From Identity to Intent: The Future of Personalization

Harness visitor intent in real-time with AdaptiveCX

Today’s shoppers don’t just want to be seen, they want to feel understood. Get that right, and it drives trust, conversions, and repeat business. But despite their benefits, traditional personalization practices still leave a lot of money on the table.

Now, predictive AI makes it easy to personalize every experience for every visitor in real-time.

Why Personalization is the Holy Grail

For more than twenty years, online brands have been trying to recreate the sorts of buying experiences that shoppers used to have at their local brick and mortar store. These shops were able to provide customers with such personalized service because they often knew them well and had a good idea of what they wanted when they came in.

In the world of e-commerce, personalization is the practice of tailoring content and messages to individual customers based on their unique behaviors and preferences. Until now, this has been made possible by collecting as much data about your customers as you can. The more you know about what they want, the better the experience you can create for visitors, and hopefully the more they’ll end up spending.

The Benefits of Personalization

The days of personalization being optional for brands are now well and truly gone. According to research by McKinsey, 71% of consumers say they now expect personalized experiences when shopping online, while 76% are frustrated when they don’t receive them. 

Personalization is also simply good for business. Brands implementing personalization strategies typically see marketing ROI lift by anywhere from 10 to 30%. While companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those efforts than those that don’t. Highly personalized campaigns have also been shown to deliver up to a 60% increase in conversion rates compared to one-size-fits-all equivalents.

But personalization doesn’t just boost immediate conversions, it helps brands build lasting relationships. Research shows that 44% of shoppers are likely to become repeat buyers after a personalized buying experience. And those personalized experiences significantly increase brand satisfaction for 68% of consumers, turning your customers into brand ambassadors.

Where Traditional Personalization Falls Short

It’s clear that personalization has been of huge benefit to online brands. But traditional personalization practices are also static, rules-based, and typically based on predefined customer segments. They use algorithms to try and predict a shopper’s intent going forward based on what they’ve done before. And that has a couple of unintended consequences.

Firstly, traditional personalization is slow, only happening after the fact. You analyze historical data, create a new segment, and hope that the next time a specific customer came back, you’ve got it right. But what if you haven’t? And what if they never come back? When visitor attention spans can now be measured in milliseconds, that’s called closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Secondly, it’s rigid. Let’s face it, the typical online customer journey is literally called a “funnel”, and who really wants to be stuck in one of those? Your visitors, on the other hand, are living, breathing human beings. They’re dynamic and won’t always behave in ways you expect. Their needs and intent are constantly evolving, and their journey in real life is made up of countless micro-moments and micro-decisions. These are too fragmented for traditional personalization methods to track.

What’s more, traditional personalization methods literally can’t see visitors with no data and no history. But for most e-commerce brands, 90% or more of their visitors are anonymous. These are first-time visitors, people browsing incognito, who haven’t signed in, or who just really don’t want your cookies. And yet despite your best intentions, you’re still serving all of them a generic homepage and crossing your fingers, hoping for the best.

Get Real with AdaptiveCX

Despite their obvious benefits, traditional personalization practices still result in a lot of wasted opportunity and missed revenue. What brands really needed is a way to personalize a visitor’s experience in real-time, as it happens, and without waiting for them to identify themselves. Enter AdaptiveCX.

AdaptiveCX from AB Tasty is a real-time personalization platform that processes behavioral signals while a visitor is on your website to understand and predict their intent. This represents a fundamental shift, from identity-based targeting used by traditional personalization to intent-based prediction, immediately unlocking the value of that anonymous 90%.

Unlike traditional personalization that is purely reactive, AdaptiveCX is designed to be:

• Reactive to both a visitor’s past and current context and actions,
• Proactive, by anticipating what a visitor is likely to do next given their perceived intent.

This allows for a highly adaptive online experience that is always relevant. One that is constantly adjusting to what a visitor has done, and what they are predicted to do next.

How AdaptiveCX Uses Intent 

Not every visitor arrives the same way—or leaves the same way either. Knowing where someone is in their journey, and what they actually need in that moment, is what separates a missed opportunity from a meaningful conversion. Whether a visitor is one click away from buying or still warming up, understanding their intent in real-time is how you turn more visits into revenue—without leaving margin on the table.

AdaptiveCX analyses live signals – like clicks, scrolls, mouse movement, and browser behavior – to infer a visitor’s affinities, needs, and intent in real-time. This allows the platform to anticipate future actions, such as the likelihood to buy, churn, or return.

