Demo Series Transcript: Boosting 1:1 Personalization with Complex Catalogs
Speakers:
- Kristen Session, Product Marketing Manager, Blueshift
- Eric Gordon, Senior Solutions Consultant, Blueshift
Why Complex Catalogs Are a Personalization Opportunity, Not a Roadblock
Kristen Session: Welcome, everyone! Today, we're diving into how to boost one-to-one personalization, even when you have a large or complex product catalog. I’m joined by Eric Gordon, our Senior Solutions Consultant.
Many marketers feel overwhelmed by vast catalogs, so they fall back on batch-and-blast messaging. But customers expect personalized experiences now—and with the right tools, tapping into your catalog complexity becomes your biggest advantage.
We’ll show you how to:
- Define and work with complex catalogs
- Create hyper-targeted segments based on catalog interactions and metadata
- Automate campaigns based on real-time catalog changes
- Use AI to scale recommendations across every channel
- See how Blueshift customers like CarParts.com, Tradera, and Zumper turned catalog complexity into results
What Makes a Catalog "Complex" and How Our Customers Handle It
Eric Gordon: Thanks, Kristen. Let’s define “complex catalog.” The challenges usually fall into three buckets:
- Large and dynamic inventories
- Tradera, for example, has over 295 million active listings. Before Blueshift, it was impossible to surface one-to-one recommendations across web, email, and SMS. With Blueshift, they now send messages based on viewed, bid-on, and even lost auctions—leading to a 130% lift in sales.
- Multiple interdependent catalogs
- Zumper manages catalogs for listings, buildings, and neighborhoods. Blueshift helps them match users to listings or amenities they’re likely to want—leading to a 400% boost in lead submissions.
- Relationships between products and customer profiles
- CarParts.com has catalogs for vehicles, parts, and content. Blueshift lets them recommend blog articles and parts based on the user’s garage profile, vehicle history, and on-site behavior. That level of targeting just wasn’t possible before.
How Blueshift Helps You Ingest and Structure Complex Catalog Data
Let’s look at how you get your catalog into Blueshift:
- Sync via API, FTP, Shopify, Snowflake, or manual upload
- Ingest unlimited product attributes (like brand, style, price, size, engine type)
- Treat product data like customer data—it's all usable in segmentation and personalization
Whether you sell books, cars, real estate, or rentals, Blueshift structures product data in a flexible way, so marketers—not engineers—can use it.
Building Hyper-Targeted Segments Using Catalog and Behavioral Data
Let’s walk through a bookseller use case. She wants to promote a new mystery novel to:
- Engaged users who’ve clicked an email in the last 30 days
- Users aged 30+
- Readers with affinities for mystery or classic genres
- People who’ve purchased books by John Steinbeck or Jack London
With Blueshift:
- You combine engagement filters, demographics, affinities, and catalog purchase data
- Filter by product-level metadata like author, genre, or price
In minutes, she has a razor-sharp segment—no SQL or IT needed.
Automating Campaigns Based on Catalog Changes
Now let’s say you want to notify users about:
- Low inventory
- Back-in-stock alerts
- Price drops
Blueshift can:
- Monitor catalog changes in real time
- Use derived events to trigger messages to users who viewed or favorited a product but didn’t purchase
- Personalize each message based on the product they interacted with
This moves you from generic “markdown” announcements to targeted offers your customers actually care about.
Using AI-Powered Recommendations with Catalog Complexity
Blueshift offers over 80 pre-built recommendation recipes across verticals. For complex catalogs, one powerful example is:
Items matching user attributes – Recommend products based on user profile data (e.g., car make/model, size, preferences)
Every recipe:
- Comes with default logic and filters
- Can be customized with your exclusions, sorting, and logic
- Can be deployed across email, SMS, web, and more
And if needed, we’ll help you create a custom recipe tailored to your catalog.
Customer Example: How CarParts.com Personalized at Scale
CarParts.com had:
- 4M+ vehicles in catalog
- 1.5M+ individual parts
- A content catalog with how-to articles
Before Blueshift, their marketing team relied heavily on engineering to build campaigns. With Blueshift:
- They increased personalized content by 130%
- Drove 400% higher CTR with personalized recommendations
- Eliminated 50+ hours/month of engineering dependencies
Final Thoughts: Turning Complexity Into Conversion
Kristen Session: Thanks, Eric. You’ve seen how even the most complex catalogs can be your advantage.
With Blueshift, you can:
- Unify and enrich your product data
- Automate relevant campaigns based on behavior and inventory
- Deliver AI-powered personalization across every channel
To learn more, visit blueshift.com/contact-us or reach out to your customer success manager to get started.
Thanks for joining!
