Our identity solution empowers marketers to capture crucial data to build richer customer profiles that power personalization.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen an evolution in both marketing and consumer behavior. Consumers crave more personalized experiences (and the convenience they offer). Meanwhile, brands have faced a quandary over how to better capture customer data amid changing privacy regulations. 

Attentive Signal is our answer to this challenge. It’s the best-in-class identity solution that allows marketers to deliver what consumers want—by collecting critical information on consumer shopping behaviors and preferences to power more personalized experiences.

We sat down with Eric Miao, Chief Strategy Officer at Attentive to share why we built it, how it works, and most importantly, what it means for marketers. 

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What is Attentive Signal? 

Attentive Signal is our identity product. It’s at the core of our platform. It powers everything you can do with it—from optimizing your customer segmentation strategy to triggering top-performing journeys. It collects and attributes a vast amount of shopper data directly to Attentive subscribers. This includes everything from zero-party data, like shopping preferences, to enrichment data, like device information. 

In other words, Attentive Signal enables marketers to understand who's shopping on their site, identify specific habits or preferences, and build the personalized experiences that customers want.

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Why is identity so important today?

We built Attentive Signal to combat the problem of signal loss (hence the name). At its core, signal loss limits personalization and performance. 

As consumers, we've all seen marketing campaigns that aren’t meant for us. Someone in your family has been researching a product that shows up as an ad in your social media feed instead. That’s signal loss at work.  As marketers, we experience signal loss when an anonymous website visitor adds items to their cart and then abandons it. That visitor might not‌ be truly anonymous—they could be a subscriber. But marketing technology can’t identify them. We lose that marketing moment because we don’t know who that visitor is.

There are three key factors that contribute to signal loss:

• Evolving privacy requirements: In recent years, major browsers have shifted their approach towards previously identification methods.For example, Apple (and Safari) have shortened the first-party cookie lifetime from 30 days to 7 days, and completely removed third-party cookies’ ability to function. This change has significantly affected marketers’ ability to reliably track returning subscribers.
• Advanced ad-blockers: The ongoing battle between ad-blockers and marketing platforms has led to more restrictive data capture policies, affecting opt-in marketing efforts.
• Savvy customers: Consumers are increasingly using tools like email proxies, multiple email addresses, and VPNs to protect their data. We don’t fault shoppers for using these different tools and strategies—they can protect them from malicious actors. They do, however, have an unintended consequence. They don't just protect data. They take their experience back to when the internet was new by breaking tools that make online experiences better.

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How does Attentive Signal find this lost data?

The short answer is our Attentive Identity Graph. Each subscriber has their own Identity Graph. It’s a web of data built with multiple unique identifiers (e.g., cookies, phone number, email, on-site shopping behavior, device information, first name, last name, etc.) with the customer at the center. It’s a comprehensive customer profile. 

Consumers are switching between devices and sessions as they shop—adding to the complexity of the signal loss problem. Using Attentive Signal means that no matter where or how someone chooses to shop, all of their data can be linked back to their unique profile. This gives marketers the ability to understand their preferences and behavior better, even with these ever-changing privacy requirements.

We recently came out of the “cookies are crumbling” marketing storm, and while cookies are staying, they are changing. With our approach to identity (using cutting-edge server-side technology), we can enable longer data collection periods for cookies. If we can’t collect cookie information, we start to look for other identifiers or match events, such as device information, that connect data in a subscriber’s Attentive Identity Graph.

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What kind of data will Attentive Signal collect and how can marketers use this data in their campaigns?

We focused on data that marketers are already using to power personalized campaigns: first-party, zero-party, enrichment, engagement, and integration data.

• First-party: Purchase behavior, browsing behavior, referring source
• Zero-party: Phone, email, custom fields
• Enrichment: Device type, cellular carrier, location, IP
• Engagement: Message clicks, conversion
• Integrations: ESP ID, Ecommerce ID, and custom IDs

All of this data powers the personalized experiences you can deliver with both our Core (SMS and Email) and AI products—no additional integrations required.

The key to our success this holiday season will be our ability to connect with customers in a more personalized and timely way. With the enhanced subscriber data from Attentive Signal, we're able to send more targeted, triggered messages, driving stronger performance and deeper customer engagement.
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-  David Reinke, CEO at The GLD Shop

How can I take advantage of Attentive Signal?

If you’re an Attentive customer, you have everything you need to more accurately identify and target your website visitors. 

Having a strong identity system means you can recognize your customers across all of their devices and over long periods of time. You can better understand their preferences and shopping habits to send the right marketing message at the right time, and on the right channel. 

If you want to super-charge your identity solution, Attentive AI™ Pro will give you even more customer recognition capabilities. 

These include:

• The Enhanced Attentive Tag: Leverages server-side technology to set more durable cookies to reliably capture customer data. 
• Smart Resolution: Boosts site visitor recognition beyond the traditional cookie lifespan. This feature gives you more actionable data about each visitor, more precise targeting, and a higher volume of relevant triggered messages.

Attentive has consistently delivered top-tier identity solutions, and with the launch of its Enhanced Attentive Tag and Smart Resolution, we've seen a 24% increase in sends and a 17% boost in revenue. Our enhanced ability to identify website visitors and collect rich first- and zero-party data has greatly improved our brand's personalization efforts.
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-  Michael Nadboy, CMO at FragranceNet.com

The ecosystem of identity solutions and data collection practices is constantly evolving. Especially over the last 10 years—and we don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. Not to mention, innovations in AI mean that richer customer profiles will help marketers deliver the sorts of truly 1:1 personalized experiences they have always dreamt of (and can deliver without any additional manual work).

Consumers are looking for that balance of protecting their data and privacy but sharing certain data with brands so they get personalized recommendations and relevant messages in return. We know that data collection and using it appropriately is the key to long-term customer loyalty. 

We'll continue to stay on top of technology changes, privacy regulations, and identifying new tools to maximize subscriber recognition.  

Looking to improve your customer experience with this powerful technology? Schedule a demo with our team.