We all know the feeling when a brand wins us over.
Maybe it's an advertisement that makes you say, “Wow, they know me so well.” Or a product recommendation that you wouldn’t have thought to search for but is exactly what you need.
What powers these moments isn’t just personalization. It’s personalization delivered at the perfect time. When brands combine complete customer data with precise timing, they transform small interactions into lasting customer relationships.
Traditionally, real-time marketing has forced a trade-off between speed and depth: react quickly based on customer behavior in the moment or personalize meaningfully with data from all the ways that a customer has interacted with your brand in the past. With today’s launch, Hightouch reimagines same-session personalization, and that trade-off disappears. For the first time, marketers can combine same-session behaviors with all of the rich customer data in their data warehouse to deliver more relevant and impactful personalization in real-time.
The importance of historical data for in-the-moment marketing
Same-session personalization is the ability to tailor a user’s brand experience to their immediate behavior and interactions. After the user takes an action (or series of actions), the rest of their onsite experience adapts.
Dynamic hotel ads appear based on user activity on a travel website.
We don’t need to explain why same-session personalization matters to marketers. Dynamically changing a user’s digital experience to their immediate behavior and interactions is critical to delighting customers, driving conversions, and elevating your brand.
However, personalization has varying levels of depth. If one of your current customers engages with your website, is it enough to respond to that brief interaction in a vacuum? Imagine the following use cases for same-session personalization with and without contextual information:
- Personalized content and recommendations: An app user swipes a certain number of times within one session and is prompted with a discount to upgrade to a premium tier. But what if they already are a premium member? They will likely be frustrated or confused, leading to attrition.
- Dynamic onsite advertising: A person searches a travel site for flights in Los Angeles, and the page automatically updates with ads for local excursions and rental car companies. What if they live there or travel there frequently and already have a preferred rental company? Tourist recommendations are going to fall flat.
- Triggered campaigns: Someone makes a purchase at your eCommerce store and receives a welcome email. If they return after six months of inactivity, a limited lookback window in your real-time solution may trigger the same welcome email despite it not being their first purchase. Instead of successfully re-engaging them with a personalized “Welcome back!” message, you create confusion and a disconnected customer experience.
When you only have milliseconds to capture someone’s attention, every interaction counts. Without complete customer data, even highly responsive experiences can still seem generic. Hightouch gives marketers the power to augment multiple real-time signals in one browsing session with complete customer history in the data warehouse and create same-session experiences that actually feel personal.
Bringing complete customer history to same-session personalization: Why is this a breakthrough?
Delivering real-time responsiveness is hard. Creating on-the-fly experiences within the same browsing session requires sub-second data processing speed, which is challenging enough on its own. After a person engages with various parts of your website or app, real-time technology has to process those actions, send that data to content management systems, and then deliver a tailored message, all in the time it takes to say the word “website.”
When you try to combine historical data with real-time signals, the challenge becomes 10x harder. Historical data is stored in the data warehouse or other systems that require slower data processing time (minutes instead of seconds).
Current solutions in the market approach this problem in various ways but still result in limited historical data available for same-session personalization. For example, most traditional real-time technologies, such as packaged Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), attempt to solve same-session personalization by forcing brands to migrate data into the vendor’s environment. While this can make certain attributes available, it still introduces difficulties with scale and flexibility. As a result, brands often find that only a small portion of their data is available for real-time personalization, hindering the effectiveness of their same-session strategies.
Until now, technology built on the data warehouse has supported near-real-time marketing, but it has been impossible to bring complete customer history to same-session personalization. With Hightouch’s Composable CDP, that changes. Using our architecture that runs parallel to the data warehouse, brands can augment real-time signals with all of their customer data to deliver a truly personalized, same-session user experience. To learn more about how we solved this, check out this blog.
Architecture that runs parallel to the data warehouse powers same-session personalization use cases.
How to set up same-session personalization in Hightouch
To begin, follow these three steps:
- Connect your event stream to Hightouch.
- Create an audience in Hightouch and turn on the “real-time” toggle. By definition, this audience logic defines the qualifying events that will trigger someone to enter the audience. With real-time enabled, qualifying events can include real-time behaviors and historical customer data. There are no limits on the number of events or filters you can use.
- Determine what to do with that audience when a new user qualifies for it. Maybe you sync members to a content management system, an onsite advertising tool, a push notification tool, or any other destination that shapes your digital customer experience (see Hightouch’s 250+ integrations here)
- When users meet the qualifying behavior criteria, their onsite experience will dynamically update in milliseconds.
Check out this demo to see the product in action:
Meeting all of your real-time needs
With Hightouch, you can deliver the right customer experience at the right moment, down to the millisecond. Brands can leverage all of the benefits of composable technology for real-time customer experiences without the traditional limitations of the data warehouse:
- Fast deployment time: Create new same-session personalization campaigns in days or weeks, not months or years.
- Personalize across the whole marketing funnel: With more than 250+ integrations, marketers can trigger real-time experiences beyond the browsing window (such as push or SMS campaigns).
- Unlimited contextual data: If the data is in your data warehouse, you can use it to power real-time use cases in Hightouch.
To learn more, reach out to our solutions engineers today.
