Who is your target customer? Whether they’re millennial parents with some extra money to spend or vegans looking for better dinner options, they’ve got something in common: rising expectations. We’re all bombarded with targeted offers, ads, and messaging whenever we so much as open our email or scroll through social media.
With every spontaneous discount code and push notification, customers expect better personalized campaigns. Keeping up can be a challenge. In recent years, legislation and consumer trends have devalued third-party cookies—the longtime foundation of ecommerce—making it even more difficult to get to know your customers.
Real-time personalization guided by first-party data is your solution. Fifty percent of consumers say personalized offers and promotions from brands they’ve interacted with improve the shopping experience. Virtually all consumers want to self-serve a buying journey filled with personalized content and relevant experiences.
In this blog, we’ll explain how real-time personalized marketing can deliver shopping journeys that convert, all while building a sustainable, long-term growth engine for your business.
What is real-time personalization?
Real-time personalization instantly adapts your online store’s content to deliver each customer a unique shopping journey. Using data customers share with you, real-time personalization provides them with bespoke, relevant content, offers, product recommendations, and more. It’s a collaborative effort across your whole operating and marketing stack, with everyone working on the same customer model using first-party data.
Effective personalized experiences should give customers the same feeling they get when they’ve been helped by a knowledgeable associate on the sales floor, or when they’ve earned a free item from a loyalty program.
Remember, today’s customer has an ambiguous response to retail personalization. Avoid tactics that come across as intrusive, creepy, or overly algorithmic. Customers want relevant experiences, but they don’t want their whole identity reduced to an item they clicked on 18 months ago—or even worse, to fear their personal data isn’t safe with you.
Consider Peter Drucker’s long-held advice: “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.”
Drucker wrote those words in 1954, but they’re quite relevant to ecommerce personalization now. Nurturing customers is the core of business growth, so be transparent with your personalization techniques. Allow customers to opt out of certain features. If customers feel a genuine connection to your brand, you’ve built a valuable relationship.
Benefits of real-time personalization
Today, 100% of buyers want to self-serve all or part of their customer journey. With such demand for a hands-on approach, how can your business stand out?
First-party data provides a wealth of insight for personalized marketing. And successful personalization strategy starts with building the best possible checkout experience.
Checkout is a high-leverage spot for retailers to cater to their customers. Shoppers value personal touches like having their preferred payment method at the ready, or being reminded of loyalty points they’ve earned that could be applied at checkout. This could be the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.
You can supercharge your personalization efforts by pairing them with the premier checkout experience. Hundreds of millions of people use Shopify Checkout each year. Our look, feel, and flow is familiar and trusted. We’ve built that reputation by delivering on high-volume holidays and making everyday transactions simple and secure.
And we convert. Shopify Checkout is the world’s highest-converting checkout, outpacing the competition by up to 36% and by 15% on average.
How does real-time personalization work?
Here’s a step-by-step guide for building real-time personalization for your target customer profiles.
Gathering customer data from multiple sources
First-party data is the foundation of everything. It’s the data you own, the data your customers entrust you with. And it’s the best way to personalize the customer journey.
This could be as simple as serving student customers with back-to-school offers, or customers in colder climates with alerts for warmer clothes in winter. If a customer searches for a specific item, you could email them a newsletter that delves into how to use it, with suggested add-on purchases. And that email could be made even more relevant with a subject line and intro informed by that customer’s demographic and behavioral data.
First-party data is the foundation of real-time personalization, but it’s not the only method. Second-party data—customer info collected from other stores you trust—can be used alongside first-party data to enhance the customer experience for those who opt in. Combined, diverse data sources can make your outreach hyperspecific and scalable, too.
But only if you have the right platform to tie it all together.
Shopify unites all your browsing, purchasing, and order data in one core customer model. You don’t have to integrate a bunch of third-party tools or worry about losing data across different selling channels. We connect all the dots so you’re ready to use your data for segmenting and scaling your messaging however you wish.
