What’s New In Nosto: Importing Existing Customer Data into the Nosto Platform

Ever since we launched the initial version of Segmentation & Insights, we’ve repeatedly heard the same request: Can we bring our existing customer data with us when we move to Nosto?

We totally get why. If you’re a growing ecommerce brand that’s taken time to invest in cultivating your customer data, it makes sense to carry this with you wherever you go (whether it lives in a huge spreadsheets or in other advanced tools).

So, we took note. Whether your data lives in huge spreadsheets or is collected in an advanced data management tool, you can now transport it directly into your Nosto accounts to create segments for your Nosto campaigns.

Why you should import existing customer data into Nosto

For today’s online merchants, audience segmentation is often talked about in terms of how to best leverage AI-based technologies to better target individual customers (something Nosto can also help with). While this is key to better personalization, it’s often just as beneficial to look at existing customer data to help increase customer engagement and drive more sales.

Immediate actionability of valuable customer data

It’s not always easy to take action on your customer data. Sometimes it requires the support of new campaigns or new creative that merchants don’t have the resources to tackle. With Nosto, it’s easy to side-step this by adding your existing customers to AI-based segments that can be acted upon immediately. Once uploaded, your customers will be shown hyper-personalized product recommendations and personalized content based on the actual products and brands they’re viewing in real time.

For example, you may have a list of loyal customers. Once uploaded, Nosto can help you find out which products these customers buy, and how often, to help you maximize efficiency when personalizing your site for your highest value customers. But that’s not all, you’ll be able to leverage pop-ups with discounts and sales to help re-engage users you know have a weak spot for certain products.

You can also personalize the content experiences for site visitors in real time. If you have special campaigns running outside of your site, you’ll be able to recognize when audiences visit from that effort and personalize the content to tie in with campaign imagery and create a unified experience for your shoppers. Additionally, you’ll be able to show shoppers dynamically changing banners on your site that feature products they’re interested in purchasing in order to keep those products top of mind and convince them to convert.

Hands-off optimization of existing customer segments

Another advantage of uploading customer data into Nosto, is that it gives merchants an easy way to ensure that existing segments are staying continuously up to date. If you’ve ever received a .CSV of emails, you know how hard it can be to market to this list once the initial campaign is over. How are you to know what content will resonate most with them? This is often also the case with ESPs or CRM vendors that will segment customers but not keep them updated. With Customer Data Onboarding, you can easily enrich these lists from visitors with the behavioral data the exhibit on site.

With Nosto, you’ll also be able to upload existing customer data and add it to a segment with set behavioral targeting rules that can either target all customers or refine your audience into specific segments. What’s cool about this is that Nosto is then able to track these customers’ behavior as they continue to interact with your products.

For example, you can upload a large list of contacts into Nosto with many different purchases made across many different products and categories. From there, you’ll be able to automatically segment these audiences into the specific products and brands they’re looking for. Whether it’s product recommendations, onsite content, or category personalization, you’re existing customers will experience a personalized shopping experience from the very first visit, in real time.

Enabling Smarter Use of Data and Segmentation: 3 Key Capabilities

We’ve developed a few different processes to make data importation as seamless as possible.

1. List upload from a .CSV

Many of us track our customer segmentation through traditional forms like spreadsheets that are created from events, one-off campaigns, or downloaded from you ESP. In the past, we used to have to continuously target these lists of customers without knowing how their buying intent was changing over time. This static segmentation made it near impossible to implement onsite personalization as you couldn’t track and update the lists with changing behaviors effectively. Luckily, we’re in a new era: dynamic segmentation. With our Customer Data Import capabilities, merchants can now take static lists and add them directly into Nosto. When customers from these lists come back to a merchant’s site, their behaviors will start being tracked immediately—meaning personalized experiences will start being served in that same session.

2. Integration with your third-party CRM platform

Additionally, we now make it possible for merchants with established CRM lists and segmentation processes to run through other vendors to utilize Nosto in tandem with these platforms. This would be the case if you currently use your own customer data platform. As mentioned above, these tools will offer great capabilities like re-engaging customers on the brink of churning. However, they’re made even more powerful when paired with Nosto’s ability to help merchants create more tailored on-site experiences for these existing audiences.

3. Transfer data through an API

For our current and future technology partners, we’ve also made it simple to build an integration with Nosto. All it takes is a quick sync of your customer data to Nosto via the API. You’ll still be able to maintain your current management system for audience segments, but will be able to utilize Nosto to drive up conversion rates, AOV, and more for these audiences.

Action Your Data for Faster, More Personalized Results

With Nosto’s new Customer Data Import capabilities, any e-commerce merchant can begin serving more personalized shopping experiences to key customers. And with Nosto’s AI-powered tooling, you’ll no longer have to worry about out-of-date targeting as these segments will continuously update with the latest onsite behaviors and transactional data.

Want to learn more? Get started with our latest update by reading our help tutorial. If you’d like to speak to someone directly, reach out to your partner manager or simply click the icon on the bottom right-hand side of your screen to start a chat with one of our product experts.