Real-Time CDP is a game-changer for delivering personalized customer experiences by turning raw data into rich, unified profiles that fuel smarter marketing. But to really unlock its power, you need to bring together key data components—like sources, identities, and audiences—and make them work in sync to drive meaningful engagement.
Introduction
In today’s hyper-connected world, delivering personalized customer experiences is the key to winning loyalty and driving revenue. Real-Time Customer Data Platform (Real-Time CDP) empowers businesses to achieve this by transforming raw data into unified, enriched customer profiles that fuel impactful marketing campaigns.
However, the journey to harness Real-Time CDP’s full potential is not a simple one-liner—it requires taming complex, diverse data sources and stitching them into actionable insights.
Activate Real-Time CDP—Data Sources, Profiles, Identities, Schemas, Datasets, and Audiences—superheroes that work together to conquer data challenges and unlock unparalleled customer engagement.
Data sources: The treasure hunt begins
Data sources are the foundation of Air India’s Real-Time CDP. The data team began mining member registration, booking, customer interaction events, and shopping data by collaborating with internal teams managing Loyalty, Revenue, and Ancillary products. They evaluated and identified the true prime data sources, including websites, mobile apps, call centers, chat bots, and affiliate partners.
Transforming complex, unstructured, and large volumes of data into a format usable by the Real-Time CDP requires a skilled data team. Their role is to identify valuable attributes that align with business goals.
Set the tone for your data team. Air India recommends you reach out to the team who manages data coming from different sources, initiate discussions with them, and guide them to understand the business value of activating data for your personalization and marketing needs.
The purposes may be to activate data to Adobe Target to deliver personalized experiences or to activate data to Meta or Google platform to reach the right audiences to advertise certain products or offers.
This helps the data team to transform the data into a format or type you would prefer. This way, the team feels confident and apply the skills that help them to provide data in a recommended format or types, either in string or datetime or double or numeric numbers etc.
These approaches help build a high-impact data team that delivers new use cases, solves complex data challenges, and supports flexible structures for diverse marketing communications.
Profiles: Crafting the customer blueprint
Profiles are at the heart of Real-Time CDP, the profile enrichment occurs by stitching every event or interaction from loyalty users, anonymous users, flight or ticket bookings, consent management, and shopping behaviors.
Example: Anonymous users can book a ticket or purchase products by giving marketing consent; loyalty users can make bookings from third party OTA platforms.
Air India having its unique profile attributes to meet objectives defined by digital marketing, growth marketing, sales, in-flight experience team, ground handling staffs.
Onboarding detailed extensive attributes add more power to bring more flexibility to create segments that can help us to communicate the right messages on time to elevate the whole travel experience.
Identities: The key to unification
Profiles are powerful, but without unique identifiers, they remain fragmented. Identities—such as Unique Member IDs, Mobile Numbers, Email Addresses, or Biometrics—enable Real-Time CDP to stitch together customer interactions across touchpoints.
Marking identities examples from this list of schemas:
- Loyalty or Member Attributes
- Travel or Booking Schema
- Marketing Consent Schema
- Product Schema
Air India has marked ECID, Member ID, Email, and Mobile Number as identity from the Loyalty Member, Anonymous User, Product, and marketing consent schema. These identities enable the profile stitching to unify a customer profile.
Identity Mapping/Common Identifier in Data Schema
The absence of a common identifier complicates profile unification, making it harder to track engagement consistently
Here are a few best practices to define an identity strategy:
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Collaborate with stakeholders: Engage all relevant stakeholders who can provide valuable insights and perspectives. Hosting a dedicated workshop can be more effective than informal meetings, as a focused, closed-room discussion often drives greater alignment and commitment.
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Evaluate different approaches with pros and cons: Present various identity strategy options, along with their advantages and disadvantages—especially in areas like loyalty programs, point accrual and redemption processes, and ‘Manage My Booking’ features. This comparative analysis helps you select the strategy that best aligns with your business goals.
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Test with real use cases: Apply a few representative use cases to each approach to determine which one most effectively addresses your key objectives. This practical validation ensures that the chosen strategy is grounded in real-world needs.
Schemas: Structuring the data universe
Schemas define the structure of customer data by organizing profile attributes into standardized fields. In Real-Time CDP, schemas are built from user engagement data—purchases, website clicks, or IFE interactions—and serve as the blueprint for creating audiences and datasets.
Air India has created 55+ data sets from 34 schemas that helped us to create 200+ audiences activated to multiple destinations including Meta and Google platforms other than Adobe Campaign and Adobe Target.
How Air India Approached the Schema Structure with use cases?
