Empathic personalization is a holistic framework that identifies a user’s state within their journey with your brand. It enables you to leverage the full power of Experience OS to deliver relevant, emotionally attuned responses—fostering stronger, longer-lasting relationships.
By evaluating a wide range of signals and behaviors over time, our personalization engine provides actionable insights. These can be used for campaign targeting, recommendations, reporting, and audience empathy scores—helping you prioritize and fine-tune your personalization strategies.
Empathic personalization states
At the core of empathic personalization is the idea that you can identify user relationship stages based on their behavior on your site, and translate this understanding into an optimized and effective personalization program that fosters a deeper connection, which in turn leads to enhanced loyalty and long-term customer satisfaction.
Empathic personalization includes the following journey states, each supported by a set of dynamic conditions used to evaluate users:
| Your brand is new to them, and it might even be their first visit to your site. The user has just arrived, and is browsing categories (like looking at departments or shelves in a physical store), but has not yet looked at a product page, nor are they fully familiar with your site. | |
| Something has caught the user's eye, and they realize you might be able to offer them value. They are now more familiar and engaged with your site: They've done a search or filtered items, and have viewed products pages. They have not yet demonstrated high intent. | |
| This is a micro-state in which the user has zoomed in and taken some action indicating high purchase intent, such as adding items to their cart or wishlist. They're at the point where they need to make a decision, and you can help drive them toward the purchase. | |
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The user made a first purchase and may be exploring more, but hasn’t yet formed a strong bond with the brand. |
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| This customer has purchased multiple times and trusts the brand to deliver. Even if they’re not actively browsing, they’re open to more. Their history gives you insight into their tastes — build on that trust with tailored bundles, smart suggestions, and subtle nudges. | |
| These are your super-fans: Fully engaged, loyal, and ready to advocate. They join programs, refer friends, and leave glowing reviews. They’ve crossed a key threshold. Now’s the time to treat them like VIPs with early access, exclusives, and ways to co-create. | |
| Once active, now quiet. This customer hasn’t engaged in a while. But they’re not gone. A well-timed message or tailored incentive could be all it takes to bring them back. This is an offline state, and so, only available for non-web-based engagement, such as Reconnect or Experience Email. |
The importance of personalization throughout the user journey with your brand
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Prepurchase At the outset, you're clear goal is getting your site visitors to perform a conversion. That's why empathy-based personalization begins by capturing attention and guiding users toward meaningful actions. The pre-purchase stages represent 60-80% of casual traffic, which is usually made up of anonymous users. While these users are not necessarily engaged yet, you can't afford to overlook them, and your goal is to turn mere visitors into customers. |
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Post-purchase But conversion isn’t the end—it’s a stepping stone. The earlier interactions lay the groundwork for trust and loyalty, which are critical in the post-purchase journey. Returning customers don’t just buy again—they become brand advocates, sharing reviews, offering referrals, and amplifying your reach. The cost of losing customers is high, while retention has a multifold return on your investment. That’s why it’s essential to stay engaged after the purchase. Even a satisfied customer can drift away without it. Thoughtful post-purchase personalization helps you maintain that connection. Repeat and loyal customers drive most revenue and profit—and unlike new users, they don’t require as many resources to acquire or convert. The even better news? When you understand their journey states, you unlock countless opportunities to deepen the relationship, spark repeat engagement, and turn satisfaction into long-term brand love. |
Empathic personalization in Experience OS
The following are the main areas where you engage with empathic personalization in Experience OS.
Audiences and targeting conditions
All users coming onto your site are identified with an empathic state, and included in the a built-in audience for that state. This means you can use targeting conditions in your campaigns that are suited for those users in particular. For example, curious users who are unfamiliar with your brand can receive a banner about the brand story on the homepage, while for interested users, the same banner would be personalized by affinity allocation to guide them to their category of interest.
You can even use empathy-based audiences as primary audiences, if you want to, and export them using Audiences Anywhere.
Empathic recommendations
The Empathic recommendations algorithm is an adaptive automatic algorithm that leverages the optimal combination of recommendation algorithms and strategies based on the user’s state of mind, stage in their journey, and location on the website.
Experience reports
Every experience report includes an audience breakdown by every empathic state, to help identify opportunities and determine whether served variations resonate with users based on their state of mind.
Events
For accurate identification of user empathic states, make sure to implement all our predefined schema-based events. Learn more about our events | See the event schemas on our Developers site
Principles of the empathic personalization framework
Comprehensive user understanding
Translate complex behavior signals into actionable states of mind, enabling you to respond with real empathy and fuel a stronger, longer-lasting connection.
Consider the entire user lifecycle
Never miss out on a customer segment: All your users are always accounted for, while also making sure to avoid redundancy – only one state of mind can be attributed to a user at any given time, though users can move between states of mind throughout their journey. This is how we enable you to zero in on the correct content for their needs.
Continual optimization
State-of-mind calculations are performed dynamically and adaptively, in real time, based on unique consumer behavior your site.
Data-driven emotional connection
By strengthening your customer relationships and loyalty, empathic personalization helps you reduce your reliance on costly acquisition strategies and grow your customer lifetime value.