Why Universal ID might be the missing link in your customer data strategy

Imagine your customer “John Smith” opens a marketing email and makes a purchase in-store a week later. You’d expect those two interactions to connect in your data—but they often don’t. Instead, your system treats them like two different people. You end up offering a discount to someone who’s already bought, and your analytics call both interactions anonymous.

This isn’t a rare glitch. It’s what happens when you don’t have a unified view of your customers.

The real problem

Most companies are stuck doing basic marketing, not because they want to—but because their data is disconnected.

Shopify or Hubspot says one thing; Snowflake has something else; Klaviyo might match. You’re not sure if the "Mary Green" in your customer database is the same person who just moved across town, changed her number, or signed up for a newsletter under a new email.

That uncertainty makes personalization unreliable. It tanks targeting. And it keeps your team stuck in the past, running campaigns based on guesswork instead of insight.

What Universal ID solves

Sometimes a gap between online engagement and offline transactions isn’t just inconvenient—it’s a dealbreaker. Without a way to connect the dots, your team can’t prove attribution, demonstrate ROI, build data pipelines or create powerful models. That’s where Universal ID comes in.

Faraday’s Universal ID links your customer data together—across systems, formats, and time. It assigns a persistent ID to each person, even as they move, change emails, or update their contact info.

This means:

• You don’t need names to match records (great for privacy-forward workflows)
• You can trace a person across historical and current addresses
• You can enrich IDs using reverse email or phone lookups

Universal ID is available via real-time API or direct data warehouse (like Snowflake) integration, and includes address parsing and standardization built in.

What Universal ID doesn’t do

Some identity resolution platforms promise to link anonymous website visitors to real identities. That’s not what Faraday’s Universal ID is built for. We don’t track or fingerprint web traffic. Instead, Universal ID focuses on resolving known data points across time, systems, and channels—like CRM records, email lists, purchase histories, and in-store transactions.

How it's different from standard identity resolution

If you’ve used Faraday before, you might be thinking, “Wait, doesn’t Faraday already resolve identities?” And you’d be right.

Anytime you bring data into the Faraday platform—whether for persona analysis, modeling, or activation—we automatically resolve identities behind the scenes using our own Universal ID system. That’s baked into the platform and included at no extra cost.

But the Universal ID product is something more: it’s what makes those resolved identities portable. It lets you deploy persistent IDs from Faraday into your own systems—like your data warehouse—so you can unify and act on customer records outside our platform. That’s what sets it apart from typical identity resolution tools.

Traditional solutions often rely on matching names, emails, or device IDs—data that’s easy to lose or siloed by channel. They struggle when people move, update contact info, or interact across disconnected systems.

Faraday’s Universal ID is built for continuity and complexity. It draws on 70+ months of historical address data (that’s 22 months longer than NCOA and growing) and uses reverse lookups via phone or email to stitch together records others miss. It doesn’t require a name to work, making it uniquely privacy-forward and effective in real-world scenarios.

So how does it look in practice?

Although Universal ID does sound nice on paper (just look at this blog), its value doesn’t stop there.

One of our consulting clients—an agency working with a fast-growing chain of brick-and-mortar stores—recently used Universal ID to solve a common but frustrating attribution problem. A retailer they work with had in-store transactions that were tied to customer identities captured via government-issued IDs, while online marketing campaigns used email-based prospecting lists with no shared identifiers.

There was no direct way to know if a person who received an email ended up making a purchase in-store. That gap made it nearly impossible to prove that digital outreach was driving foot traffic—or to justify campaign investment.

By bringing both datasets into Faraday and exporting Universal IDs back into their data warehouse, the agency was able to resolve identities across systems and attribute revenue to specific campaigns. This helped them demonstrate ROI and secure future spend. Without Universal ID, none of that analysis would have been possible.

Why not build it yourself?

So yes, you could.

But you'd be signing up for more than just development work. Replicating Faraday’s Universal ID would require licensing and integrating data from multiple vendors, like address standardization from Smarty.com and personal data from Epsilon or TransUnion. Then you'd need to build and maintain the logic to reconcile records across different identifiers, and stand up both batch and real-time infrastructure capable of handling identity resolution at scale. On top of that, maintaining high match accuracy over time is its own ongoing challenge, especially as people move, change contact details, or drop off your radar entirely.

And even if you managed to build all that, you’d still be missing the strategic advantages. Faraday brings a 70-month address history and counting—substantially longer than the most expensive NCOA license—which boosts match accuracy and depth. Its matching process doesn’t require names, making it more privacy-conscious and flexible. Plus, it’s already tailored to marketing workflows like prospect attribution, list enrichment, and campaign activation.

It also plugs straight into your data warehouse or your real-time pipelines, so you’re not stuck waiting to see results. Faraday’s done the heavy lifting so you don’t have to. You don’t just get a functional solution—you get one that’s already delivering value in the real world.

Transparent pricing

Universal ID delivers enterprise-grade identity resolution at a fraction of the cost it would take to build and maintain in-house. Whether you're an agency proving ROI for campaign work or a brand investing in better personalization, the value comes not just from the data, but from the speed and accuracy with which you can act on it.

At Faraday, Universal ID pricing is straightforward and based on monthly lookup volume:

• 50,000 lookups/month: $250
• 150,000: $500
• 1M: $2,000
• 10M: $9,000

But in 2025, a better question than what it costs might be: what does it cost not to have this information?

Know your customers. For real.

Disconnected data leads to disconnected marketing. If you want to stop guessing and start connecting the dots—for targeting, personalization, and attribution—Universal ID makes it possible, and we’re here to make that process easy.

Ready to unify your data and get more out of your existing systems? We can help.

Curious how it might fit your team? Reach out—we’d love to chat.