A customer visits an online store and looks at a pair of shoes. Another customer buys a skincare product. A third customer has not purchased anything from the brand in six months. If all three receive the same promotional message the next morning, the brand is reaching them, but it is not really speaking to them. This is where personalised marketing comes in. Personalised marketing is not simply about adding a customer’s name to an email. It is about using what a brand already knows about a customer to make its communication more useful and relevant.
That could mean recommending a product based on what someone has browsed, sending a reminder after an abandoned cart, offering a different reward to a loyal customer, or choosing WhatsApp instead of email because that is where the customer usually interacts with the brand.
The idea is simple: instead of asking what message the brand wants to send, personalised marketing asks what message makes sense for this particular customer right now.
Personalisation Is More Than Calling a Customer by Their Name
For a long time, personalisation in marketing meant simple things such as adding a customer’s first name to an email. But today’s customers interact with brands in many different ways. They browse websites, use apps, open emails, click advertisements, speak to businesses on WhatsApp, and make purchases across different devices. All these interactions can tell a brand something about what a customer needs or prefers.
For example, imagine a customer who has:
- Browsed running shoes several times;
- Added a pair to their cart but did not purchase it;
- Previously bought sportswear from the same brand.
Instead of sending that customer a general “20% off everything” message, the brand could send a reminder about the shoes they were considering. That is a much more relevant conversation.
Personalisation vs Segmentation: What Is the Difference?
These two terms are often used together, but they are not the same. Segmentation means putting customers into groups.
For example:
- New customers
- Repeat customers
- Customers who have not purchased recently
- Premium or loyalty members
A brand can then send one message to each group. Personalisation goes one step further.
Instead of assuming that everyone in a group wants the same thing, the brand considers the individual’s behaviour and circumstances. Two customers who have not purchased for six months may therefore receive completely different messages. One might receive a discount on a product they previously purchased. Another might receive a reminder about a category they regularly browse.
So, segmentation helps brands organise customers. Personalisation helps brands make the communication more relevant to each customer.
What Information Does Personalised Marketing Use?
A brand does not need to know everything about a customer. It needs the right information. Three types of information are particularly useful.
1. What the customer has told you
This includes information such as their language, preferences, location, membership status, or the type of communication they have agreed to receive. For example, a customer may choose to receive delivery updates but not promotional emails. That preference itself is useful information.
2. What the customer has done
This includes actions such as:
- Products they viewed
- Items they added to a cart
- Purchases they made
- Emails they opened
- Pages they visited
- Offers they clicked
- Features they used in an app
These actions can help a brand understand what a customer may be interested in.
3. What is happening right now
Context matters too. A customer may be in a particular location, using a mobile phone, shopping at a certain time of day, or waiting for an order. A message that is useful at one moment may be irrelevant at another. This is why good personalisation is not only about who the customer is, but also what they are doing and when they are doing it.
Why Does Personalised Marketing Matter?
Customers receive a huge number of marketing messages every day. When every customer receives the same email, notification, or offer, much of that communication can simply be ignored. Personalisation gives brands a better chance of making their communication useful.
But personalisation is not valuable simply because it is personalised. Customers are more likely to appreciate it when it solves a problem, saves them money, or gives them a useful benefit. In other words, the goal is not to show customers that a brand knows a lot about them. The goal is to use that knowledge to make their experience easier or more useful. (Source: Deloitte Digital)
It can help brands:
- Make messages more relevant
- Improve customer engagement
- Reduce unnecessary communication
- Encourage repeat purchases
- Build stronger customer relationships
- Make better use of customer data
Deloitte Digital research shows that companies with higher personalisation maturity were 48% more likely to exceed their revenue goals and 71% more likely to report improved customer loyalty than companies with lower maturity. (Source: Deloitte Digital)
But there is an important catch. Personalisation only works when it actually feels useful to the customer.
When Personalisation Goes Wrong
More personalisation does not automatically mean better marketing. The research from Data Partners suggests that customers value personalisation when it serves a clear purpose. It can be useful when it solves a problem, saves money, or gives customers a benefit they value. This means personalisation should not be about using more customer data; it should be about using the right data to make the experience more useful. (Source: Data Partners)
Imagine buying a pair of shoes and then receiving advertisements for the same pair every day. The brand has used your data, but it has not used it intelligently. There are three common problems brands need to avoid.
