A Framework for Personalisation at Scale

What Personalisation Means in 2025

97% of executives rank personalised customer experiences as a business priority. 89% consider it essential for success in the next 3 years. 71% of consumers expect personalised experiences, and 76% feel frustrated when they’re not offered. Great, we’re all agreed – personalisation is important. So why aren’t companies delivering?

There’s a growing gap between a brand’s perception of its personalisation capabilities and what customers experience.

• 65% of customers expect experiences that adapt to their needs and preferences, but 61% say companies still treat them as a number (Salesforce).
• 63% of marketing execs still struggle to provide personalised experiences (Gartner).
• 61% of brands say they personalise experiences, but only 43% of customers recognised the effort (Deloitte).

Bridging this gap is crucial. Yet it’s also more complex in the context of tightening privacy regulations, fragmented journeys, and increased noise in the market. Many brands find it hard to move beyond rudimentary personalisation tactics. And those with more mature capabilities often struggle to scale them.

 

It’s one thing to personalise a single point of contact. Scaling that capability up to omnichannel customer journeys is a different beast. It means delivering experiences that customers actually want in the way they want them. It means threading those experiences together seamlessly. It means adapting to evolving preferences and needs. It means looking beyond tech to implement organisational change. And it means not delivering experiences they haven’t asked for – regardless of how personalised they might be.

The Problem(s) With Personalisation At Scale

There are lots of reasons that personalisation at scale remains hard. Information silos, data accuracy, underperforming tech, misaligned strategies, internal politics, and resource limitations tend to be common culprits.

But one overarching (and often overlooked) reason is a lack of any clear personalisation strategy that’s aligned across the business.

A framework that encompasses offer decisioning, data usage (and privacy), channel activation, and content delivery enables brands to scale up and automate personalisation. It creates a customer experience supply chain that ensures the outputs are unified, consistent, and customer-first.

Crucially, it also enables holistic customer experience management. Effective experiences are personalised at the strategic level and then the tactical level. This is the difference between managing customer experiences and launching campaigns; there’s a clear goal that ladders up to big-picture business value, rather than a short-term KPI.

It’s why sending an SMS instead of an email is personalisation. It’s why a well-timed upgrade offer is personalisation. It’s why sending two different upgrade offers to two different people is personalisation. And it’s why sending no offer at all can also be personalisation.

Offer, Message, Timing, Channel: A Framework For Personalisation At Scale

That all sounds great. But what does it look like in practice? Frameworks (especially ones developed by consultants) have a habit of being good-looking but impractical. That’s not the way we do things.

Our framework helps clients develop a scalable system for personalising customer experiences. It requires addressing four interdependent dimensions: offer, message, timing, and channel.

Offer: What Do You Want To Say?

Think beyond what you’re selling, i.e. the features of your product or service. Focus on how it benefits your customer. How does your offering solve their problems, fulfil their aspirations, or make their lives easier? (If the answer is “it doesn’t,” then you should think critically about whether to launch the offer at all).

To make offers more dynamic and adaptive, introduce more data points into the offer decisioning process:

• Purchase history, including frequency, value, and recency.
• Engagement patterns and browsing behaviour.
• Geographic data like location and seasonality.
• Usage patterns that indicate up-sell readiness.

These are on top of the standard data points you might be using to create broad customer segments.

Remember that “offer” doesn’t always mean a commercial offer. It could also be an offer to engage with website content, join a social community, or provide feedback on a recent interaction. Those can all encourage loyalty across a longer customer journey.

You don’t always need to wait for a clear signal from customers. There’s an argument for sending offers to in-market opportunities who aren’t as familiar with your brand. In those cases, a gentler or higher-level “offer” to engage with the brand can bring the prospect into your orbit.

Message: How Do You Want To Say It?

The message is the bit most brands think of when they think of personalisation. Tone of voice, creative execution, copy and imagery – there’s a lot you can personalise. The key is understanding what matters to which customers, and how tweaking these expressions of your message will drive the desired response. Getting it right requires continuous testing to find what works.

How your message is expressed should also reflect a customer’s preferences, and where they are in their buying journey. For example, a pop-up on a webpage will look different to an in-app banner. The offer might be the same, but the execution is contextualised.

Timing: When Is The Best Time To Say It?

