From Batch to Precision: Winning the Relevance War Without Burning Out Your Base

This article is part of our ongoing series unpacking Plinc’s Strategic CRM Playbook: From Execution to Influence. The Playbook offers a practical roadmap to help CRM teams move beyond campaign delivery and into strategic leadership roles.

In Chapter 3: From Batch to Precision, we explore what it means to shift away from blanket sending and why relevance isn’t just a CX goal, but a commercial necessity.

Download the full Playbook now or follow this series to explore all 10 chapters.

A Familiar Tension

CRM teams are under pressure to drive volume, quickly and constantly.

Every week brings new trading priorities, urgent asks and “just one more” send to squeeze in. So the list gets pulled. The campaign goes out. And performance is measured by what’s easy to count: revenue, clicks, redemptions.

It works. Until it doesn’t.

Fatigue creeps in. Unsubscribes rise. Customers start ignoring the brand, even when the message is relevant. And soon, CRM teams are stuck in a reactive cycle, more sends to hit more targets, with less and less impact.

The hamster wheel keeps turning. Short-term sales take up so much time and energy that there’s no space left to focus on what drives long-term retention. Things like personalisation, targeting efficiency and journey design fall off the to-do list.

The result? CRM gets busier, but not necessarily better.

The Pattern That’s Easy to Miss

On paper, batch campaigns often look fine. Sometimes even great.

But beneath the surface:

• Engagement is concentrated in a shrinking segment
  → A small, high-response group drives most of the return.
• The long tail of the audience is disengaging
  → Opens, clicks, and conversions drop off dramatically after the top quartile.
• Incremental value is eroding
  → The campaign works but only because the most loyal customers were already inclined to buy.

The business sees success. The CRM team sees signals of wear. But without a different model, there’s no clear way out.

Why It Persists

Batch remains dominant because it’s:

• Quick to execute
• Easy to measure
• Reassuring to the business (“We hit the whole base!”)

But the cost is buried in unsubscribes, customer churn, missed opportunities for relevance, and campaigns that could have performed better with more restraint.

CRM teams often know this. They see the unsubscribes before anyone else.
But they don’t always have the data, the models, or the permission to act on it.

The Strategic Reframe: Precision as Protection

As the Playbook outlines in Chapter 3, the shift is simple — but powerful. Move from maximising exposure to protecting customer value.

Strategic CRM teams start asking different questions:

• Not “How many can we send this to?”
• But “Who will this matter to? And who could this damage?”

They use:

• Affinity and intent models, powered by digital engagement data, to segment audiences by relevance rather than just recency. These signals help identify what matters most to customers right now and where attention is already shifting.
• Purchase margin and product role data to avoid overexposing high-value or premium segments.
• Fatigue rules that prioritise long-term engagement over short-term spikes.

And they measure success differently. Not just by revenue but by efficiency, engagement consistency, and value per contact.

Making This Land Internally

This shift can be hard to sell to leadership especially if they’re used to big numbers and base-wide sends.

Here’s how we’ve seen CRM teams make the case:

• Back-test recent batch campaigns against a simple relevance model
  → “If we’d only targeted likely buyers, we’d have made 85% of the revenue with 60% fewer emails.”
• Model the long-term cost of churn and fatigue
  → Show how repeated batch exposure can undermine loyalty value especially in key segments.
• Align precision to trading priorities
  → Use audience logic to support margin protection (“Hold back on full-price buyers”), loyalty growth (“Reinforce with newly converted customers”), or category push.

The goal is to reframe smarter targeting not as restraint but as commercial intelligence.

Quick Wins vs Long Plays

Quick win: Run a fatigue analysis across your last 90 days of sends. Identify the top 10% of customers by send frequency and model whether more exposure equals more value. (It often doesn’t.)

Longer play: Start introducing a “Relevance Confidence Score” to new campaigns, a simple way to signal how well each campaign matches audience intent, and how that’s expected to affect performance.

Why Chapter 3 Matters Now

As pressure to deliver mounts, it’s easy to fall back on volume. But true commercial performance isn’t about how many people you reach. It’s about how many people you influence.

Precision isn’t a compromise. It’s a strategy. And it’s one of the clearest ways CRM can protect customer relationships, margin, and long-term brand impact while still meeting short-term goals.

This article is part of From Execution to Influence, Plinc’s Strategic CRM Playbook. Download the full Playbook here to explore all 10 chapters.

Next Up:

Chapter 4 – Become a Customer Economist

→ How CRM teams can speak the language of value, and make customer profitability the metric that matters.