Personalization has redefined how businesses go to market, giving marketers a powerful tool to authentically engage their audiences. 

Like most new technology, introducing personalization has posed initial challenges. Marketers face obstacles like fragmented tool chains, high development costs, and poor customer data integration, which has made it difficult to demonstrate meaningful ROI at scale. 

Now for the good news: Contentful has recently acquired Ninetailed, the pioneer of structured content personalization and experimentation. Starting today, Contentful customers have a smoother path to personalize, optimize, and measure their digital experiences using the combined power of the Contentful Composable Content Platform and the leading AI personalization capabilities of Ninetailed.

This move combines the power of composability with an API-first architecture, generative AI, and lightning-fast delivery. It is a major step on the path to seamless and dynamic customer interactions.

The result, for brands, is a higher ROI from existing investments in content and data, better 1:1 engagement with customers, and the ability to continually optimize content and presentation based on experiences that resonate most. 

In this post, Chief Product Officer Mairead O’Donovan shares what this powerful integration means for customers, and discusses how it is already enabling brands to provide personalized digital experiences across channels.  

Eliminate obstacles to personalization 

There is no doubt, the future of marketing is personal. By acquiring Ninetailed — lightly rebranded to Ninetailed by Contentful — we are giving our customers access to a complete and scalable platform where marketing teams can create, manage, and optimize digital experiences.

One of the great advantages of Ninetailed’s personalization solution is the way it empowers marketers. Imagine this: no more dependency on developers; no more dependency on data teams. From within Contentful, marketers can identify, select, experiment, and analyze personalized experiences at scale faster and more easily in a no-code environment, without creating new workflows. You will find that Ninetailed’s products radically simplify the onboarding and ongoing management of personalization into digital experiences.  

And as brands navigate the possibility of no third-party cookies and zero-party data, Ninetailed’s platform addresses a major pain point. Brands will finally be able to tap into their own customer data, unlocking a stream of additional revenue by creating personalized experiences at scale.    

“We have a shared vision and great customers. We make decisions because of them. Putting the power of Ninetailed into more hands through Contentful is a great thing for me personally, and our organization as a whole." - Andy Kaiser, CEO and Co-founder, Ninetailed

Liberate brands, tailor experiences 

We are very excited about the opportunity this will unlock for brands.  

To date, Contentful is trusted by more than 4,200 customers and nearly 30% of Fortune 500 companies. Well-known brands like Kraft Heinz, Ace & Tate, and SumUp are already using Ninetailed technology in their Contentful-built digital experiences, and finding that it drives both higher click-through and higher conversion rates. At the same time, it has been reducing the time and effort it takes to bring tailored journeys to market.  

As one customer, direct-to-consumer powerhouse Ruggable, tells us, personalizing the landing pages for paid traffic increased conversions by 25% and sent click-through rates up seven-fold.  

The brand’s Associate Director of Product Management, Daniel Graupensperger, said Ninetailed’s technology is “integral to Ruggable’s business.”

Diving deeper, let’s explore how customers will be able to leverage the combined power of Contentful’s leading composable content platform with Ninetailed’s leading AI personalization capabilities. 

Unified workflows  

Ninetailed is already tightly integrated with Contentful’s authoring environment. Marketing teams have long been able to define audiences, preview tailored experiences, and create personalized content directly within Contentful. Going forward, we’ll further streamline the need for multiple platforms and workflows, and explore more ways to create, manage, and deploy personalized experiences and A/B tests directly within our platform.

No-code personalization 

You and your marketing team can now define audience segments. You can then build personalized experiences, set up experiments using intuitive interfaces, and eliminate the need for coding skills or developer support. 

Leverage existing investments in content and customer data 

Ninetailed’s composable architecture allows customers to seamlessly integrate within their stack to operationalize existing investments in content and customer data to drive business outcomes. By enabling personalization at scale, you are able to leverage these investments to yield better customer experiences, loyalty, and growth. Your content and customer data can all be managed in one workflow, making your content platform the single place to manage experiences. 

Scalable personalization 

This involves creating content and design elements using our structured content platform and design components in Contentful Studio Experiences. By using component-level personalization, experimentation, and analytics in Ninetailed by Contentful, you can simplify the process of scaling personalized experiences. This can be across different brands, different regions, and channels, and the platform ensures that user interactions are consistent and relevant globally. 

AI-powered suggestions 

You will gain access to audience and experience suggestions generated by Ninetailed by Contentful’s AI-powered solution. This helps marketers to create effective segments and personalized experiences without the need for complex data analysis or development work. 

Low-latency personalization 

Ninetailed optimizes page performance to drive top-level conversion rates by processing personalization tasks at the edge. The crucial improvements in web performance and user experience that result maintain high conversion rates. 

Personalize journeys, not single elements 

Ninetailed by Contentful allows you to personalize your content across the entire journey consistently, not just specific elements. 

Mairead O'Donovan, Chief Product Officer, Contentful, with Andy Kaiser, Co-Founder and CEO, Ninetailed, at the Contentful HQ in Berlin.

Empowering the non-technical marketing and design user 

Contentful’s scalable, reliable, enterprise-grade content platform includes an ecosystem of more than 100 integrations and plug-ins. These are available through its Marketplace. So, Contentful is already the solution of choice for many leading organizations that are looking to modernize their content management strategies.  

With the recent launch of Contentful Studio Experiences, and now the addition of Ninetailed personalization, Contentful has evolved into an incredibly powerful solution. In fact, it’s the only solution in the market that offers a modern, composable platform tailored to expert users, combined with experience-building and personalization products ideally suited for non-technical marketing and design users. 

Contentful and Ninetailed coming together is part of a long-term vision to deliver AI-powered solutions to our customers. It accelerates our mission to help brands automatically and instantaneously optimize and personalize digital experiences across any channel.  

So, there is a lot to be excited about here. We’re delivering advanced AI-driven personalization and testing capabilities much faster than anticipated. By integrating Ninetailed’s expertise into our leading, composable content platform, we are poised to offer customers a comprehensive, unified platform that addresses the full spectrum of digital experience needs. 

Each step toward our vision will unlock new revenue streams for our customers. This move is an important step that will deliver measurable impact for brands. 

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