Timing can make or break a customer’s experience. Anticipating a customer’s need and delivering a relevant offer at exactly the right time will build loyalty. Getting too far ahead or waiting too long will erode it.

Maturing in this dimension means moving from defined timings to sending messages based on precursors and conditions that signal the optimal moment.

• Working around their schedule: Test different timings for promotional messaging and use an individual’s behaviour to figure out the best time of day or day of the week for the next message.
• Celebrate events: Birthdays, brand anniversaries, or milestones like usage streaks can trigger personalised communications that elicit an emotional response.
• Real-time engagement: Highly engaged customers might be looking for an opportunity to complete an action (purchase, sign-up, etc.) on the spot. Real-time engagement requires real-time data and responsiveness, but it can significantly boost customer loyalty and sales.
• Condition-driven activation: Using customer status or purchase frequency to trigger offers like contract renewals, replenishment reminders, or expiring benefits can be an effective way to remind customers that you’re paying attention.
• Business triggers: Customers who’ve expressed interest in a product might want to know that it’s on sale, back in stock, or available in a new variant. Just be careful to exclude customers who’ve already purchased – they probably won’t be happy to learn that they overpaid.

I recently saw a client get 33% higher clicks on an email just by sending it at a better time. Timing really makes a difference, and it’s one thing that’s entirely within your control.

Channel: Where Will You Say It For That Customer?

Your customers are interacting on multiple touchpoints, but they don’t want you stalking them across platforms. Effective personalisation means tailoring the message to their preferences:

• Create a preference centre so customers can tell you where they want to engage.
• Make it granular to give individuals more choice over specific message types.
• Make it available so they can tailor communications at any time.

Customer journeys are also increasingly fluid. Mature personalisation strategies enable conversations to continue across multiple channels, and connect inbound and outbound engagement so the next interaction is always based on the last.

Achieving this kind of omnichannel personalisation requires integrating all your customer touchpoints. It’s not easy or immediate. Start by delivering single messages on the right channel, work up to linking outbound and inbound (including aligning teams and processes), and aim for seamlessly connect customer journeys as your ultimate goal.

• Going omnichannel doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere. Experiences still need to be personalised but they need to know about each other.
• Sometimes they choose the channel (inbound) and sometimes we choose it (outbound)

Omnichannel engagement doesn’t mean showing the same experience on every channel. It means personalising each experience, and making sure each channel knows what’s happening on the others. The big advantage is that whether the customer chooses the channel (aka inbound) or the brand chooses it (outbound) the experience is personal to them. It doesn’t conflict with what they’ve already seen, and it’s delivered in the right way for them.

Put Data To Work

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of data in delivering personalised, relevant, timely, connected experiences. Thankfully, data is just about the only thing marketers have too much of. It’s usually a question of filtering out valuable information.

That said, if you haven’t invested in collecting first-party data (personal info, purchase history, browsing behaviour and therefore inferred preferences) and zero-party data (provided explicitly, like communication preferences and customer profiles), they should be a priority. Third party data (collected by someone else, and often aggregated and anonymised) can enrich what you know about your customers, but shouldn’t be a proxy for first- or zero-party data.

What Data is Useful For Personalisation At Scale?

Data handling and activation processes are the backbone of personalisation strategies. Knowing where data comes from, what it means, and how to activate it will enable you to launch and refine targeted strategies, and build up confidence in the information behind them.

If you follow our four-dimensional personalisation framework, you’ll need three types of data:

• Personal data: Information about the individual, ranging from their name and contact info to demographic and geographic data, life stage, and which customer segment they match.
• Behavioural data: How they’re engaging with your brand, including purchase history and frequency, lifetime value, churn risk, active touchpoints, annual spend and other value insights.
• Contextual data: Their status as a customer, including loyalty programs, complaint history, in-market modelling, and intentions. (This is by far the most challenging to get right, but the most impactful when it is used correctly).

Combining personal, behavioural, and contextual signals – often a blend of data, ideally weighted towards zero- and first-party – will enable you to answer most of the questions about offer, message, timing, and channel. The last mile is iteration.

How the Right Tech Enables Personalisation at Scale

Tech vendors promise a lot when it comes to personalisation. In reality, your internal setup is far more important than the tools you buy. Once you hit a certain size, most big-name enterprise platforms do most things pretty well. So, stop obsessing over features. Start thinking about exactly what you want to deliver to customers, and the user experience needed to achieve it.

