Real time personalization in 2026: What’s working and what’s next

Most successful brands understand the value of content personalization. 

In fact, in 2025, it’s a non-negotiable. Research shows that 71% of customers expect personalized interactions with brands, while 76% get frustrated when they don’t receive them. That trend is driving profit, with the fastest-growing companies deriving 40% more revenue from personalization than their less successful competitors. 

But as organizations grow, digital marketing needs change, which means that brands need to evolve their personalized experiences to keep pace with customer expectations.  

In 2026, that will mean exploring the possibilities of real-time personalization. 

And in this post, we’re going to do that. We’ll explore the value of real-time personalization, how it differs from other personalization methods, the challenges of implementing it at scale, and how a tool like Contentful Personalization can make real-time personalization happen.

Case Study

Kraft Heinz secures the secret sauce for an iconic, modern brand

Looking to move beyond outdated technology, the heritage brand sought a solution to assemble dynamic digital experiences that could cut through the noise.

What is real-time personalization?

Real-time personalization is personalization that happens instantly, as customers move through a digital experience. 

It’s a reference to both the speed of experience delivery (the processing, analysis, and activation of data) and to the idea that brands can adjust the experience to reflect a customer’s preferences as they actively engage, browsing pages, exploring an app, navigating a payment gateway, and so on.

But how does real-time personalization differ from “non-real-time”? Let’s get into that.

What is personalization? 

In its most basic sense, personalization is the tailoring of experiences to the personal tastes and preferences of customers in order to prompt deeper brand engagement and increase the chance of conversion.

That means that brands first need to understand who their customers are. 

That process begins with brands collecting information, such as gender, age, and location, and then using that data to tailor the digital experience to individual customers’ tastes and preferences.

In a rule-based approach to personalization, for example, that might involve “males over 40 living in Alaska” receiving product recommendations for “winter coats,” and “males over 40 living in California” receiving recommendations for “surf shorts.” 

Personalization can also be predictive, using algorithms to tailor the experience. Customers that have bought hats, gloves, and scarves, for example, might be shown recommendations for “winter coats” based on the algorithmic assumption that they’d be interested in those products next. 

What does “real-time” mean?

“Real-time” is a reference to the time at which a process or event occurs. In the context of personalization, however, we need to focus on two defining aspects of the term. 

The first aspect is speed. Real-time personalization needs to happen in milliseconds, or at least so fast that any delay in delivery is imperceptible by the customer. Real-time website personalization delayed even by microseconds can result in a “flickering” effect as users get a glimpse of the non-personalized version of the content prior to the personalized. 

The second aspect of real-time personalization refers to the idea that the personalization needs to happen during the customer’s current engagement with the brand’s content.  Rather than being based solely on previously collected customer data, a real-time personalized experience leverages the customer’s active browsing behavior: the pages they click through, the images they enlarge, the videos they watch, their current IP, the items they add to their basket, and so on.

Long story short: Real-time personalization is personalization that happens instantly and adapts to the customer’s experience based on their in-session behavior.  

Real-time personalization could include the generation of timely messages, such as pop-up reminders of items sitting in shopping carts as the customer browses. It could be promotions and offers based on customer loyalty levels or recent page views. Or, it could be product recommendations for related items immediately following a product search.

Non-real-time personalization is personalization that happens outside the direct session — minutes, hours, or even days or weeks after. It can be the post-purchase email, the seasonal offer, or the birthday discount. These non-real-time events don’t change the experience immediately, and it’s not always critical that they’re delivered in milliseconds. 

To go back to our previous example, in a real-time personalization strategy, our customer in Alaska might be shown a recommendation for “windscreen de-icer” immediately after purchasing tire chains. Meanwhile, our customer in California gets a “free delivery” offer after spending time browsing new surfboards.  

Case Study

Pets Deli increases Black Friday conversions by 51% with personalization

Pets Deli easily built and deployed dynamic, segment-specific content using a no-code interface that integrated seamlessly with existing systems.