This real-time understanding of intent enables you to instantly deliver a variety of adaptive experiences:

• Intelligent incentives: AdaptiveCX predicts a visitors purchase intent and adjusts promotional pressure accordingly. Discounts are reserved for those who are unlikely to convert without one, while visitors who are likely to buy anyway are not shown an incentive, thus protecting profit margins.
• Personalized search and discovery: The platform uses intent signals to personalize search suggestions and reorder product carousels, helping visitors find relevant products faster.
• Adaptive experience for out-of-stock products: When a product is out of stock, AdaptiveCX can instantly show personalized alternatives that match a visitor’s intent, turning a dead end into a new discovery path
• Elevated luxury experience: For high-intent visitors who are unlikely to purchase online, AdaptiveCX can adapt the experience to highlight human-assisted paths, such as booking a store appointment, aligning with luxury buying behavior.
• Mid-funnel messaging: For visitors who land directly on product or category pages, AdaptiveCX can deliver relevant homepage messaging that is adapted to their real-time intent, providing context and guidance.

By focusing on real-time intent, AdaptiveCX allows brands to move past static, rules-based personalization and create experiences that continuously and automatically adapt to each visitor’s needs.

Real-world case studies using AdaptiveCX

Now used by over a billion visitors, several leading global brands use AdaptiveCX to ensure their personalization tactics continuously adapt to visitor intent.

Kurt Geiger’s AdaptiveCX carousel

Kurt Geiger is a globally renowned fashion and accessories brand with a strong presence in the UK, US, and Mexico. They continue to push the boundaries of e-commerce by focusing on personalization, customer retention, and delivering the right product to the right customer at the right time.

The Challenge: Rising Costs & Missed Connections

Despite a robust product catalogue, the brand had trouble surfacing the most relevant items to each visitor. This led to missed revenue opportunities, higher acquisition costs, and less efficient use of marketing spend.

The Adaptive Solution: One Carousel with Infinite Possibilities

The brand launched an AdaptiveCX Homepage Carousel to serve highly targeted product recommendations based on each visitor’s affinities – whether bags, shoes, or other categories.

“AdaptiveCX helps us predict user intent and connect people with the right products instantly, which has had a clear impact on revenue.”

Gareth Rees-John, Chief Digital Officer, Kurt Geiger

The Results: Big Moves & Big Wins

Attractiontickets.com and Adaptive Search

Attractiontickets.com was founded in 2002 in order to Add Happiness® to holidays and make it easier for people to buy tickets to the world’s leading attractions. They’ve now sold more than 15 million tickets and their values and customer promise are the same as when they started.

The Challenge: Limited Product Discovery & Low Conversion

Despite selling tickets to a large number of attractions, the brand’s homepage search feature didn’t offer popular search suggestions. First-time visitors with no history were shown keyword suggestions that didn’t necessarily match their needs.

The Adaptive Solution: Improved Search with Visual Cues

The brand implemented an adaptive search feature, enhancing the existing search experience by showing proposed search terms based on real-time in-session user affinities. This was enriched by images which help draw a user’s attention more effectively.

The Results: Strong Uplifts Across Key metrics

E-commerce is changing fast. Traditional personalization practices based on static rules and predefined segments are just too slow to keep up. AdaptiveCX adapts to each visitor in real-time, even the anonymous ones. This not only maximizes engagement and sales, it ensures you’ll never miss an opportunity again.

Ready to dare to go further, together?

FAQs

Still have questions about the future of personalization? Here are the answers you need.

What is the difference between adaptive and static personalization?

Static personalization relies on predisposed rules set by marketers. For example, a website might show a specific banner to users from a certain location or display different content for returning visitors. These rules remain unchanged until someone manually updates them.

Adaptive personalization, on the other hand, continuously adjusts experiences in real time based on user behavior, context, and data. Instead of relying on rigid rules, it learns and adapts dynamically to deliver the most relevant content or experience.

Adaptive personalization is also often referred to as AI-driven personalization, dynamic personalization, or real-time personalization – as it uses data and algorithms to automatically optimize the customer experience.

What kind of software can I use to implement adaptive personalization?

One option for software catered to adaptive personalization is AdaptiveCX, an in-house solution developed within the AB Tasty platform.

Effectively implementing an adaptive personalization effectively requires excellent software that can analyze user behavior, run experiments, and automatically optimize experiences. With AdaptiveCX, businesses can move beyond static rule-based personalization by using experimentation and adaptive decisioning to tailor digital experiences for each user segment in real time.

What does AdaptiveCX do?

AdaptiveCX is a tool within the AB Tasty platform designed to deliver adaptive, data-driven personalization in real-time.

It accomplishes this by continuously analyzing user interactions and testing results to determine which experience performs best for different audiences. Instead of relying on fixed segments or assumptions, AdaptiveCX dynamically adjusts content, layouts, and messaging based on what actually drives engagement and conversions.

This approach allows teams to:

• Automatically optimize customer journeys
• Deliver more relevant experiences in real-time
• Reduce manual rule management
• Continuously improve performance through experimentation

This real-time, user data allows for a more personalized digital experiences – which can help boost conversion rates and brand loyalty long-term.

What does the future of personalization look like?

The future of personalization is migrating from static websites to more dynamic interfaces that can adjust to what the user wants in real-time. By using tools like Adaptive CX, Evi AI, and Emotions AI with AB Tasty – brands can successfully personalize their websites according to what their shoppers want while they’re still browsing the site, which can dramatically increase conversions.