• User-friendliness over features: Choose tools your team can actually use. That might even mean upgrading your existing tech instead of investing in new tools with a long learning curve.
• Collaboration-ready: Look for solutions that work for all stakeholders and integrate with existing systems. It’ll mean more people using the tech to build more experiences.
• Scalability: Consider how your chosen tools look (and how much they cost) when you’re dealing with twice, three times, or 10x the number of database contacts or experiences.
• Culture alignment: Invest in tech that fits your culture, not your problems. It’s easier to solve problems than rebuild culture.

Martech underutilisation is a massive problem. Don’t discount the potential value of the tech you already have. We often find that upgrading or updating existing tech unlocks value without needing a big outlay for new platforms.

Changing Ways of Working

While it’s easy to get caught up in tech and data, personalisation at scale often requires a shift in how teams operate.

Rigid Approval Processes Kill Personalisation

If every message has to go through lengthy sign-offs, there’s no chance of being agile enough to respond with a relevant and timely offer.

Shift your mindset from approving campaigns to enabling components. Create a toolkit of pre-approved content blocks, offers, and messaging templates. These should be versatile and adaptable, ready to be mixed and matched depending on the customer.

Empower your teams to iterate, and define rules for how marketing automation platforms deliver experiences without direct human oversight.

Creative and Content

The smaller these components, the more scalable personalisation becomes. Let’s take an email engagement as an example:

• Best in class personalisation: One person gets an email, another an app notification, a third a responsive web experience, and suddenly you’re personalising across multiple dimensions.
• High personalisation: Images, offers, copy, messaging, and CTAs all adapt based on the person’s history and behaviour, and they never see the same thing twice.
• Medium personalisation: People are segmented and served the content blocks that are most relevant to their segment, e.g. picking five from a master list of 10 blocks.
• Low to no personalisation: Everyone gets the same email, “personalised” with their name in the subject line.

Smaller, reusable components like headlines, images, or CTAs allow for rapid iteration and better scaling of personalisation across channels. The key is creating a content supply chain that’s flexible enough to evolve with the customer’s journey and preferences, but still aligned to your business goals.

Siloed Teams Can’t Deliver Holistic Experiences

Customers don’t belong to any one team. Businesses tend to be set up to engage with customers in distinct departments, like CRM, web, and digital marketing. Each has its own personalisation strategies. It’s crucial to bring these teams together under a unified strategy that thinks about the customer as an individual, which means true personalisation and not touchpoint-level personalisation.

That requires three things:

1. Aligned (or redefined) business goals that are based on customer value and cascade down to team-level KPIs.
2. A shared customer intelligence platform.
3. Integrated customer engagement processes across departments.

This combination can be a rudder to reorient company culture towards customer centricity and away from traditional departments. Everyone has access to the information they need to make the right decisions for the customer, and visibility across the entire journey.

“Mature businesses spend around 80% of their time optimising what works, and only 20% building from scratch. You need to trust the system. It’s the only way to evolve from creating generic campaigns to coordinating personalised experiences.

Is Personalisation Even That Important?

Most marketers advocate for the power of personalisation. But there’s a trade-off. Personalisation strategies require resources: time, effort, tech, and often organisational change. It’s not a one-time investment, either. Maintaining one-to-one relationships takes continued effort. So, is it worth it? The data is pretty clear here.

• Brands that excel at personalisation are 48% more likely to exceed revenue goals and 71% more likely to see improved customer loyalty (Deloitte).
• They also derive 40% more revenue from personalisation than competitors (McKinsey).
• 78% of consumers said a personalised experience made them more likely to re-purchase (McKinsey).
• Experience-first companies grow 1.7x faster than competitors (Adobe).

Even at the tactical level, personalisation makes a difference. For example, HubSpot found that personalised and contextualised CTAs converted 202% better than basic CTAs.

But the real value of personalisation comes from scalable, repeatable, customer-centric strategies. A holistic perspective, supported by a robust framework, enables the kind of value-driven experiences that grow brands, delight consumers, and forge unbreakable bonds between your brand and its customers.

This guide is part of our in-depth series on designing and optimising customer journeys. You can download a summary with all the best bits below.