The Intent Growth Blueprint

The path to finding new growth with intent

A reliance on static rules and website-first data is holding back ecommerce.

We have become stuck, not only in an entrenched way of thinking, but with slowing growth and few remaining levers to pull.

It’s an approach that has taken many mature brands about as far as it can. Yet, the demand for growth isn’t going away. It never will.

Traditionally, this has left leaders and teams with a limited number of options. Assuming new products and markets are off the table, we have little choice but to either continue trying to raise conversion rate across all visitors or get more visitors in the first place.

The thing is, we have optimised our default pages and experiences to the point where squeezing any extra juice is a diminishing return.

And while acquiring new visitors, from social to email, is in many ways getting easier and more targeted, it’s also getting noisier and costlier.

There will always be generic growth to find and optimisations to make. But after hitting a certain level of maturity or performance, every brand hits a plateau. Growth is no longer predictable. No longer sustainable.

This is why we believe ecommerce doesn’t just need another growth hack. It needs a new perspective of the people it’s selling to. It needs to focus more on stages, not pages. It needs intent.

Many people in ecommerce agree with us too. Time and time we see nodding faces in response to the sentiments above.

We’ve also backed up the problem with research. Surveying 2,000 online shoppers, as well as analysing 100 ecommerce experiences and 669 million ecommerce events, to highlight The Intent Gap.

We’ve even proven targeting real-time intent can find new growth. Across multiple use cases. You can see this in our customer stories from the likes of Bensons For Beds, On The Beach and Seasalt Cornwall. And in our Closing The Intent Gap Playbook.

But, as with all new approaches, change can be daunting. Moving from generically optimising, measuring on website-first metrics such as conversion rate, towards, well, something more human feels like a big step.

The right step. But a big one nevertheless.

This is why we’ve created The Intent Growth Blueprint.

Your roadmap to finding new growth using real-time intent.

After finding new growth for brands from many verticals, we‘ve proven a three step blueprint.

It’s designed to deliver instant value from day one, while showing you how your use of intent can evolve, dependent on capacity and appetite, toward an intelligent, intent-first ecommerce experience. Each stage building on the last.

Stage 1

Activate
  • Visitors segmented by real-time intent signals

  • Deliver experiences at high-impact moments

  • Automatically test timing and delivery

  • Clear uplift reporting vs non-intent holdback

  • Session summaries shared to CRM/CDP

  • Fast growth without added resource

Stage 2

Orchestrate
  • Identify specific opportunity segments

  • Dynamic campaigns adapt in real time

  • Sequenced campaigns evolve as intent shifts

  • Alerts surface new moments worth acting on

  • CRM and offsite campaign optimisation

  • Greater control through Campaign Manager

Stage 3

Systemise
  • Full access to event-level intent data

  • Insight Agent surfaces patterns and context

  • Journeys orchestrated end-to-end

  • Message strength & cadence adapt to intent

  • Intent data integrated into analytics

  • Intent-first approach to experience design

Get started

The Intent Growth Stages

Designed to be a roadmap to adopting and scaling intent in an ecommerce brand.
Level 1
check icon
Activate
At this stage, intent is activated as a performance lever. You launch a small number of high-impact, agent-led campaigns designed to prove value quickly. The Optimisation Agent handles testing, segmentation and timing automatically, allowing you to see measurable uplift without heavy resource or complex configuration.
What Stage 1 looks like
Level 2
Orchestrate
Once value is proven, intent becomes something you actively work with. You begin identifying opportunity segments, designing dynamic and sequenced campaigns, and aligning onsite and offsite experiences around visitor context. You use  intent to solve specific business challenges rather than relying solely on pre-configured strategies.
What Stage 2 looks like
Level 3
Systemise
At Stage 3, intent moves beyond individual campaigns and becomes a strategic intelligence layer. You gain access to the full dataset and use the Insight Agent to interrogate patterns, performance drivers and behavioural signals in depth. Data is integrated into your wider analytics ecosystem and shapes how you design, analyse and evolve the customer experience.
What Stage 3 looks like
We believe moving through these stages is how ecommerce brands move past plateauing performance and find their next major, sustainable growth unlock.