Collecting and analyzing behavioral data for insights
Analyze customer actions to identify patterns and preferences. Are you getting lots of purchases from a certain demographic? Explore ways to engage them more specifically. Are a lot of people asking your AI chatbot similar questions? Something could be amiss in the checkout process.
You can use machine-learning algorithms to process streaming data and generate metrics or “features” for personalized recommendations. Smart search, powered by machine learning, directs customers to the items they’re looking for even when their search queries are a little off, ensuring sales aren’t lost.
And be sure to collect and analyze customer feedback to refine your personalization strategies. Messaging that stood out three months ago could fade to background noise if you’re not truly engaged with your audience.
Understanding and segmenting your audience
If first-party data is the foundation of everything, segmenting is the foundation of knowing what to do with it.
Segmenting means grouping customers by key characteristics so you can personalize marketing efforts towards each group.
With Shopify Segmentation, you can segment customers based on demographics, purchase data, storefront engagement, third-party app data stored in Shopify, and more. You can use customer data to identify distinct customer groups and tailor marketing efforts towards whatever kind of person you want to reach—and run personalized experiences at scale. And Shopify’s Web Pixels give you a powerful and compliance-forward way to keep track of how buyers use your store, from discovery to checkout.
Mapping the customer journey and identifying touchpoints
The ecommerce customer journey map is growing less linear and more complex. As shopping behavior grows ever nuanced, it’s important to anticipate every customer touchpoint and plan personalization opportunities.
The customer journey begins with brand awareness via advertising and marketing, all the way to purchase (and then, customer support and loyalty building). Throughout the process, customer journey orchestration identifies key moments to trigger personalized responses. For instance, personalized retargeting ads can convince customers on the fence to tap “Buy.” And AI-powered chatbots can answer queries about order status and return policies.
Shopify is your key to data collection and identity resolution in personalizing the customer journey. Shopify Functions, Metaobjects, and other new platform primitives give you infinite possibilities for what to build, and the right framework for building it, so any app or customization will work effortlessly with everything else.
How to implement real-time personalization with Shopify
Shopify’s first-party data tools give you everything you need to maximize marketing technology—and drive conversion.
Here’s a sampling of what sets us apart:
- Shopify’scustomer data platform unifies buyer touchpoints across channels, devices, and sessions. If a potential buyer signs up for your email list on their desktop, receives confirmation on their phone, and taps the link in their email app, Shopify lets you target them with personalized messaging without missing a beat.
- Shopify’s web pixels let you transfer data client-side and server-side to use customer behavior data reliably.
- Ourattribution and ROAS reports give you an accurate, unbiased view of marketing performance. You can see where traffic and orders are coming from, and how much you’re spending to get them.
“Now, with third-party cookies behind us, marketers on Shopify already have everything they need to optimize the shopping and checkout experiences with the best data out there: the data they own.” Bobby Morrison, Chief Revenue Officer at Shopify
Social Entrepreneurship is about harnessing commerce for a cause.
Implementing real-time personalization
It’s time to spring your data into action.
Let’s explore how to build dynamic, real-time personalization in 2025.
Defining your personalization goals and objectives
Real-time personalization initiatives are most successful when guided by specific, measurable goals. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success. Then connect them to overall business objectives.
Maybe you have an AOV goal you want to hit with first-time shoppers, or you want to increase international orders by a certain percentage. Both of these goals are deeply intertwined with customer data and can be pursued through real time-personalization.
Unifying your data for seamless integration
Real-time data processing can be a sprawling challenge. Choosing the right customer data platform (CDP) is one of the most important choices you can make to ensure your data is unified, organized, and ready to be deployed.
We make it easy to integrate data from various sources to develop dynamic content for highly segmented audiences.
Here’s how:
- Segmentation on Shopify improves marketing KPIs by using ShopifyQL to query your customer list and create targeted campaigns.
- Shopify’s personalized storefronts delight customers with self-serve options the moment they log in. By making a buyer’s personal account their default home base in your webstore, you foster a personal experience and make it easy for customers to self-manage their relationship.
