Data segmentation and analytics firm Segment.io Inc. is giving its customers the ability to synthesize large amounts of customer data into individual profiles that can be used for personalization.

The feature, called Personas, establishes a central record of an organization’s entire relationship with a customer for purposes such as email marketing, advertising, social media interactions and personalized offers.

Segment pulls data from more than 200 sources — including web analytics platforms, customer relationship management applications, email servers and social media streams — into a single information store that marketers can use to target offers and campaigns. For example, a retailer could pull out lists of customers by their favorite product categories and average order values and then automatically sync that data to email marketing tools, web ads, push notifications, customized website content and even in-store coupon systems.

“All the data we’ve been collecting up till now comes in as a series of events that we then fan out to [analytics platforms like Google LLC’s] BigQuery or email marketing or analytics,” said Peter Reinhardt, Segment’s co-founder and chief executive. “We’re now aggregating that stream into individual profiles so we have a complete history of what each user has done.” Segment processes about 130 billion user actions per month across a universe of nearly 3 billion people.

Personalization is gaining prominence in marketing as customers become more fickle and their buying options proliferate. A survey of 1,006 U.S. buyers conducted by Segment found that 49 percent have purchased a product they didn’t intend to buy as a result of receiving a personalized recommendation from a brand. Forty percent said they’ve spent more than they planned because their experience was personalized. The survey also found that retailers believe they’re delivering a more personalized experience than customers perceive.

Markets of one

Customers can use Personas to create highly detailed queries, such as all customers who made a purchase more than two months ago but haven’t returned since. They can use other elements in the profiles to refine query results to include things such as a customer’s response to email campaigns, location, age and membership in social networks.

Personas uses an identity graph to resolve user identities across different channels into one profile using a deterministic matching algorithm. Marketers can segment those customers into various audiences, such as high-value customers or bargain-hunters. A feature the company calls “computed traits” (pictured) calculates likely preferences based upon historical data and cluster analysis.

Marketers can then synchronize audiences and computed traits with their preferred marketing automation tools. There’s also an application program interface that developers can use to build custom experiences.

Computed traits is the first of several applications of Personas the company expects to add in the future, Reinhardt said. For example, developers will be able to automatically populate customer relationship management systems with data drawn from Personas. “The concept of the 360-degree view of the customer has been a Holy Grail for decades, but it’s never been possible because the system of sources and destinations hasn’t been built,” he said.

Personas is still in beta test. The company plans to roll it out in 2018. Pricing hasn’t been set. The principal service is priced by the number of identified and tracked users, starting at $100 per month for up to 250,000 users.

Segment claims that more than 15,000 businesses use its service. The company has raised $109 million in venture financing, including a $64 million round this past summer.

Image: Segment