What if every interaction your customers had with your brand felt like it was designed just for them? In 2025 and beyond, personalized customer experiences will no longer be a luxury—they’ll be the standard.
As you may know, personalization is not new. What is new is how crucial it is to adopt innovative solutions. Why? The answer is simple: to keep up with the competition, streamline personalization, and differentiate your brand from the crowd.
In this article, we’ll explore how personalization shapes the future of customer experience, highlight best practices from industry leaders, and show how SAP Emarsys empowers brands to deliver individualized experiences at scale. Let’s dive in.
The State of Personalization in 2025
Personalization is no longer a buzzword—it’s a proven driver of business success. The impact of personalization on revenue is undeniable, and data found in previous years helps us understand the 2025 state of personalization.
- According to a worldwide Statista study on customer experience personalization and optimization software and services, revenue was projected to exceed $9.5 billion in 2024 and rise to over $11.6 billion by 2026.
- According to IBM, extensive personalization using the best action increases average revenue per user by 166%. This demonstrates the immense potential of leveraging data and AI to deliver hyper-relevant experiences that resonate with customers.
But how are customers responding to the rise of AI-powered personalization?
- Research by SAP Emarsys in 2024 reveals that 64% of US shoppers say AI has improved their retail experiences—A 25% rise in positive sentiment from 2023. This trend is expected to accelerate as AI becomes more sophisticated.
- Despite these compelling statistics, many businesses are still lagging behind. A BCG survey of over 1,400 global C-suite executives found that while 85% planned to increase AI spending in 2024, a significant portion of this investment is focused on cost-saving measures rather than personalization.
This is a missed opportunity. As the data shows, personalization is a key strategy for driving revenue, building loyalty, and staying ahead of the competition.
The Future of Personalized Customer Experience
Leading companies set new standards for personalized customer experiences, enhancing engagement and satisfaction. These brands deliver highly tailored interactions that resonate with individual customers by leveraging advanced technologies and data-driven insights.
Levi’s
For Levi’s, the key to personalization was in its data. Levi’s found the right fit to improve repurchase rates by maximizing its customer data, which gave it a wide array of customer preferences and behaviors. This led to better strategy and execution. By utilizing SAP Emarsys to learn more about their customers and create an omnichannel strategy across email, digital ads, and SMS, Levi’s Brazil showed results in a short window, with over 30% of online revenue now coming from SAP Emarsys automation within the first six months of implementation.
They better served their customers by integrating Welcome, Abandoned Browse, Abandoned Cart, Back in Stock, and Price Drop automation. They won back potentially lost revenue without a significant lift from their marketing team. The capacity to properly use data for targeting on social media and their ad strategy led to increased revenue and engagement. And this is just the beginning – Read their whole story.
Adidas
Adidas excels at personalization, particularly in email marketing. By segmenting its customer base based on factors like gender, location, and past purchases, Adidas crafts targeted email campaigns that speak directly to each group’s needs and desires.
This approach has proven highly effective, with personalized emails driving higher engagement rates than generic campaigns. Additionally, the Adidas running app uses real-time triggers to deliver personalized content. Learn how Adidas does this.
Brisbane Airport
Brisbane Airport achieved an 11.95% increase in active customers and a 28.5% YoY growth in attributed revenue thanks to personalization to engage customers. Brisbane Airport’s partnership with SAP Emarsys began with the goal of enhancing its visitor engagement through more personalized communication.
They focused on the vast data generated from parking bookings to achieve this. Each time a customer booked parking through its online system, valuable data points were collected, including the timing of the booking, the duration of the stay, and the frequency of use. SAP Emarsys enabled the airport to aggregate this data across thousands of transactions, allowing them to identify patterns and behaviors within different customer segments. Learn their complete success story.
These examples illustrate that personalization is a critical differentiator in today’s marketplace. By delivering relevant, timely, and tailored experiences tailored to individual preferences, brands foster deeper emotional connections with their customers, increasing engagement, retention, and lifetime value.