Not just by edging up conversion rate with page-first, catch-all CRO.

Not just by taking a more-is-more approach to customer acquisition.

But by understanding and responding to visitor intent.

This growth blueprint is designed to be a roadmap to adopting and scaling this approach. A guide on how to move from the website-first way of today, to a visitor-first tomorrow.

At this point we should flag that, yes, we have built what we believe to be the best product to help ecommerce brands use intent at scale. So while this maturity scale is written in line with our framework and customers, it is intended to be a general guide.

Let’s get into it.

Stage 1

Activate

Every Made With Intent journey starts here. This stage is about seeing value fast. Proving that responding to customer intent in real time can drive measurable commercial impact, without the need for additional effort or resources.
Time to value:

1-2 weeks
Just launch Agentic Campaigns to prove incremental impact with minimal internal resource.
Connect your existing tactics to real-time intent. Prove impact fast, with automation doing the heavy lifting.

At this stage, you’ll activate Agentic Campaigns targeting key shopper moments, such as basket abandonment, or for more general experience optimisation. These campaigns are designed to require minimal set-up, showing measurable uplift within days using our Optimisation Agent, which handles testing and delivery automatically. Our Optimisation Agent is specifically built to find both the optimal segment (or segments) and timing for your experience. Unlike traditional multi-arm bandits, our optimisation agent works customer-first, not website first.

Why is Stage 1 important?

Ecommerce personalisation has long been slow, manual and resource-heavy - in part because it has been focused on the website rather than the customer. Agentic Campaigns remove that friction. They prove the value of both Made With Intent as a product, and intent as a personalisation trigger. Showing that this growth lever can be instant, automated, and effective without the need for developer time or complex configuration.

You'll:

  • Launch experiences that start driving incremental revenue within days

  • Show tangible ROI in weeks

  • Demonstrate how intent is the unlocked growth lever in ecommerce

  • Lay the groundwork for always-on optimisation, handled entirely by the Optimisation Agent, not your team

The primary benefit of doing this is driving more revenue and conversions, while proving that intent-based experiences are more effective than the non-intent equivalent through our Agentic Campaigns.

“We've driven a 2x increase in CRM contribution to booking numbers over the last couple of years. Made With Intent's data is a big part of that.
Andy Webb
Head of Customisation

On The Beach
What will you be doing at Stage 1?

Your role here is **light-touch**, we’ve designed it that way to reduce time to value and necessary effort from you and your team. You aren’t required to understand the intricacies of intent data at this stage. Instead our team will work with you to up-skill you on what you need to know to get your first campaigns live and driving value. As you continue using intent, they’ll introduce you to additional concepts to enhance your knowledge.

You’ll:

  • Select your Agentic Campaigns (typically 3–5), and define the response you want to have with guidance from your Customer team

  • Collaborate on setup; our team works with you to configure your campaigns with no heavy code or design work required

  • Go live quickly; the Optimisation Agent immediately begins testing and learning in the background

  • Review results; see uplift in engagement, conversion, and revenue through clear, automated reporting

What brands learn at this level

At this stage, ecommerce teams typically begin to:

  • Work with new, consistent intent datapoints (such as our proven Intent Framework)

  • Segment visitors by intent in real time

  • Understand the mindset and composition of their traffic based on the intent of the visitors

  • Reframe internal questions from “What’s the bounce rate?” to “What’s the intent stage of this audience?”

This sets the foundation for acting on intent in future stages, but the value of Level 1 is clarity. It’s where you start seeing the gap between how you design and how people buy.

This isn’t a tactical step. It’s a strategic one.

Most brands never stop to rethink the basics, or learned behaviour. Like how they analyse performance, or how they segment visitors. That’s why this stage stands out.

By building a shared language around intent, your team becomes better equipped to question existing metrics, advocate for more relevant experiences, and contribute to stronger, more sustainable growth strategies.

