Build Tailored Content for Your Customers using Segment’s Golden Profiles with Contentful & Ninetailed

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Personalization is table stakes in today’s competitive e-commerce environment to not only gain customers – but keep them, too. However, doing this requires a deep understanding of who a customer is and what their preferences are. So often, though, brands don’t have the right toolset in place to capture these important nuggets of information as well as activate on them. 

So that begs the question – what is the right toolset? Using Segment’s Golden Profiles alongside the leading CMS platform Contentful with the help of Ninetailed’s API is a winning combination to deliver tailored experiences to users visiting your website and other channels. This recipe will show you exactly how to use these tools in unison so you can say goodbye to one-size-fits-all content for good, and usher in a new strategy of custom-fit content for every visitor.  We think you (and your customers) will love the result. 

Step 1: Build your golden profiles in Unify

ID resolution is at the heart of Segment’s Golden Profiles. This means that Segment will leverage first-party identifiers that are determined by you (i.e. user ID, email, device ID, etc.) that are collected across your sources including website, email, cloud apps, and more to stitch together the Golden Profile. 

To set up your identity resolution and start stitching these profiles together, simply access the “Unify Settings” on the left-hand sidebar of your Segment account. You can set the first-party identifiers of your choosing, including ones that are specific to your business. Just ensure that these identifiers are being sent through in your current Connections Sources.

Once you have your identifiers setup, you will connect the Sources that you want to use to build your Golden Profiles. These Sources should contain the identifiers that you configured in the ID resolution settings in the previous step.

Once you have both your ID resolution settings configured and your Sources connected, you can see your Golden Profiles populate within Unify. These Golden Profiles will serve as the foundation for audience building and computed trait building within Engage in step 4.

Step 2: Setup Ninetailed integration

Now that you have your Golden Profiles, it’s time to set up your Ninetailed Integration within Engage. Follow the simple steps within our documentation to set this up and see screenshots below for extra guidance. It’s as simple as copying and pasting an API key!

Step 3: Setup your Contentful content source in Ninetailed

If you don’t already have your Contentful CMS space setup within Ninetailed, ensure you authenticate it within your account via the “New Content Source” button below. 

You can click on your Contentful Content Source to select the Contentful content types that you want to add personalizations and experiments using Segment data.

Step 4: Send audiences & computed traits to Ninetailed

Within Engage, leverage your Golden Profiles to build audiences and computed traits that you want to use to personalize experiences on your website or other Contentful platform. For example, you may want to personalize a web page based upon the last campaign that a user viewed. This can be done through the “Last” computed trait as seen below.

Once you’re satisfied with your computed trait, you will select Ninetailed as your destination, and name the trait in the last window.  Segment will then send this computed trait to the corresponding Ninetailed profile. The same trait can be used as a rule within a Ninetailed Audience to drive experiences for that visitor.

Step 5: Build your personalized content in Contentful

Now it’s time to leverage your computed traits and audiences within Contentful’s intuitive UI. Go to “Content” within your Contentful space to access all of the elements on your site or other platform. From there, select “Add Entry” and choose “Ninetailed Audience.”

Within the Audience builder, you will select “has trait” to specify the computed trait or audience that you sent over from Segment. Note that for computed traits, you will specify the specific computed trait value you are looking for within the value (i.e. “last_campaign_viewed” = “lookalike_audience”), but for audiences you will use the audience name as the key and “true” or “false” as the value (i.e. “high_value_customer” = “false”) when you send to Ninetailed as an identify call.

Now you have your audience that you can use to power other content types including “Ninetailed Experiences” that will dynamically change content based upon the “Ninetailed Audience” you’ve specified within Contentful. You’ll be able to see how flexible the Contentful platform is for putting actionable data directly within the hands of your marketing or product team to power content.

The result? A beautiful, personalized website.

Wrapping up

Contentful, Segment, and Ninetailed are all cloud-based platforms that are designed to facilitate integration with other services and tools. This makes it easy for your organization to integrate them all together seamlessly, while folding into your existing workflow.

Doing so like we showed you in this recipe will allow marketers, product teams, and more to take advantage of your business’s data in real-time to personalize experiences for your customers from targeted offers to 1:1 messaging. Reach out to us to learn more!

Recipe Summary

• How to build a Golden Profile in Unify
• How to connect Ninetailed to Segment
• How to connect Ninetailed to Contentful
• How to send audiences/computed traits from Segment to Contentful via Ninetailed
• How to build Ninetailed Audiences with Segment data in Ninetailed