What personalization strategies are working?

The effectiveness of real-time personalization depends on brands implementing their strategies in alignment with their business objectives and customer expectations. Here are examples of strategies that have seen recent success.  

Location-based: Experiences tailored to customer locations. For example, Kraft-Heinz used Contentful to show different homepage banners to customers based on their geolocation, and ultimately saw a 78% uplift in conversions.

Loyalty: Experiences tailored to customer’s previous engagement with a brand. Pets Deli used Contentful Personalization to offer returning customers unique prices and promotions — and increased conversions by 51%.  

Paid traffic: Experiences based on incoming traffic. Ruggable used Contentful to create personalized experiences based on the type of paid campaign customers clicked through to arrive on the website. Pet owners, for example, would receive pet-friendly rug recommendations, while parents would see machine-washable rugs. The strategy earned a 7x increase in click through and a 25% increase in conversions. 

Account-based: Personalization targeting specific accounts. As part of an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, Personio used Contentful to deliver different homepage experiences to its customers based on the characteristics of their business accounts, increasing conversions by over 45%. 

Real-time personalization use cases

Almost any vertical can benefit from real-time personalization, so it’s worth exploring in any industry. Examples of specific use-cases include:

• Retail: Ecommerce sites can dynamically update on-page experiences to reflect their customer’s browsing interests, surfacing different products and services for each step in the customer journey. 

• Software as a Service (SaaS): Brands may adapt onboarding sequences based on the needs and interests of their customers, highlighting higher priority services while deprioritizing those that customers aren’t currently interested in or using.

• Financial services: Customers using banking websites or apps may be shown contextual offers. App users checking their balance after payday, for example, might see options for high-interest savings account products.

When should you invest in real-time personalization?

The best time to invest in real-time personalization was yesterday. The next best is today. 

Real-time personalization isn’t a targeted strategy for specific use cases. Ideally, it’s an “always on” component of every digital experience. With that in mind, brands shouldn’t wait for market conditions, such as growth plateaus, drops in traffic or engagement, or competitor divergence, to explore and implement personalization. 

To stay ahead of the curve, brands need to have infrastructure in place ahead of time that can support ongoing personalized content creation at scale.  

The challenges of real-time personalization at scale

Effective personalization isn’t always smooth and seamless, especially if brands are working with out-of-date, or inflexible, legacy digital experience stacks.

So, what are the key challenges of achieving real-time personalization at scale? 

• Siloing: Data siloing should be high on the list of potential challenges because it can prevent brands from activating and unifying information about their customers. That fragmentation leads to duplication, inconsistent messaging, and fractured brand voice.  

• Latency: System latency can slow down the delivery of content to browsers and apps and undermine the critical real-time speed requirement. Even a fraction-of-a-second delay can trigger a flickering effect. 

Case Study

Personio onboards a 46% increase in conversions with personalization

As Personio’s customer base grew to include companies of all sizes, it needed a scalable way to deliver personalized experiences that resonated with the specific needs of each segment.

Putting real-time personalization into practice 

It should be clear that real-time personalization doesn’t happen by accident. You’ll need to gather key tools, resources, and data and set out clear performance goals, such as increased engagement, conversions, customer retention, and so on, in order to gauge the success of your strategy. 

Focus on first-party data 

The need to react to customer behavior in real time means that brands should focus on  collecting the most up-to-date customer information to feed their personalization engine. 

The best place to obtain that is from the customers themselves — in the form of first-party data. 

First-party data is data collected directly from customers, via those customers’ interactions with a brand’s content, products, and services. It includes things like transaction history, account information, social media interactions, and loyalty program activity. It also takes in customer activity on the brand’s website or app; time on page, search queries, conversions, and so on. 

First-party data is more accurate and reliable than the historic data leveraged for segmentation and non-real-time personalization, and, critically, reflects customers as individuals. As an added bonus, brands own their first-party data, which means there’s less data privacy risk when they use it in their personalization engine. 