This is the level where brands stop only thinking in pages, and start thinking in stages too.

Recommendations of where to start
  • Challenge the default metrics. Start by questioning whether conversion rate and bounce rate alone are telling the whole story.

  • Ask better questions. In your next optimisation meeting, replace “What’s the drop-off?” with “What’s the visitor’s intent at this stage?”

  • Surface new human context. Use intent data to understand how many visitors are actually in-market, and which aren’t, even when they land on the same page.

That’s it. Once your experiences are live, the agent takes over.

At this stage we’ll also set up your lightweight session summary, which sends a simple intent score into your CDP or CRM. This gives you early visibility of behavioural strength without requiring any extra configuration, and lays the groundwork for deeper integrations later on.

What is in the Agentic Campaigns?

Agentic Campaigns are designed to get you live and seeing value fast. They contain a set of pre-configured strategies powered by real-time intent and delivered automatically by the Optimisation Agent. Each strategy is focused on a core part of the customer journey, with multiple response types to choose from depending on your business goals.

These strategies are:

  • Browse Abandonment with Intent. Designed to reduces browse abandonment through contextual, real-time prompts.

  • Basket Abandonment with Intent. Designed to do the same for basket abandonment.

  • Product Visits with Intent. Designed to boost consideration by surfacing value, reassurance or urgency on product pages.

  • Returning Visits with Intent. Designed to support returning visitors to pick up where they left off in their journey.

  • Experience Optimisation with Intent: Designed to find impact across the entire visitor journey, independent of these other focus areas.

Each of these strategies is powered by intent signals and optimised automatically. You’ll choose the moments and experiences that align with your goals, and the Optimisation Agent managing testing and delivery automatically.

“Intent means we can see what customers are actually doing on site - browsing, researching or buying. Prioritising these signals helps us to improve sales, customer experience & lifetime value.”
Jana Linder
Senior Digital Trade Manager

Seasalt Cornwall
Are you ready to move to Stage 2?

Some customers remain at this Activate stage for their entire partnership, relying on the Optimisation Agent to continuously maximise impact with zero additional effort from you and your team

However, Stage 2 may be the next step for you if:

  • You have business specific objectives you want to use intent to solve, and have the internal capacity to support this

  • You want to better understand intent, and start integrating intent insights into your broader experimentation and tech stack. You may also wish to explore optimising CRM campaigns with intent signals (for which your integration has already been set-up)

  • You want to explore dynamic, multi-layered campaigns that evolve based on a visitor’s intent

  • You want to begin focusing on in-page, dynamic content based on the stage and signals a visitor is showing

  • You’d like greater control and customisation via Campaign Manager, whilst keeping automation at the core

Stage 2

Orchestrate

Once you’ve proven value, this stage is where you scale and personalise experiences with greater sophistication while still keeping automation at its core to support you in driving value.
For brands who
want to scale
Start shaping more dynamic, tailored and sequenced experiences, onsite and off it.
Take control from insight to delivery.
Identify priorities and design experiences around your strategy.

This stage is perfect if you have an established personalisation or optimisation team and you want to begin bringing intent into your ways of working outside of the initial campaigns. If there’s appetite, you can also start exploring post-visit experiences with your visitors, enhancing campaigns such as Abandon Browse or Abandon Cart.

Why is Stage 2 important?

You’ve seen what intent can do, and the value it can bring. Now, you’re ready to scale that impact.

In this sense, Orchestrate means expanding your control over the use cases of intent, allowing you to solve specific business challenges with the framework you’ve seen drive greater impact using Agentic Campaigns.

You’ll go through a period of learning with your Customer Success team to support you in further understanding intent data. This will enable you to begin using intent to solve business specific challenges using our performance dashboard and segment builder. Perhaps you want to focus on a certain traffic source, or category. Interrogating intent data will allow you to highlight segments of opportunity, who can be delivered a targeted campaign using our advanced campaign manager. You’ll also be supported by our Alerts and Notifications, highlighting to you when an opportunity for action arises.

