Introducing the Real-time Personalization Data App: Effortlessly deliver dynamic experiences

Effective personalization is table stakes for any company that wants to compete in today’s marketplace. Customers expect it, and when it’s done well, they reward it. Companies that nail it generate 40% more revenue from personalization than those with mediocre execution.

However, excelling at personalization is no small feat. At its core, it’s a data problem, and getting it right requires a clean identity graph and a comprehensive Customer 360 to drive logic and ensure the right experience is delivered. Real-time experience personalization – the most powerful type – involves an additional technical challenge because it requires enabling access to all the right data in real time (naturally).

RudderStack Profiles helps you overcome the first hurdle, making it possible to rapidly model complete customer profiles in your warehouse to build a customer 360. The Customer 360, though, is just a foundation. It’s the use cases you build on top that make it valuable to the business.

To make it possible for every team to ship real-time personalization projects in days, not months, we’re introducing the Real-time Personalization Data App. It’s part of a new suite of apps to help you bridge the gap from Customer 360 to measurable business results.

Eliminating custom data API work

Delivering dynamic personalization for web and product experiences typically requires custom APIs, complex data pipelines, and months of development. The work required to define, design, code, test, and publish a data API keeps real-time personalization out of reach for many teams. Moreover, custom APIs are hard to scale and maintain, creating ongoing, burdensome work and hindering experimentation cycles.

The Real-time Personalization Data App eliminates the intensive engineering work, freeing teams up to focus on building value-driven features instead of managing complex data pipelines. The app combines several of RudderStack’s API and integration features to make your customer 360 data available via a ready-made endpoint that web and app developers can use to quickly implement personalization use cases for marketing and product. The Real-time Personalization App leverages three components:

• Your customer 360 data set (generated through Profiles).
• A Redis cache, where you push your customer 360 data.
• RudderStack’s Activation API which gives you real-time access to the data in your Redis cache.

Our own Head of Web, Gerlando Piro, was impressed after using the app to ship a marketing project, noting, “Across the data and web teams, we shipped this project in less than 5 days, which was incredibly fast based on my experience. At past companies, it took us many months to build out real-time use cases like this.”

How the Real-time Personalization App Works

With the Real-time Personalization App, you can make your customer 360 data available for real-time use in a few easy steps.

Set up and run a Profiles project to generate the data you want to make available in real time. You’ll also need to set up a Redis instance where you’ll store the data for quick access.

Enable the Activation API and add your credentials: In your Profiles project, simply toggle on ‘Enable sync to Redis’ and enter your credentials to turn on the activation API.

Once enabled, RudderStack will sync your Profiles data to your Redis cache.

Integrate the Activation API into your website or app: Activation API endpoints give frontend and mobile developers real-time access to the enriched user traits stored in Redis.

The Real-time personalization data app provides a seamless workflow and a RudderStack-managed API that makes it possible for every team to build personalized experiences with real-time adjustments based on user interactions. Go deeper in the docs.

Dogfooding at RudderStack: Personalized website CTAs

We use Profiles along with the Real-time Personalization Data App internally to enhance the user experience on our website. To serve more relevant CTAs to site visitors, we wanted to base our header CTA on signup status, so visitors who have already signed up will see a “Request demo” CTA while those who have not signed up yet will see “Try for free.” Here’s how we did it.

Step 1: Resolve user identities – Using RudderStack Profiles, we created a "Web Personalization" project which is a filtered view of our existing ID graph to target active users (in the last 30 days) with at least one non-anonymous ID. (This reduced unnecessary data and costs while preparing for personalization.)

Step 2: Build features to drive personalization logic – To make the logic easy for our frontend team, we created a new feature (user_app_signup) that represented signup status as a boolean value (as opposed to a timestamp). Profiles made this as easy as defining the inputs and writing simple definitions for the features themselves.

Step 3: Make the profiles available in real time – The activation API made this as easy as toggling on the endpoint and adding credentials.

Step 4: Frontend Integration – At this point, our data engineer was able to hand off the API endpoint to the frontend engineering team. They used Vercel Middleware to grab the users' anonymousid, pass it to the Activation API, pull down user signup status, and change the frontend—almost instantaneously.

We’re not the only ones taking advantage of the Real-time Personalization Data App. Our customers are also seeing incredible results.

Phantom’s sensational real-time campaign

Using The Real-time Personalization App, Multichain crypto and NFT wallet, Phantom, executed a brilliant campaign that went viral on X. It created a word-of-mouth buzz that vaulted them to the #1 spot in daily app store downloads. With Profiles, Phantom was able to identify users who were eligible for the Jupiter $JUP token airdrop (a big deal in the Crypto world). They then used the activation API to send this group of users reminders to claim their tokens so they wouldn’t miss out on the one-time event.

Get Started

RudderStack’s Real-time Personalization Data App is your solution to overcoming the technical complexities of real-time personalization. Pair the app with RudderStack Profiles, and you can solve both identity resolution and real-time data access to make experience personalization easy.

To learn more about how RudderStack can help you deliver dynamic experiences, check out the docs for Profiles and the Real-time Personalization Data App. To see the Real-time Personalization Data App in action, request a demo with our team.