Assemble the right tools

Real-time personalization gets easier when you build the right tools into your tech stack. The key components of your real-time tech stack should include:

• Content management system: A headless content management system (like the Contentful Platform) empowers nontechnical users to create and update content without developer support. This level of agility and accessibility is essential for teams seeking to build and deploy real-time, personalized content experiences.

• Native personalization: The capability to personalize from within the digital experience stack is a significant efficiency and productivity boost. For example, Contentful unifies an array of automated, AI-powered personalization tools in a single platform.

Contentful real-time personalization case study: Ruggable

We mentioned consumer rug brand Ruggable earlier, as an example of Contentful’s real-time personalization potential. 

Ruggable adopted Contentful to deliver instant, tailored experiences during high-traffic periods, such as Black Friday. 

After integrating Contentful’s personalization tools, Ruggable was able to dynamically update landing pages based on the paid ad sources that directed them to the site, with no need to loop in developers to support the experience. 

The strategy worked: Ruggable achieved a 7x increase in click-through rates and a 25% increase in conversions. On top of that, Contentful enabled Ruggable to reduce the time it took to launch those personalized experiences from days to hours — and can now use that capability to continuously evolve personalized experiences for its customers.   

Case Study

Ruggable rolls out an efficient way to manage Black Friday and personalization

Learn how Contentful enabled Ruggable to execute time-sensitive campaigns and deliver a reliable experience despite high traffic.

Beyond 2026: What’s next for real-time personalization? 

Your personalization strategy must evolve with the digital landscape. Here are some of the key ways that real-time personalization is going to change in 2026 and the coming years.

• Continuous optimization: In a crowded digital marketplace, the need to optimize real-time personalization strategies will be continuous. That process must be predicated on the ongoing collection of data, before the ideation and development of new tests, the analysis of results, and implementation of new experiences. The cycle then begins again with a new ideation phase. 

• Contextual personalization: Beyond demographic and past behavior data, personalization platforms will take an increasing amount of contextual information into account, including behavioral data such as pages visited and scroll depth, transactional data such as current basket contents, loyalty level, and recent item views, and technical data such as device type, connection speed, and geolocation. 

• Vibe personalization: Integrating AI-supported analysis and automation, brands will be able to adapt content dynamically to match customers' behavioral signals, and better align content with their emotional and cultural preferences.

• Personalization-privacy balance: Data privacy will continue shaping the corporate collection and use of personal data. To balance that regulatory obligation with the need for deeper personalization, organizations will lean into first-party data collection and automated compliance tools. 

• Real-time across channels and journeys: Customers will increasingly expect real-time personalized experiences across every channel, at every stage of their journeys. Brands will need to seek personalization solutions capable of seamless omnichannel personalization delivery.   

How is AI shaping the future of real-time personalization?

AI tools have the potential to transform the real-time personalization landscape in 2026 and beyond by adding convenience and speed to personalization workflows. 

It’s not about removing human creativity from the personalization process, but supporting growth teams as they work to keep pace with customer expectations in increasingly demanding and fast-paced marketing environments. 

Essentially, the more automated we can make the real-time personalization process, the more convenient it will become for growth teams to execute, and the more time those team members will be able to dedicate to value-adding creative work like creating new growth streams, and developing and launching new campaigns. 

Wrapping up

As 2026 approaches, the personalization headline should be that brands need one eye on the digital horizon.

Evolving customer needs and expectations reshape industry marketing strategies constantly; personalization solutions need to be able to accommodate that level of flux to ensure that their digital experiences continue to hit real-time speed and quality standards.

Contentful helps brands across industries do exactly that by providing the tools they need to create fresh, engaging personalized experiences at super-fast speeds, for diverse audiences in every corner of the world — and then adapt and iterate those experiences effortlessly. 

If you're ready for the next step in your personalization journey, so are we. You can learn more about the capabilities of Contentful Personalization or discuss your personalization strategy with our sales team. 

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