In a perfect world, communicating with your customers would be like communicating with your best friend.

You’d know their history. You’d know what they like and dislike. You’d know when, where, and how to reach them. You could send more meaningful, resonant messages that they were excited to receive.

In other words, true 1:1 personalization would be the norm.

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for marketers just yet. The truth: You may never be able to communicate with each and every customer on a “best friend” level. It would require lots of time and information — and besides, how would you scale that?

But there is good news: You can actually get remarkably close to achieving this. By using the tech-powered personalization capabilities found in some of today’s customer engagement platforms, you can actually deliver true 1:1 personalization that is meaningful and relevant for your customers… and you can do it at scale.

Here’s 3 features your customer engagement platform must have if you want to deliver true 1:1 personalized customer experiences.

1. Fully-Integrated CDP

True 1:1 omnichannel personalization requires a customer-centric approach to marketing. At the core of that approach is your data.

But the problem is, many organizations have their data scattered, often sitting outside their customer engagement platform, or siloed within their organization. These silos make customer-centricity near impossible.

This isn’t a surprise to most marketers. According to eMarketer, nearly 50% of marketers in North America said that “centralizing ownership of data would be one of the most important changes that their organization could make to derive value from their data.” In terms of priority, this was rated equal to “dissolving silos between groups” as the most popular desire.

To deliver amazing personalization, you’ll have to be able to better leverage your customer data. This means having your CDP fully integrated within your customer engagement platform, since the latter is the launch point of everything you want to do in terms of marketing execution.

Thy key is to use a customer engagement platform that lets you integrate ALL your product, customer, interaction, and custom data into a single source. This will help eliminate the silos that would otherwise stand in the way of omnichannel personalization.


There are 4 PILLARS required to build true, 1:1 personalization. Do you know them all?

2. Artificial Intelligence

If you’re looking to make personal connections with your customers, it’s all about delivering the best content, at the most meaningful moment, wherever they happen to be. And to drive business results, you need to do this for each and every customer

Pulling this off would require development of a superbrain to handle the vast amount of data and information involved. You’d also need to give up sleep altogether, because there’s simply not enough time in the day. 

Or you can adopt artificial intelligence into your marketing efforts. 

Essentially, AI handles the whole “right message, at the right place, at the right time” part for you. It does it proactively, not just post-purchase, and it can do it for all of your customers, which means you can easily scale your 1:1 marketing efforts. 

AI can make incredibly accurate predictions about customer behavior, such as: 

  • Who will convert
  • What they will buy
  • How much they will spend
  • When they will respond to communications
  • Where they fall in the customer lifecycle

The sophisticated self-learning algorithms and real-time decisioning that are inherent in the technology allow for meaningful 1:1 personalization to be delivered across every channel. Having AI built into your platform saves you time and energy, and gets you better business results.

Looks like you don’t have to give up sleeping after all. 

3. Pre-Built Personalized Use Cases

When you’re manually building personalized use cases from scratch in a platform, it can take a lot of effort, especially for omnichannel communication. Even a simple product recommendation email could take time — often, that’s time better spent on other marketing activities. 

That’s why a best-of-breed customer engagement platform should have out-of-the-box use cases included, ready to activate. Look for solutions that offer a wide range of use cases specific to your industry (as you know, the demands of an e-commerce brand may differ from retail or travel brands).

Armed with a scalable system like this, crafting 1:1 personalized communications like product recommendations becomes easy. In turn, and in combination with other tactics, a powerful impact on revenue can be realized, and every channel becomes a money-maker. 

Worth noting, personalized use cases are best supported by unified customer data and powerful AI technology, so if a platform already has those two features, you’ll be able to see some seriously impressive results from your personalized marketing efforts. Those are the kind of results that get the attention of everyone in the C-suite when they’re looking at business results… and which team is responsible for them. 


The right technology helps you drive better business outcomes from 1:1 marketing. How else can you improve personalization?

Final Thoughts

Sending personalized communications across every channel could be difficult. Doing so in a way that is truly personal — so that it actually feels tailored to the individual customer — could be even more difficult. 

But it doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, it really shouldn’t be. With the right technology in your customer engagement platform, it will be easy. We’ve seen this with our clients, because the Emarsys Customer Engagement Platform offers a fully-integrated CDP, intuitive AI, and pre-built, industry-specific use cases proven to generate business results. 

If you’re looking to deliver the true 1:1 personalized omnichannel experiences your customers deserve, make sure your customer engagement platform has the right technology.

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