Why Customer Data is Essential to the Online Experience

1:1 personalization is now becoming standard for online businesses, especially as the adoption of AI and other technologies that support personalization have increased. This rapid adoption of personalization strategies has mostly come from consumer demand — either explicitly within surveys, or implicitly as shoppers spend more of their money with brands that offer a personalized experience.

If personalization is the key to more effective marketing, then data is the key to more effective personalization. Marketers need a deep, real-time Single Customer View to base personalization on. This understanding must live at the center of your martech, and it needs to go beyond a 360 customer view of historic and real-time data from across all interactions. It must also include predictive intelligence about customers’ likelihood to engage, purchase, or churn as well as next best actions to guide real-time customer interactions across the platforms within the stack. This is powered by dynamic customer profiles that update in real-time with every new activity, including for both known and anonymous customers. According to a recent survey, 89% of brands say real-time customer profiles are essential for personalized interactions. This unified data also allows you to easily create precise, auto-updated segments based on site activity, transaction history, and custom attributes.

See it in action: Learn how Blueshift customer, CarParts.com, increased customer engagement +400% by personalizing customer experiences based on each user’s vehicle type, historical, and real-time site behaviors.

Using dynamic content is not a new trick for marketers. Think of Happy Hours and Early Bird movies — to fill traditionally underperforming hours of operation, businesses instituted special prices and offerings that were time-sensitive. Dynamic content and product recommendations bring this old sales trick into the 21st century by making that experience digital. By changing content based on availability (like sales or “gone soon” content) and by customer (their specific interests and affinities), both on your site and within other marketing channels, you’ll provide a customer experience that feels more relevant and human. Blueshift customer, James Allen has seen a 30% increase in CTR through dynamic, personalized experiences.

Much like general personalization, dynamic, 1:1 recommendations rely on a solid foundation of customer data. One of the best martech platforms to achieve this is a Integrated CDP (Customer Data Platform). The CDP takes all of your raw first-party data and unifies it into a Single Customer View, which serves as the source of truth for everything your team does.

Having all of your relevant customer data in one place and accessible by all the teams that need it can make a world of difference for your business. Not only can your marketing be more relevant and personalized than ever before, but teams across your organization can use this information to make better, more informed decisions about your customer experience.

When you have unified and activated customer data, it becomes easier to see the patterns within your customers’ behavior and make changes accordingly. This means it’s easier to pivot according to trends and changes to consumer behavior.

See it in action: Learn how Blueshift customer, James Allen, increased engagement with dynamic, personalized experiences based on real-time site behaviors.

As cross-channel marketing becomes increasingly complex, effectively harnessing data is now a key differentiator. However, this is a significant hurdle for many, as our survey found that 76% of B2C brands struggle to activate offline data for cross-channel marketing, and 61% of teams cite data bottlenecks as a primary reason campaigns fail to scale.

This is where AI-driven solutions are making a real impact. These technologies help brands with real-time customer journey tracking, a key trend for 2025, and lead to higher customer lifetime value. In fact, 80% of marketing leaders say AI-driven cross-channel marketing has led to higher customer lifetime value, with the impact being particularly significant in the Retail and Insurance industries.

As marketers look to the future, the clear solution to these challenges is an Intelligent Customer Engagement Platform (ICE) that unifies data, intelligence, and engagement. 

The brands that thrive will embrace AI, unified data, and cross-channel orchestration to create seamless, personalized customer experiences. To stay competitive, brands need a platform that simplifies data integration while enhancing customer insights, automation, and personalization.

A key part of this solution is the ability to integrate everywhere, connecting with your existing martech stack and providing robust data security and privacy compliance with standards like GDPR, SOC2, HIPAA, and CCPA.

Talk to Blueshift today to see how the platform can help you optimize customer acquisition, engagement, and retention while driving long-term business growth.