The advanced campaign manager includes dynamic campaigns; allowing you to alter both over-page and in-page content dependant on a visitor’s intent, and sequenced campaigns; where you can build multi-experience campaigns that fire as a visitor moves through different segments. For both of these, executions vary from over-page experiences to in-page dynamic content; such as in-grid content slots on PLP, or homepage carousel banners.

For some of our most advanced customers, you may also wish to use intent within your wider tech stack, such as personalisation platforms. As part of the advanced campaign manager, you’ll gain access to Third Party Triggers - enabling you to embed intent segmentation into existing experience processes.

Finally, at this stage you may begin experimenting with intent outside of your in-session experiences. By integrating Intent with your CDP and CRMs, you can optimise your Abandon Browse and Abandon Cart campaigns based on the summary of a visitor’s session. Or, develop targeted campaigns for visitors based on their Intent Stages & Interests.

Resource needed from your team can vary, based on the complexity of the campaigns you wish to launch. This stage allows you drive even more value from intent campaigns by driving hyper personalisation at scale, whilst you continue to benefit from the Optimisation Agent’s self-learning delivery.

The primary benefit of Stage 2 is to drive greater revenue with advanced experiences, powering unique personalisation journeys and solving your business challenges with intent
Image of Calum Atkinson
“We showed the intent-based email capture to more people. More people were signing up. And more of those people were converting.”
Calum Atkinson
CRM Manager

Bensons for Beds
What will you be doing at Stage 2?

At this stage, you’re evolving from activating Agentic Campaigns to designing advanced, intent-driven experiences that solve specific business challenges, both on and off-site. You’ll start using the data behind intent to identify opportunities, build targeted campaigns, and manage more complex personalisation journeys - all supported by automation. Naturally, this requires more dedicated time from your side compared to the initial Activate stage.

You’ll:

  • Identify opportunities using intent data through our performance dashboard and segment builder, working with your Customer Success team to uncover segments to target.
  • Set up alerts and notifications contextual to your business goals in order to be alerted of opportunities for campaigns
  • Design and launch dynamic campaigns that adapt in real time - changing both over-page and in-page content (e.g. homepage banners, PLP grids, or PDP blocks) based on a visitor’s intent.
  • Build sequenced experiences that evolve as a shopper moves through different stages of intent.
  • Use the Campaign Manager to visualise, schedule, and control advanced experiences across your site.
  • Review and optimise through a mix of manual insight and automation; segment performance and uplift are captured in real time, with the Optimisation Agent supporting where appropriate.
  • Integrate with your CRM and CDP platforms, to optimise campaigns such as Abandon Browse and Abandon Cart with Intent signals
  • This stage is about expanding what’s possible with intent; combining creativity with automation to deliver hyper-personalised experiences at scale.
Are you ready to move onto Stage 3?

As with Stage 1, many customers stay at the Orchestrate stage, utilising our high level insights to drive hypotheses and creating targeted in-page and over-page campaigns.

However, moving to the Stage 3 may be applicable if you want to make intent the basis of all your on-site experiences. Pushing the boundaries of in-session, in-page real-time experiences with full visibility and exploration of your data.

Stage 3 could be right for you if:

  • You’re ready to go beyond the high-level intent insights available in Stage 2 and access your full dataset; with the ability to query, analyse, and visualise intent data in depth

  • You want to push the boundaries of real-time in-page experiences, surfacing dynamic components to visitors based on where they are in their journey

  • You want to uncover why campaigns perform the way they do and explore trends across audiences, categories, and experiences through raw data analysis, and iterate on campaigns with these insights

  • You’d benefit from self-serve analytics that allow you to dig into intent signals and campaign outcomes without relying on pre-defined performance dashboard.

  • You’re ready to use the Insight Agent to power both day-to-day decision-making and campaign strategy.

  • You want to integrate your intent data into your broader analytics ecosystem (e.g. GCP, Azure, Snowflake).

