Same-session Personalization: The next step in real-time marketing

Think about the last time you shopped online. 

What experience made you more likely to purchase again? The time you received an email encouraging you to purchase sneakers you had already bought? Or the moment when you were delivered the perfect coupon code or product recommendation when browsing? Probably the latter.

Customer expectations have fundamentally shifted over the past few years, and consumers no longer evaluate their digital experiences after leaving your site or closing your app. They make decisions in the moment, as they engage with your brand. 

Today, we’re introducing Same-session Personalization, a new capability that fundamentally changes that.

The evolution of real-time personalization

Traditionally, real-time marketing has struggled with one fundamental problem: context. Marketers had to choose between acting quickly on customer intent or personalizing experiences using richer customer data that lived elsewhere. Speed and context seemed to be mutually exclusive. 

We changed that with GrowthLoop Real-time Messaging, by combining instant triggers and lifecycle marketing in one unified journey canvas. Marketers finally had the flexibility to trigger messages in seconds, without complex workarounds or custom engineering,  while relying on their own data to add the personalization and relevancy that drives purchases, brand affinity, and loyalty. 

But as teams began delivering triggered messages more effectively, a new limitation became clear. Even when messages could react instantly, the in-session customer experience couldn’t. Once a session began, content, offers, and eligibility on the website or app were still largely determined in advance, based on customer data ingested before the interaction even started. 

This gap exposed a deeper personalization challenge. While marketers could trigger messages in real time, the underlying customer context powering the experience remained largely static during an active session. In other words, teams could react quickly, but they couldn’t adapt the experience as the customer’s behavior unfolded.

Real-time experiences require real-time context

Consider what the modern digital experience demands. A shopper wants to see that their order qualifies for free shipping the moment after they add items to their cart, or that a promotion is available for another product that complements what’s in their cart. 

Delivering true real-time personalization at this stage requires more than fast event processing. It requires customer context that updates as customers interact and is immediately usable by digital experiences, without forcing teams to centralize all customer data in a closed system.

When context lags behind behavior, experiences become disconnected, even if you deliver messages in real time.

Introducing Same-session Personalization: An evolution of our real-time capabilities

That’s where Same-session Personalization steps in, making it easy to adapt on-site and in-app experiences to reflect what a customer is doing right now, not what they did hours or days ago. With Same-session Personalization, marketers can actively shape experiences as customers engage, connecting with them at the moment of highest intent. 

How do we do this? The GrowthLoop Personalization API provides a real-time personalization layer that makes up-to-date customer context available to your website or app through a low-latency API. 

A shopper views a product, a real-time event is triggered, and that event is quickly processed within Universal Journeys, updating the shopper’s context based on what they just did. Those updates are then written to the GrowthLoop Personalization API, where they are immediately available for in-session decisions. The experience can then change in real time, whether that’s an offer, a banner, a recommendation, or eligibility logic.

Teams can decide exactly which warehouse fields and audience attributes are exposed for real-time use. The warehouse remains the system of record, and the personalization layer simply makes the right data available at the right time.

Let’s say Sally is browsing for sneakers and puts a pair of running shoes in her cart, but doesn’t immediately purchase and goes back to browse more. As Sally interacts with the site, real-time events update her context, allowing the website to adjust in-session and highlight related running accessories or complementary products. In seconds, Sally’s experience becomes more relevant to her intent.

By combining dynamic personalization and real-time context, GrowthLoop makes it easy to connect with your customers in the moment, wherever they are.

Real-time personalization for the future 

Same-session personalization is the next step in powerful, relevant marketing personalization.

Real-time Messaging made it possible to act instantly across channels. Same-session Personalization makes it possible to reshape experiences while customers are still engaged, guided by what they are doing in the moment. Together, these capabilities move you from reacting in real-time to adapting in real time.

As your marketing evolves, each real-time interaction surfaces signals through the Personalization API to help you better understand your customers. Personalization evolves from simply reacting faster to continuously learning what actually improves customer experiences, one interaction at a time.

With GrowthLoop, you can combine speed and context to meet your customer where they are, in every moment.

If you'd like to learn more, please reach out to us for a demo.