Blueshift: Data & Identity Management

Overview: Unlike other competing solutions that require complex up-front data modeling and SQL queries with a limited number of data attributes, Blueshift provides a marketer-friendly framework that dynamically adapts to the underlying data, avoiding complex and lengthy deployments. This means that with Blueshift, you do not need to model your data up-front. Instead, Blueshift creates field types dynamically as it receives data from your existing data stores and applications. Dynamic fields in Blueshift are available immediately for use for segmentation, as well as for personalization.

Our platform’s modern way of managing customer data enables you to immediately integrate and leverage customer data from any source despite any potential underlying inconsistencies in data structures. Additionally, our platform will provide marketers with tremendous flexibility when it comes to integrating new data sources and adding new customer attributes to be leveraged across segments and campaigns.

Blueshift's solution helps you maintain a 360-degree profile of customers that updates with every customer interaction. This profile is linked to customer identifiers on each channel: email address, phone number, mobile app device tokens, as well as 3rd party identifiers like Facebook or Display RTB ids.

Blueshift automatically merges anonymous (logged-out) activity of users with their known behavior whenever possible (e.g. in the case of an anonymous web user who logs in or creates an account).

Blueshift's SDK (for mobile apps), Javascript library (for web front-end events), and API (for all other actions) give you a comprehensive set of tools to track known and anonymous customer behavior on the web, mobile and offline platforms.

Blueshift's Responses to Questions on Data Management

Data Ingestion

1. What data types and formats does the solution support? Can your solution handle structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data using schema-less ingestion? Describe the methods through which your solution ingests data.

Blueshift can accept data in any format (structured, semi-structured, or unstructured) and can properly index the metadata into the appropriate field for the appropriate user. You do not need to model your data or perform any data mapping up front. Instead, Blueshift can infer the incoming data, classify the data type (i.e., text, numeric, timestamp), and then automaticially create data fields dynamically so that you always have a complete view of your users.
In addition, Blueshift provides the flexibility for marketers to manually add, modify, and classify user data attributes using Blueshift's Data Studio. In terms of event data, marketers can easily add, modify, and classify any event activity for tracking user behavior across any channel in just a few clicks within the UI.

Additional information can be found in Blueshift's documentation at https://help.blueshift.com under the topic: Data Within Blueshift.

2. Does your solution provide pre-built connectors to ingest data from source systems?

Yes, Blueshift’s platform is data agnostic and can connect with any data source from across channels and devices. We have pre-built connectors with your existing enterprise applications, data warehouse, and more to seamlessly ingest both real-time and batched data. Blueshift also has native integrations with leading ecommerce solutions to easily ingest customer, product catalog, and transactional data.

Additional information can be found in Blueshift's documentation at https://help.blueshift.com under the topic: The App Hub.

3. Does your solution support both real-time data streaming and batch processing?

Yes, Blueshift supports multiple ways for ingesting user attribute and event streaming data in both real-time and/or batched process.
For Batch Processing we support importing and exporting via

File transfers (i.e. Amazon S3, sFTP, etc.)
Direct warehouse connections
Manual Upload

For real-time data processing, we provide various options, including:

JavaScript tag that can be placed on your web page or integrated with your existing tag management solution to track real-time online website behavior.
Mobile SDK that can be installed in your iOS or Android mobile app(s) to track real-time mobile user behavior.

To integrate directly with your back-end systems, we offer robust web services REST API, including a Bulk API to push large sets of data to Blueshift, for real-time processing directly from your internal systems.

4. Can your solution ingest real-time behavioral event data, product catalog data, customer interaction data, transactional data, and customer account data types and make it available for use immediately?

Yes, Blueshift ingests real-time user and behavioral data and once the data is ingested into Blueshift, this data is immediately available for use by your marketers to drive downstream marketing processes, such as audience segmentation, 1:1 personalization, omnichannel campaign orchestration, sending data to paid media parters, or syncing data back to your internal systems to further influence and optimize your user experience.

Additionally, unlike other solutions that only track user level and behavioral data, Blueshift provides the marketers the ability to better understand user interactions and affinities with your content. This can be achieved because Blueshift provides the ability to easily import your content and product catalogs and, more importantly, measure/track user interactions with your content. Blueshift then use this information to feed into our patented AI recommendation engine to personalize the most relevant content in future communications with your users.

Another key differentiator of the Blueshift platform is our ability to model your transactional data (i.e., orders, subscriptions, etc.). More specifically, Blueshift provides the ability to model and track the different statuses of the transaction (i.e., purchased, shipped, returned, cancelled, etc.) via our transaction modeling capability. By having the ability to capture both user actions and track/model the “state” of the transaction, Blueshift gives our customers the ability to better understand user intent and interests and move the user more quickly through the buying cycle to drive higher engagement, increase conversion, and ultimately higher revenue.