  • Your team is ready to use this visibility to inform experimentation and strategic planning, identifying new opportunities that lead to you building end-to-end intent-first experiences

Stage 3

Systemise

At this stage, you move beyond using intent to solve isolated business problems. You’re starting to design your entire customer experience around real-time intent signals. You’re no longer thinking about individual experiences, but how full journeys evolve based on actual behaviour, patterns, and performance data.
For brands who
want to design
around intent
Use full behavioural insight to shape end-to-end experiences and strategy across teams or channels.
Make intent your strategic foundation. Design connected journeys shaped by real behaviour.

This is where data and decision-making converge. You gain access to the full intent dataset, as well as unlocking the Insight Agent. You start to ask more sophisticated questions of your dataset, for both insights and hypotheses but also campaign performance. Diving deeper into not just what worked, but why, to help you inform what to do next.

Intent shifts from being a trigger for individual campaigns to a strategic intelligence layer within your business. It guides how you shape experiences across the site, and powers personalisation across your stack.

You’re using the most advanced campaign capabilities, such as dynamic component slots that change with a customer’s intent - giving them the right functionality at the right time. You’re beginning to orchestrate journeys rather than launch isolated experiences, using intent as the engine that shapes how a visitor moves through your site in real time.

Why is Stage 3 important?

In Stage 2, you start to work with high-level insights in our performance dashboard, as well as understanding your audience through our segment builder. This is great to identify opportunities for targeted campaigns specific to your business objectives. However we know some customers will want to take this a step further; going beyond these insights to query, analyse, and visualise intent data in depth with full flexibility.

The Systemise stage is about enabling this. You’ll start working directly with the raw, event-level dataset that sits behind the high-level insights. This means you’re no longer confined to aggregated metrics. Instead, you can interrogate the data in full detail: every interaction, signal, and journey. You’ll be able to ask and answer precise questions about performance at an event-level, uncovering not only what happened but why. For example, you might explore how visitors in a specific intent stage behaved on PDPs, how different signals affected engagement for a particular category, or which journeys most strongly influenced conversion.

Beyond understanding your audience, this level of visibility allows you to perform deeper campaign analysis. Rather than simply tracking overall uplift, you can understand the detail, how performance evolved over time, and where opportunities or inefficiencies exist.

You’ll also unlock the Insight Agent, which serves two key roles:

  1. General insights: helping you interrogate intent data at scale in relation to your business context. Surfacing patterns, anomalies, and opportunities through natural language questions.
  2. Campaign performance analysis: providing deeper context and recommendations around what worked, why, and how to improve or expand on it in future iterations.

This deeper level of analysis allows you to go beyond one-off optimisations and start designing end-to-end experiences rooted in real behaviour, not assumptions. With full access to your dataset, advanced campaign tools, and the Insight Agent, you’re using intent as the foundation for how you design, deliver, and improve your customer journeys.

This is also the moment where you begin orchestrating journeys in a more connected, adaptive way. Ensuring every interaction is shaped by real-time signals rather than static templates or pre-set rules, and pushing the boundaries of what real-time adaptive experiences look like.

Finally, Stage 3 is where your intent data begins to extend beyond the platform. You can integrate directly with cloud and analytics environments, such as GCP, Azure, Snowflake, or CDPs, to join intent signals with your broader data stack (e.g. transactional, CRM, or product-level data). This enables teams to build unified views, automate insight workflows, and run advanced modelling within your own systems.

At the beginning of this stage, we’ll work with you and your team to further enrich your knowledge of intent, and our Intent Framework in order to be able to look at our data, and your website, in a new way

Primary benefit:  You’ll drive even greater impact from intent by uncovering what your visitors actually need, when they need it. Your entire digital experience will begin to be driven by intent, as you reframe how your organisation sees it’s visitors.

Image of Aaron Smedley
"By using intent data to segment and target our audience in Klaviyo we doubled our email open rate, and saw a like-for-like increase in conversion value of 160%."
Aaron Smedley
Chief Digital Officer

Le Chameau
What will you be doing at Stage 3?

