True customer-first marketing is not about running more campaigns. It is about building the right foundations, earning the trust to personalise, and creating the operational muscle to prove impact.
That was the focus of The Personalisation Payoff: Trust, Timing and What Drives Real Response, a breakfast briefing hosted by Plinc and the DMA on 18 September at Manchester Art Gallery.
The morning opened with brand-new consumer insight from Plinc, revealing where brands are falling short in meeting customer expectations on trust, message volume and relevance. This was paired with DMA research showing that customer-data-driven campaigns deliver 25% higher business effects, 21% higher overall effectiveness and are four times more likely to result in long-term retention.
Attendees also heard how leading marketers are tackling the biggest blockers to personalisation at scale, from data connectivity and content bottlenecks to the cultural work of aligning teams around a single view of the customer.
The session culminated in a panel discussion with senior CRM leaders from some of the UK’s best-known brands, including Jessica Rose (Co-op), Rachel Liversedge (Matalan), Kate Chatterton (BrewDog) and Katie Ascott (Regatta), who explored the biggest blockers to personalisation at scale. They discussed everything from data connectivity and content bottlenecks to the cultural work of aligning teams around a single view of the customer, sharing practical steps for overcoming these challenges and highlighting what to avoid, such as intrusive personalisation that risks eroding customer trust.
This debrief captures the key lessons from that conversation and distils them into practical steps for teams looking at how they can overcome today’s barriers and deliver personalisation that customers trust.
1. Building the Right Foundations: Data, Trust and Customer Permission
Strategic Principle: Build personalisation on trusted, high-confidence data. Earn the right to use it.
Many attendees described the challenges of working with incomplete, inconsistent or outdated data, and the risk this poses to customer trust. The message was clear: before you scale personalisation, you must be confident in the data you are using.
Panellists recommended a purposeful data capture process that collects only the fields that unlock genuine value, such as pet type or birthday month, and then quickly demonstrates the benefit.
As one panellist put it, do not be afraid of a little friction. If you ask at the right moment and quickly show the benefit, people will share their data because they trust they will get a better experience in return.
High-confidence data sources like transaction and browsing behaviour remain the most reliable base, but panellists were quick to stress the importance of sense-checking and testing before activating. Several shared examples of running “sanity checks” on data, for instance filtering out anyone with a suspicious birth date, before triggering campaigns.
2. Making the Business Case: Proving Value and Securing Buy-In
Strategic Principle: Incremental measurement is your baseline for securing investment.
With reliable data in place, the next challenge is showing the business why personalisation deserves attention and budget. Panellists highlighted the need to move away from reporting campaign volume and instead demonstrate contribution to long-term customer value.
Teams are increasingly tracking metrics such as lifetime value, retention and the “value of an unsubscribe” to show the cost of poor targeting. Several examples demonstrated the power of precision: 5 to 10% of campaign volume can drive up to 40% of channel revenue when delivered through highly targeted automations.
Key takeaway: Do not hide failed tests. Share what changed, course-correct, and show the business that the team is still learning and iterating.
Dashboards were cited as a powerful tool to socialise results and bring customer-centric metrics into regular business conversation, shifting focus from immediate trade revenue to sustainable growth.
3. Creating a Customer-First Culture
Strategic Principle: Change the conversation by making the customer visible inside the business.
Even with solid data and clear metrics, progress stalls if the organisation is not aligned. Much of CRM’s job is internal education, helping teams across the business understand the customer experience.
One proven approach is mapping out the entire communication ecosystem, including service and courier messages, so stakeholders can see the full volume of contact a customer receives.
As one panellist observed, getting everybody in the room to remember that they are a customer reframes the discussion from ‘I want to talk about X’ to ‘what is the experience we are actually creating.’
Cross-functional initiatives, such as membership schemes, have also been effective in uniting teams around shared goals, helping product, store and digital departments work from a single view of the customer.
4. Evolving Targeting and Efficiency
Strategic Principle: Anticipate value, reduce waste and plan for scale.
Once the organisation is aligned, attention can shift to more sophisticated targeting. Successful teams combine explicit customer feedback with predictive models to focus investment where it will have the greatest return. Asking customers what they want to hear about, for example through surveys in lapsing journeys, has proven to be one of the most effective ways to create accurate, actionable segments.
Predictive modelling then helps marketers reduce audience size without losing revenue, protecting budget while prioritising the customers most likely to respond.
AI is beginning to play a key role, not to replace human judgment but to take on repetitive tasks. Examples included automatically surfacing audience counts, generating reporting insights and reminding teams about key steps like control groups.
Key takeaway: Use AI to create efficiency by automating repetitive work and freeing teams to focus on the decisions that matter most.
Panellists were unanimous that strong ethical guardrails are essential. Fully automated content creation was seen as risky without human oversight, and over-personalisation can quickly erode trust if it feels intrusive.
5. Strategic Takeaways: The Path to Scalable Personalisation
The Manchester briefing reinforced that personalisation at scale is not a single project or platform deployment. It is a continuous, disciplined shift that blends operational rigour with cultural change.
A blueprint for progress:
- Anchor in data confidence. Build from high-quality, validated data and make the value exchange clear.
- Measure incremental value. Treat uplift as your baseline metric for investment decisions.
- Educate and unify the business. Use dashboards and customer experience mapping to align teams.
- Predict and personalise efficiently. Combine explicit feedback with predictive modelling to reduce waste.
- Use AI to support, not replace, human creativity. Focus on efficiency gains and keep human oversight.
- Keep trust at the centre. Treat personalisation as a privilege and prioritise relevance over volume.
Final Thoughts
The discussion in Manchester revealed a picture of personalisation as a discipline that is less about martech capability and more about making customer decisions clearer, faster and better aligned with business outcomes.
CRM leaders are not just delivering more campaigns. They are bringing focus, clarity and momentum to their organisations and proving that personalisation can be a commercial lever, not just a marketing ideal.
For more perspectives on smarter CRM strategy, follow Plinc on LinkedIn.
