Segment Announces Personas, a New Product That Helps Businesses Compute User Signals From Cross-Device and Cross-Channel Data

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - October 25, 2017) - Segment, the customer data platform, today announced Personas, a new product that allows businesses to synthesize massive amounts of customer information into helpful traits that signal user intent. Businesses can use Personas as the central record of their entire relationship with a customer, and leverage the platform to create personalized experiences everywhere they interact with their users -- whether in email, advertisements, social media, push notifications, in-app, or even in-store.

Personas helps companies drive loyalty and revenue by adding the context necessary to enable personalization in every customer interaction. For instance, with Personas, a retailer could identify a customer's favorite categories and average order value, then automatically sync this data to tools for email, ads, push notifications, site content, and even in-store systems. By doing this, the retailer can offer the right product recommendations at the right price to that customer on every channel. Personas reruns these calculations any time a user interacts with the company, updating Computed Traits in real time.

"Companies have struggled to get personalization right because it's a fundamentally difficult data and infrastructure problem," said Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment. "At Segment, we've spent the last five years building customer data infrastructure with an ecosystem of hundreds of marketing and analytics tools. More than 15,000 companies use Segment to route, manage, and activate their customer data. By adding the ability to compute meaningful traits from customer behavior on top of that raw data, we're best positioned to help companies understand their users and deliver customer-centric marketing and products."

The Situation: Data Everywhere, but Fragmented

Consumers demand personalized experiences no matter where they are. According to Segment's 2017 State of Personalization Report, which was published today, 54 percent of consumers expect a personalized discount within a day of identifying themselves; 32 percent after just an hour. In contrast to these expectations, only 22 percent of consumers feel their shopping experiences are highly personalized.

Personalization offers a huge opportunity for brands. Almost half of shoppers surveyed (49 percent) have purchased a product that they did not intend to buy after receiving a personalized recommendation from a brand, and 85 percent were happy with that purchase. Twenty-three percent of those shoppers have spent more than $50 on a single purchase, and 44 percent of consumers will likely become repeat buyers after personalized experiences.

In order to achieve omnichannel personalization, businesses need to understand the complete history of each user across all channels, in one centralized record. They also need to make these records available in the tools that their company uses to interact with customers. However, existing solutions cannot understand, connect, and contextualize customer history from every device and channel, nor can they provide the specificity needed to customize user segments to businesses' unique needs. This is a massive data and infrastructure problem.

Introducing Personas

There are three key pillars of Personas:

1. Identity Resolution: The Segment Identity Graph resolves a user's identity across different channels into one profile. It uses a deterministic matching algorithm to add any ID fragment with a common link to the right user profile.
2. Trait and Audience Building: On top of these profiles, marketers can build Audiences, like high-value users, or Computed Traits, like favorite product category, to calculate important signals from their historical customer data.
3. Activation: Segment syncs Computed Traits and Audiences to each company's marketing integrations, so they can tailor their campaigns. Developers can build custom in-app experiences with the Personas Profile API.

The Right Message, for the Right Person

Segment Personas helps companies drive customer loyalty by sharing the right message at the right time, and keeping messages consistent across channels.

HotelTonight, a popular hotel booking app, plans to use Personas to further customize the hotel choices it displays to individual customers.

"At HotelTonight, we've been using Segment for centralizing data tracking to one platform and syncing our data to all of the tools we use," said Sam MacDonnell, CTO at HotelTonight. "With Personas, we're excited to surface user insights within Segment, remove engineering work required to manually derive user traits, and more easily give each user a custom experience no matter where they are. Segment data has always been a core piece of our internal machine learning and personalization efforts, and Personas will take our capabilities to the next level."

Availability
Personas represents the next generation of Segment's platform and will be rolling out over the next few months. Today, companies can join the waitlist for the Personas beta, which includes core features for identity resolution, trait and audience building, and activation. Segment will make Personas generally available in 2018 and add more functionality throughout the year.

To join the waitlist, visit https://segment.com/personas.

About Segment
Segment is the infrastructure for your customer data. Use one API to unlock 200+ tools for every team in your company. With Segment, developers can stop building tedious and expensive one-off data integrations while business users can compute important traits about each customer and push this data to their favorite apps for analytics and personalization. Segment is trusted by thousands of companies including Gap Inc., New Relic, Instacart, Intuit, and Time. For more information visit https://segment.com.