At this stage, you’ll go beyond the high-level intent insights available in Stage 2 and gain full access to your dataset; giving you the ability to query, analyse, and visualise intent data in depth. You’ll use these insights to design more adaptive, end-to-end experiences, grounded in real customer behaviour.

This is the most time intensive stage of the Growth Blueprint, allowing you to truly embed intent in your organisation.

You’ll:

  • Explore the Intent Framework in full, learning how signals, stages, and journeys connect to performance outcomes across your site

  • Use the Insight Explorer to interrogate raw intent data by business objective, category, page type, or traffic source - identifying key trends, friction points, and opportunities.

  • Run self-serve analytics, creating and customising dashboards so you can dig into intent signals and campaign outcomes without relying on pre-defined reports.

  • Use the Insight Agent to uncover general insight (e.g. where journeys are stalling) or campaign-specific learning (e.g. which variant worked best, and why)

  • Design connected experiences, using the Campaign Manager’s advanced functionality to act on insights and launch targeted experiences that address what you’ve uncovered. Building journeys that adapt in real time and pushing the limits on intent first experiences.

  • Analyse campaign performance in greater depth through the raw data

  • Export data into your cloud environment (e.g. GCP, Azure, Snowflake) or connect to your CDP to join with other datasets and feed broader customer strategies

  • Feed insight directly into activation, using what you learn to continuously evolve your campaign strategy and influence wider personalisation efforts across your stack

Many teams at this level find intent becomes embedded in their day-to-day decision-making - shaping how they brief, design, and evaluate digital experiences across the organisation.

Level 4

Directing campaigns

Armed with intent insights, this is where you begin to deliver intent-first journeys. Not just adjusting when experiences show, but how they behave, what they say, and how they evolve based on where a visitor is in their decision-making process.
Average timeline: 6-12 months
Creating intent-first experiences to unlock new value, takes a little resource for a lot of impact.
Move beyond timing to content and creativity. 
Customise intent-first experiences for your key segments.

At this stage, you’ve stopped treating features as isolated tests. Now you’re thinking in terms of *moments*. What experience should someone get, at what time, with what message?

Level 4 is where brands begin designing intent-first journeys. Not just adjusting when experiences are delivered, but how they behave and what they say based on where a visitor is in their decision-making process.

You’re no longer optimising around what you have. You’re building what’s missing.

Image of Jay Shufflebottom
"Our discount strategy is reliant on Made With Intent and we've seen margin enhancement improvements of over 10% as a result."
Jay Shufflebottom
Trading Manager

Buy It Direct Group
Why this level matters

Most brands stop at optimising existing catch-all features and tactics. Timing a pop-up. Reworking a CTA. Switching off a discount.

Level 4 is where intent-based experiences go up a notch. Using insight from Level 3, you start building:

  • In-session content that adapts in real time
  • CRM flows shaped by behavioural signals
  • Retargeting journeys that reflect the last known stage

This isn’t just about showing something different. It’s about designing experiences that wouldn’t be possible without intent.

Now, you’re asking:

  • What’s the right message for this moment?
  • How should it evolve if intent shifts?
  • How do we turn one-off features into cohesive, adaptive flows?

Level 4 unlocks more relevant journeys, and better results, without relying on resource-heavy rebuilds. You’re scaling precision, without a major increase in effort.

What changes at this level?

Having built confidence using intent to optimise existing features, teams now create new experiences based on the visitor’s intent. These replace or work with your current templates and flows (no rebuild required).

From dynamic overlays and in‑page content to sequenced CRM flows and personalised remarketing, you are thinking beyond features towards adaptive, intent‑first journeys.