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Shopify Audiencesuses the collective power of participating merchants to drive better ad performance. Brands opt in to send data to the Audiences co-op. From there, Shopify Audiences algorithms generate billions of buyer behavior insights, giving you the tools to:
- Boost audience retargeting by reaching more people who have engaged with your brand but haven’t purchased.
- Engage your existing shoppers and exclude them from prospecting campaigns.
- Optimize prospecting audience by reaching potential new customers similar to those who have already bought your products.
- Marketing automation driven byShopify Flow delivers prebuilt templates using Shopify Email and third-party apps that you can set to whatever triggers and conditions you want. Our automations are always on and endlessly adaptable, ready to engage customers anywhere along the marketing funnel.
Examples of real-time personalization in action
We love hearing from ecommerce leaders who solved problems with Shopify’s help. Here are the stories of three online businesses who used our personalization tools to increase conversion:
1. Dermalogica Canada
Challenge: Before migrating to Shopify, the skincare company Dermalogica Canadastruggled with a custom-built platform that made search functionality and merchandise management difficult.
Solution: Shopify’s intuitive platform made rebuilding their store easy. “There’s a ton of Shopify developers out there that are already familiar with the platform, so it’s incredibly easy to add features and customizations,” says Sara Assenza, Dermalogica’s head of ecommerce. Shopify’s staff permissions feature united company sales reps in a single platform and gave them selective access to manage orders and drive sales more efficiently. With Shopify, Dermalogica Canada boosted B2B conversion rates by 23%, with a 338% increase in reorder frequency.
2. Monos
Challenge: After launching in 2018, the Canadian travel brand Monos sought solutions to keep up with their rapidly growing international customer base. Monos needed an easier way to customize and manage their checkouts without complicated custom coding that couldn’t handle new features.
Solution: With Checkout Extensions, Monos leveraged checkout customizations that integrate seamlessly with Shop Pay, including one-page checkout, discount combinations, pre-orders, and Shopify’s bundles offering. The result? A checkout experience that converts up to 50% better than guest checkout.
3. Maine Lobster Now
Challenge: Maine Lobster Now is a gourmet lobster company that ships fresh Maine lobsters directly to their customers’ doors. After launching with a custom site, Maine Lobster Now turned to Magento (now Adobe Commerce) to build the highly customized checkout experience necessary for shipping live lobsters on very specific dates. However, Magento’s checkout system required lots of clunky customizations, and sales slipped away.
Solution: Maine Lobster Now switched to Shopify and built a new checkout, totally customized to the needs of their customers—complete with a delivery date calendar that instantly processes the complexeties of shipping live seafood. With Shopify, Maine Lobster Now has boosted conversion by 69%---and by 97% on mobile.
The perfect sales pitch for your prized customers
The best kind of real-time personalization projects a certain feeling: “Hi, we understand you and we’ve got exactly what you’re looking for.”
With Shopify, you can deliver that message to your best customers with optimized shopping journeys proven to convert. Our experts would love to chat about a real-time personalization plan that’s perfect for you.
Real-time Personalization FAQ
What is real-time personalization?
Real-time personalization is the practice of using location, purchase history, and other first-person data to provide customers with unique, instantly adapted ecommerce experiences.
What are the 4 D’s of personalization?
The four D’s of personalization are data, decisioning, design, and distribution. Together, these ecommerce principles are used to scale a personalization approach: first by gathering relevant data, then using it to make decisions to design personalized experiences, before finally distributing these experiences across ecommerce channels.
What are real-time marketing examples?
Examples of real-time marketing include sending reminder emails to customers who’ve abandoned their carts and instantly offering promotional codes to first-time visitors of your webstore if they sign up for your email newsletter.
What is real-time content creation?
Real-time content creation means using customer data to deliver unique shopping experiences that feel genuinely relevant to each customer. This includes dynamic website content, such as banners with personalized product recommendations, and personalized promotions, such as birthday discounts.
