power better marketing, personalization, and customer engagement.
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