In-session:

  • You design adaptive overlays and in-page content that flex based on real-time signals

  • You shift from “show/hide” logic to sequenced, dynamic campaigns

  • You test not just if something works, but for who, when, and why they work

  • Segment by intent as standard: Every campaign is evaluated through an intent lens, not just aggregate conversion rate

Post-visit:

  • You create new CRM flows triggered by stage, affinity or signal patterns-

  • You personalise remarketing creative, not just segments

  • You stop thinking “channel-first” and start thinking “context-first”

You stop launching features and tactics in isolation. Instead, you connect experiences across the journey.
What brands learn at this level
At this level, ecommerce and CRM teams begin to:
  • Use hypotheses from Level 3 to launch new experiences, not just iterate
  • Redesign templates and campaigns to respond to real-time signals (not segments alone)
  • Move beyond overlays: test homepage layouts, messaging, and content that adapts with intent
  • Personalise flows at the moment of re-entry not just at send
  • Use timing and content together to increase conversion without relying on blanket discounts
  • Introduce new journey types: multi-step CRM series, sequential remarketing etc.
What emerges is a more connected, responsive experience. Tailored not just to who someone is, but what they’re trying to do.

This is the leap from iteration to invention.

Your team stops asking “how can we improve this feature?”

They start asking “what’s the experience this visitor actually needs, and how can we deliver it?”

Suddenly, personalisation isn’t a tactic. It’s a mindset.

And intent isn’t just an insight. It’s the logic that shapes the journey.

This is the level where brands stop tweaking, and start creating.
Recommendations of where to start
  • Launch a new in-session experience based on real insight, not a hunch
  • Rebuild one CRM journey using intent signals instead of static rules
  • Test variations of content based on stage or affinity, not just placement or timing
  • Share results internally, linking every outcome to the intent insight behind it
Signs you‘re ready to move to Level 5
  • You’ve launched at least one new experience from scratch, based on intent

  • You’ve tested different delivery types (overlay, in-page, CRM, retargeting) for a shared objective

  • Your templates are no longer fixed, they evolve based on signal and stage

  • “Intent-first” thinking shows up outside your team, in trading, CRM, media or UX conversations

  • You’re already mapping out the full journey, not just its individual parts

How Made With Intent helps at this level

Our campaign manager and integrations give you everything you need to deliver intent-first experiences. Using sequencing and dynamic content, our customers design new campaigns that evolve as intent shifts. Whether in-session overlays or CRM flows, our tools make it possible to test, learn and create intent-based journeys without complex engineering work.

Level 5

Orchestrating journeys

While we’re yet to see a brand truly reach this level, this is where intent moves from being a layer in your stack to the logic behind everything. Not just a tool for optimisation, but the foundation of how journeys are designed, delivered and scaled.
Average timeline: After 2+ years
Intent becomes the operating model behind all experiences.
A future where intent is the contextual engine across ecommerce. Where your experience is truly connected with your visitors.

While we believe no eCommerce brand is yet to reach this point, whether through our tool or other means, we feel the full potential of intent lies in real-time orchestration.

You’ve proven connecting your tactics to intent can drive value. You’ve built adaptive experiences, shaped by real signals. But in Level 5, something changes.

This is where intent becomes more than a layer, it becomes the logic. Not just a tool for optimisation, but the foundation of how journeys are designed, delivered and scaled.

Once you hit level 5, you stop thinking in campaigns. You start thinking in systems.

Image of Nick Glynne
“Understanding and targeting customer intent has added well over £1m in incremental revenue in less than 6 months. It is our secret weapon.”
Nick Glynne
CEO & Founder

Buy It Direct Group
Why this level matters

Most brands optimise in parts. They A/B test. They retarget. They send CRM flows.

But these are fragments, disconnected by team, channel, and logic.

Level 5 is where intent begins to unify it all. So you go from building experiences to something more like orchestrating entire journeys.

  • Responsive in-page content that evolves over time
  • CRM flows triggered by actual stage shifts
  • Retargeting aligned with real behaviour, not rules

Everything moves with the visitor, because experiences (and therefore, their journeys)  are no longer static. They’re responsive systems powered by context.

This is the point where intent becomes more than an option, or a signal. It starts to become central to all things ecommerce.

What changes at this level?