Outdated information
If a customer has already bought a product, continuing to recommend that same product can make the brand appear disconnected.
Too much personalisation
A brand can also make customers uncomfortable by showing that it knows more about them than they expected. There is a difference between saying, “Here are some products you may like,” and making a customer wonder how closely the brand has been watching them.
Different channels tell different stories
Imagine receiving an email saying your order has been cancelled, while a WhatsApp message says it is being delivered. The problem is not a lack of personalisation. It is a lack of coordination. This is why customer information needs to be consistent across the channels a brand uses.
How Personalisation Works Across Different Communication Channels
Personalisation does not belong to one particular marketing channel. It can be used wherever a brand communicates with customers.
A clothing brand could show different products based on what a customer has browsed or purchased. It could also send an abandoned-cart reminder instead of a general promotional email.
SMS and WhatsApp
These channels can be useful when the message needs to be timely. For example, a brand could send a delivery update, appointment reminder or personalised offer based on a customer’s recent activity.
Mobile apps
An app can show different recommendations or messages depending on how someone uses it. For example, a food-delivery app may highlight a customer’s frequently ordered cuisine.
Website
A returning visitor does not necessarily need to see the exact same experience as a first-time visitor. The website can use previous interactions to make the experience more relevant. The important thing is not to use every channel simply because it is available. The right channel is the one that makes sense for the customer and the message.
You Don’t Need to Personalise Everything
One of the most useful lessons from personalised marketing is that brands do not need to change everything at once. In fact, trying to personalise every customer interaction from day one can make the process unnecessarily complicated. A better approach is to start with one important customer moment.
For example:
A customer makes their first purchase.
The brand could build a simple post-purchase communication journey:
Purchase → Order update → Delivery → Product feedback → Relevant recommendation → Next purchase
Once this works, the brand can gradually add other customer moments such as abandoned carts, repeat purchases, renewals, or customers who have become inactive.
The goal is not to create hundreds of complicated customer journeys.
The goal is to make the important interactions more relevant.
Start With the Customer, Not the Technology
It is easy to think of personalised marketing as a technology problem. Which CRM should a business use? Which channels should it connect to? But technology is only one part of the process.
The first question should be much simpler:
What does our customer need from us at this particular stage of their relationship with the brand?
- A new customer may need guidance.
- A customer who has just purchased may need reassurance and useful updates.
- A loyal customer may value early access.
- A customer who has stopped purchasing may need a reason to return.
Once a brand understands these moments, technology can help deliver the right communication at scale. For businesses looking to put this approach into practice, customer engagement platforms such as Retaint bring customer data, communication channels, and retention journeys together in one place. This can help brands move from one-off campaigns to more timely, behaviour-based communication across channels such as WhatsApp, email, SMS and push notifications.
How Can Brands Know If Personalisation Is Working?
A personalised campaign may generate more clicks, but that does not automatically mean it has created more business. Brands need to compare personalised communication with a normal, non-personalised version. For example, if 10,000 customers receive a personalised offer and another similar group receives a standard offer, the brand can compare their results.
It can look at metrics such as:
- Purchases
- Revenue
- Repeat purchases
- Engagement
- Unsubscribes
- Customer retention
This helps answer a more important question than “Did people click?”
It answers:
Did personalisation actually make a difference?
What Brands Can Learn From Personalised Marketing
The biggest lesson is not that every customer needs a completely different marketing campaign. It is important that customers should not always be treated as one large audience. A person who has just bought from a brand is in a different position from someone who has abandoned a cart. A loyal customer is different from someone discovering the brand for the first time. Personalised marketing helps brands recognise these differences and respond accordingly.
And as customer interactions become spread across websites, apps, email, SMS, and conversational channels, this becomes increasingly important. The future of personalisation is therefore not simply about knowing a customer’s name. It is about understanding what the customer has done, what they may need next, and how the brand can communicate that in a useful and timely way.
For businesses, the lesson is straightforward: better customer data should lead to better customer conversations, not simply more marketing messages.