Air India’s MarTech team collaborated with key stakeholders from marketing, sales, loyalty, partnerships, ground handling, and crew management to brainstorm impactful use cases. These use cases aim to enhance customer experiences and elevate the entire travel lifecycle. Air India’s data team considered them and presented the outcome of the feasibility study; it directed us to arrive at a solution to address and deliver.
Examples of use cases:
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Track and analyze user engagement with the flight selection page to optimize conversion paths and personalize travel recommendations.
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Identify users who engage with specific aircraft model cabin layouts and onboard features. Analyze their behavior to inform product design and personalize marketing strategies.
- A streaming type of audience activated to Adobe Campaign to nudge the user by showcasing Air India’s Premium Economy experiences.
- A batch type audiences activated to Meta platform to showcase carousel ads containing Premium Economy features.
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Identify and analyze users who visit deals and offer pages to refine promotional targeting, enhance engagement, and drive higher conversation rates.
- Batch type audiences activated to Adobe Campaign to send App-Push notification and in-app notifications with coupon codes or promo codes to nudge the visitor further in the booking flow.
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Deliver targeted seat or class upgrade communications to users who book economy tickets, enhancing upsell opportunities and improving customer satisfaction.
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Promote Air India’s Group Booking product to users booking more than four tickets in a single transaction, enabling tailored offers for group travel and increasing product adoption.
These user interactions across website related use cases are addressed in Real-Time CDP by steaming events through webSDK and mobileSDK implementation approaches.
This enables the Adobe Experience platform to deliver precise, real-time customer targeting and personalized experiences by activating the data from Real-Time CDP to many destinations where you would like to get the segmented audiences.
Datasets: Fueling the marketing engine
Datasets are curated collections of profile attributes and schemas, ingested into Real-Time CDP to power various platform services. Their quality depends on the richness of attributes and the accuracy of schemas.
Air India achieved or able to create many dataset grouping booking attributes, travel preferences related attributes and booking history related attributed that can drive Air India’s personalized growth marketing campaigns.
Datasets also bridge identities across sources, enabling unified profiles. By feeding downstream services like Adobe Target or Marketing Campaign, they support real-time audience activation across Meta, Google, or Air India’s mobile app, optimizing media spend.
Air India optimized cost by activating high intended audiences to Meta to run campaigns in Facebook and Instagram, this helped us to move away from mass marketing campaigns where CPAs (Cost Per Acquisition) are generally high.
Now, we are completely away or not dependent only on creating ads using the typical interest and demographic based audience in Google ads and Facebook ads platform.
Audiences: Activating the superpower
Audiences are the culmination of Real-Time CDP’s efforts, created by segmenting enriched profiles based on attributes, behaviors, and identities. As mentioned earlier, Air India activated 200+ audiences those are both streaming in nature and batch manner to the below destinations:
- Adobe Target
- Adobe Campaign
- Meta
- Google Audience Match
If you identify audience segments—such as users who prefer to book on weekdays, weekends, or specific days of the week—you can activate them in Adobe Target to personalize their booking experience. You can also trigger in-app notifications or send targeted marketing messages via the Message Center. With Real-Time CDP, you have the power to do much more!
For example, segments like “Frequent Flyers Interested in Business Class” or “Users Abandoning Bookings” can be activated across digital channels for tailored campaigns. Real-Time CDP’s real-time capabilities ensure that these audiences remain dynamic, adapting instantly to user behavior—like recommending in-flight entertainment content mid-flight. Ultimately, this leads to streamlined operations, enhanced customer experiences, timely communication during delays or cancellations, and reduced friction when it matters most.
Conclusion: Results and impact of Real-Time CDP
- Air India activated the loyalty life cycle communications use cases largely because of Real-Time CDP
- The real-time personalized communications are going out to Website, Email, App-Push and WhatsApp channels.
- An enriched profile with unified view to know and understand the customers better.
These superheroes are in charge now to do wonders.
Adopting Adobe Real-Time CDP is a game-changer for businesses seeking to deliver personalized customer experiences. Its strength lies in unifying diverse datasources into enriched profiles, activated through dynamic audiences for impactful campaigns.
These superheroes: Data Sources, Profiles, Identities, Schemas, Datasets, and Audiences in Adobe Experience Platform not only empowers airlines like Air India to enhance engagement, optimize costs, and drive revenue but this also a major player across industries like Banking, Automobiles, Hospitality, Large chain of outlets, eCommerce or Entertainment or Ticket selling business models.
Embrace these components, tackle technical challenges with a skilled team, and unlock the full potential of your customer data.