Additional information can be found in Blueshift's documentation at https://help.blueshift.com under the topic: Transactions.

Profile Unification

5. Does your solution connect and resolve identity, event, and attribute data from multiple touchpoints, devices and channels into unified customer profiles?

Yes, Blueshift provides a highly sophisticated, flexible approach to identity resolution. Blueshift builds a single, 360-degree profile for each of your users by tracking behavioral, event, and attribute data for both anonymous and signed-in identifiable users across devices and sessions and merging/stitching profiles using explicit, deterministic methods using a hierarchy of user identifiers. The customizable hierarchy includes 6 standard identifiers with the ability to define up to 10 addtional custom identifiers.

We start tracking users at the top of the funnel anonymously with a first-party cookie or device id, and subsequently merge user profiles once user identity is known after an authentication event (i.e. sign-in). User attribute data and event data are resolved and merged into the user profile based on the user identifying themself using one of the defined customer identifiers.

Additional information can be found in Blueshift's documentation at https://help.blueshift.com under the topic: Customer identifiers and profile unification.

6. Is your solution capable of identity resolution between known and anonymous user data?

Yes, Blueshift provides cross-device identity resolution, as well as identity resolution between known and anonymous users. Blueshift tracks anonymous user behavior using cookies or mobile device identifiers, and subsequently merges the anonymous user behavior with known user activity as known user activity becomes available. Moreover, because we use multiple identity keys, compared to other solutions that require an email address to resolve identities, our user profiles are much richer so we can resolve anonymous and known profiles faster, reduce duplicate profiles, and truly capture a full view of users across channels.

7. Does your solution maintain unsubscribe or opt-out information for each channel?

Yes, Blueshift supports channel specific response management (i.e., subscriber opt-in/opt-out status) including multiple SMS code permissions. Unsubscribe/opt-out data is updated at the user level in real-time.

Additional information can be found in Blueshift's documentation at https://help.blueshift.com under the topic: Managing unsubscribes

8. Can your solution assess data in the unified profile to determine the most accurate version of name, address, lifecycle state, and other attributes. Are data fields constantly updated as new data becomes available?

Yes, as new data comes into Blueshift, we update the user profile with the new and latest data in real-time based on one of the defined user identifiers. For user profile attributes, we do in-order data processing in real-time using a streaming lambda architecture to update the user data in the order it was received. This ensures, we would be updated with the most recent version of attributes on the user profile.

Data Access

9. Do business users have direct access to all data in the unified customer profiles without IT configuration and development? Is data available for segmentations, analytics, campaigns, and other system functions?

Yes, Blueshift creates unified, comprehensive profiles of each user by aggregating data from across all user touchpoints. Business users and marketers can easily search and access a user profile within the Blueshift UI based on any user attribute. The user profile is intuitively organized into 4 main sections:

Overview - This section shows user identifiers, an unlimited number of custom attributes, channel subscription preferences, lifetime activity (such as revenue, orders, and visits), demographic data, and recent onsite behaviors (views, abandoned items, saved content and products, etc). Blueshift also enriches user profiles using our AI patent technology with additional insights, including predictive scores about user's likelihood to purchase, churn, retention, engage, or perform over key behaviors, as well as their channel, brand, and category affinities.
Campaigns - This section shows a history of all the messaging activity and engagements across all marketing campaigns sent to the user.
Activity - This section shows user behavior and activity (i.e., view, purchase, add_cart, search, etc.)
Transactions - This section shows a history of the user's transactions (i.e., orders, subscriptions, etc.)
Recommendations - This section provides a preview of 1:1 personalized recommended content/products that are derived from our predictive recommendation engine.

More importantly, business users can immediately activate and take action on this data to drive downstream marketing processes, such as audience segmentation, 1:1 personalization, omnichannel campaign orchestration, predictive intelligence, and more within the Blueshift platform. You can also send data to paid media partners and your internal systems to further influence and optimize your user experience.

10. Can data from unified customer profiles be accessed in real-time by external and internal systems via API connections, Webhooks, or query?

Yes, Blueshift gives your external and internal systems real-time access to any data in the user profiles through a set of robust web services REST API. More specifically, your external and internal systems can query our user profiles using our User API. User campaign engagement data (i.e. delivered, opened, clicked) can be easily accessed by your external systems in real-time via our event webhook capability.

In addition, Blueshift offers many pre-built, 3rd-party integration connectors with leading, best-of-breed technology solutions, which provide real-time access to our user profiles once integrated. As an agile company, we are constantly building out and expanding our partnership ecosystem that drive the success of our customers.

Additional information about Blueshift's API can be found at https://developer.blueshift.com/reference/welcome