3 Examples of Personalization Best Practices in Action
Next up, let’s take a look at 3 examples of personalization best practices for you to draw inspiration from:
1. Enhancing personalization for sales events
SAP Emarsys empowers brands to enhance their personalization strategies for major sales events. By analyzing historical data and customer behavior, businesses can anticipate demand, optimize campaigns, and deliver seamless, personalized experiences.
“You do things a certain way, you automate a certain way, you personalize a certain way. This particular team [the SAP Emarsys Strategic Services Team] specializes in showing you the different ways you can increase your engagement, make things better, or even integrate things that you didn’t know were possible before. So once you start doing that and see the results, it’s just fantastic.”
Early preparation is key to maximizing the impact of personalization during high-traffic periods. Brands must also optimize their existing marketing assets and ensure that dynamic content is relevant and engaging for each customer.
“What works for my team and me is: You got to look at what you've been doing on the previous events. So, what did you do on the previous event that didn't work? Just cut it out. Have no mercy on that. But what did work? How do you capitalize on that? What have you learned over the months leading up to these events, like Black Friday, Singles Day, or Hot Sales, and how can we build on that?”
Effective personalization requires close coordination across multiple teams and functions. Marketing, sales, web development, and logistics teams need to work together to handle the surge in traffic and deliver a seamless customer experience.
“I would approach our SAP Emarsys representative and see what else is out there that we could integrate into our marketing strategy for the Hot Sales season. I did that all the time, and that's something that has really worked for us in the past and in the present. SAP Emarsys's Strategic Services Team has a fantastic process.”
By combining early preparation, optimized assets, and cross-functional collaboration, brands can elevate their personalization efforts during major sales events. The result is a more engaging, relevant, and profitable customer experience that differentiates them from the competition.
2. Bridging creativity and commerce
This data-driven personalization strategy effectively improves conversion rates. By understanding customer preferences and behavior, Ochsner Sport optimizes the user experience to drive engagement and sales. Successfully implementing personalization requires balancing creative vision and data-driven insights.
Demonstrating personalization’s tangible impact on key metrics, the ecommerce team secured support for further investment in these initiatives.
Ochsner Sport’s approach demonstrates how aligning creative marketing with data-informed strategies enhances the customer experience and boosts business results. Their success highlights the importance of harmonizing artistic vision with analytical rigor in achieving personalization excellence.
3. Tekmovil’s DTC success
Tekmovil, a leading mobile device manufacturer, recently transitioned from a traditional retail model to a direct-to-consumer (DTC) approach. This strategic shift empowered the company to enhance its personalization efforts and drive impressive growth in customer repurchase rates.
Tekmovil leveraged the Emarsys platform to create, run, and optimize highly targeted customer journeys.
"Using Emarsys to create, run, and optimize nearly 100 customer journeys, we achieved massive repurchase results."
The impact of this personalization-focused approach has been substantial. Within just three months of implementing their new DTC strategy, Tekmovil witnessed a remarkable 10x growth in repurchase rates. This success stems from the company’s ability to deliver highly relevant, individualized experiences to each customer, fostering greater loyalty and engagement.
Tekmovil’s success underscores the power of personalization in reducing customer acquisition costs and boosting loyalty. To learn more, check out our guide on how Tekmovil grew repurchases and built its DTC business.
Personalization in 2025 and Beyond
As we look toward 2025, brands prioritizing individualized interactions will be best positioned to form lasting customer connections.
From AI-driven recommendations to orchestrated, data-based marketing workflows, a robust personalization strategy differentiates you from competitors and fuels sustainable growth.
Ready to take your personalization strategy to the next level? Discover how SAP Emarsys can help you deliver AI-driven, personalized omnichannel experiences at scale. Learn more about our Personalization Engine.
Book a demo today to see how we can empower your brand to connect with customers like never before.
About the author
Kirk Donlan is a Product Marketing Manager at SAP Emarsys, specializing in D2C marketing, product messaging, and go-to-market strategy. He crafts compelling content that helps brands connect with consumers, increase engagement, and drive measurable growth. With expertise in sales enablement and marketing strategy, Kirk translates complex solutions into clear, actionable insights for D2C brands.
