What is it?
Attentive's Identity Platform helps brands recognize and engage shoppers as people — not just as individual email addresses, phone numbers, or devices. It unifies identifiers across online surfaces, like a website; offline surfaces, like an in-store point of sale; and channels, such as email, SMS, and push. At its core is the Attentive Identity Graph, the system that connects identifiers that belong to the same person into a single, unified shopper profile.
This means that instead of treating one channel or one email address as the customer record, Attentive builds a more complete, person-level view of each shopper across every touchpoint.
How does it work?
To understand how the platform achieves this person-level view, it helps to break the model down into its four foundational components:
| Component | Definition / Scope | Key Details & Behavior |
| Shopper Profile | Attentive’s unified view of a real person. | Can link multiple phone numbers, emails, device IDs, push tokens, and e-commerce platform IDs to one person. |
| Identifiers | The data points used to recognize and connect activity. | Includes emails, phone numbers, push tokens, e-commerce platform IDs, device or browser identifiers |
| Destinations | Where a message can actually be delivered. | Examples include a specific email address, phone number, or push token. A single User ID can have multiple destinations of the same type. |
| Subscriptions | The opt-in or consent status for a specific destination. | Stored at the destination level, not the user level. This means a person can be opted in on one email address but opted out on another. |
An Example: If a shopper browses your site on a laptop, signs up with a personal email, checks out later using a work email, and provides a phone number for SMS, Attentive's model links all of these pieces together under a single, unified Shopper Profile. However, it still tracks the subscription status separately for each individual email and phone number.
1. Real-Time Identifier Collection
As shoppers interact with your brand across various touchpoints, such as browsing your site, signing up for email, checking out, or engaging via SMS, the Attentive tag and integrations dynamically captures these data points in real time on your behalf.
2. Identity Graph Linking & Profile Unification
The Identity Graph connects these collected identifiers using primarily deterministic signals, automatically nesting them under a single central profile. Attentive links distinct identifiers when they have been directly observed together from a data source at least once, seamlessly building a comprehensive person-level view instead of a fragmented, channel-specific record.
Example: A customer signs up for email on a laptop, and, on your behalf, Attentive creates an initial profile. Later, they sign up for SMS on their phone, creating a second profile. When the customer finally completes a purchase on their phone and provides both their email and phone number at checkout, Attentive recognizes the shared signals and instantly merges the profiles into a single, unified shopper profile.
3. Isolated Consent Tracking
To help ensure compliance, subscription and opt-in statuses remain strictly isolated to the specific destination (the individual email address or phone number) rather than the overall user profile. For instance, a shopper with two linked emails can safely opt out of marketing on one address without affecting their active, opted-in status on the other.
4. Smart Resolution for Anonymous Activity
Separately from the core graph, Attentive utilizes Smart Resolution to connect anonymous interactions (like a browsing session or adding an item to a cart) back to a known user. This process relies on leveraging features like user agent, IP address, IP-based location, carrier, browse time, and viewed content to match data to known users with a high-degree of confidence. It is strictly used for anonymous-to-known identification and never to merge two already known profiles.
Example: A shopper adds an item to cart anonymously. There is no direct email or phone signal on that event, but other high-confidence signals (like user agent, IP address, IP-based location, carrier, browse time, content viewed, and other features) suggest the anonymous event belongs to a known shopper.
What features does this benefit?
The Identity Platform powers several core areas of the Attentive platform:
- Triggered messaging (Journeys): Messages can be triggered based on a shopper's activity across touchpoints, not just a single channel, and to the shopper’s destinations that will drive the highest engagement.
- Segmentation: Segments are built from a fuller, cross-channel view of each shopper, making them more accurate and actionable.
- AI & Personalization: Attentive's machine learning models—like product recommendations, Audiences AI, and send-time optimization—leverage unified profiles to base predictions on a shopper's complete behavioral history across all devices, driving significantly higher ROI.
- Anonymous behavior recovery: When anonymous browsing activity can be matched back to a known user, that behavior can inform relevant follow-up messaging.