The biggest shift is coordination. You stop building experiences in isolation and start creating connected paths.

That means:

  • Sequencing touchpoints around shared objectives

  • Designing content and logic that flex in real-time

  • Adapting the experience, not just personalising the message

  • Scaling without adding complexity, using automation and generative AI

You’re not thinking “what feature should we show here?” You’re thinking: “Where is this person in their journey, and what’s the best next step for them?”

What brands learn at this level
In this final stage, leading teams typically:
  • Map full journeys using intent stages, signals, and trends, across in-session and post-visit

  • Design coordinated sequences of content: overlay → CRM → retargeting

  • Use orchestration logic, not just timing logic

  • Dial experiences up or down based on performance or margin protection goals

  • Use intent as shared language across teams: product, CRM, UX, brand, performance

What emerges is a new way of operating. A more responsive model. A business that designs with intent, not just for outcomes.

This is the move from designing features to shaping journeys.

Your team doesn’t just launch campaigns. It builds systems that respond to context, adapt across time, and scale without more resource.

Intent becomes the connective tissue between visitor mindset, experience delivery and commercial objectives

This is the level where brands stop optimising and launching with a singular focus, but practically let intent itself do the orchestrating.
Recommendations of where to start
  • Map one full journey using real-time intent data, across overlays, CRM, retargeting and on-site content

  • Create a blueprint: align stages, signals, objectives and outcomes. This becomes your orchestration canvas

  • Shift your language internally: use intent to brief new ideas, prioritise features, and analyse performance

  • Sequence a campaign across in-session and post-visit touchpoints to match one key objective

  • Set orchestration KPIs, so you track not just touchpoint metrics, but journey-level progression and outcome

Signs you‘re ready to move to Level 5
  • You’ve connected in-session and post-visit experiences into full journeys

  • You’ve mapped key journeys around shared business objectives using intent

  • Teams across the business use intent as a core concept, not just a feature

  • Your templates, flows and features adapt in real time, based on live behaviour

  • Intent is seen not just as an option, but the engine of your ecommerce strategy

How Made With Intent helps at this level

While we’re yet to know the true power here, we believe our product will see intent become the logic across your ecosystem. Our orchestration capabilities will connect in-session, CRM and retargeting into cohesive journeys. With automation and generative AI, we expect brands to be able to scale precision while keeping orchestration manageable.

Getting started with intent

How progression works

The Intent Growth Blueprint isn’t intended to be a checklist.

Some brands progress quickly. Others spend longer in certain stages, testing, learning, and proving ROI. That’s expected.

What matters isn’t how fast you move, but how deeply you adopt the mindset.

The stages also aren’t rigid. Early levels often overlap. You may experiment with Stage 3 thinking while still building Stage 2 foundations. You may even decide to stay at Stage 1 or 2 for the foreseeable.

That’s the strength of the blueprint. It flexes to where you are, and where your growth needs to come from next.

This is how you move from diminishing, catch-all optimisation toward sustainable, contextual growth.

From treating visitors as traffic to sell to, to treating them as people to connect with.

Wherever you are today, this blueprint helps you move forward with intent-based experience optimisation. With clarity, confidence and commercial impact.

If you’ve read this far, you’re already thinking deeper about intent than many in the industry. But we’re willing to bet (try us) that it won’t be this way for too long.

You’ve seen how innovative brands move from generic journeys to contextual growth, by using real-time intent to shape how they understand, respond to and convert visitors.

Each stage in this blueprint reflects a shift. From proxies to predictions. From averages to individuals. From pages to stages. From features to journeys. From isolated wins to orchestrated growth.

And right now, that shift matters more than ever. Traffic is expensive. Competition is fierce. Site visits are fleeting. Teams are stretched. The brands that win next won’t do it by squeezing 0.1% out of tired templates. They’ll do it by seeing what others don’t, and responding in real time.

If that’s where you want to go next, book a demo to see how Made With Intent helps ecommerce brands unlock the full value of real-time intent.