With customer expectations for seamless experiences at an all-time high, marketers are under pressure to deliver personalization across distributed teams, languages, and compliance environments. This guide looks at how connected data powers more relevant customer experiences and how brands like Pimkie, L’Étudiant, and AXA Direct Assurance use Selligent by Marigold to scale engagement across channels.
Marketers around the world are finding it difficult to turn their ambitions into real outcomes. While customer expectations for seamless, personalized experiences continue to rise, teams are slowed by disconnected tools, fragmented data, and the evolving reality of customer data regulation.
This disconnect is shown in Marigold’s 2025 Consumer Trends Index. 40% of consumers say they’ve been frustrated by irrelevant content or offers in the past six months: a direct result of poor personalization. Yet the opportunity is just as clear: seventy-nine percent say they’re likely to engage with personalized emails that surprise them with offers tailored to their interests. Personalization is no longer optional. It’s the foundation of modern customer experience.
But personalization isn’t possible without data. And not just any data. Marketers need connected, compliant, and configurable data to turn strategy into reality.
Marketing teams aren’t short on data, but they are often short on clarity. Today’s challenge isn’t gathering more information; it’s activating the right data.
The essence of data-driven marketing is using customer data to fuel the personalization of each customer’s journey. Real-time personalization enables marketers to respond dynamically as customers interact across channels such as email, web, mobile, or in-app. In practice, this means using behavioral, demographic, and preference-based signals to customize the next message, offer, or experience. Done right, this builds stronger connections and long-term value.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence add a powerful layer of insight and automation to scale this process further:
Consider different types of actionable data:
Decide what to collect:
Advice from our experts: start with what you have, then identify what’s missing.
When marketers shift focus from quantity to quality, data becomes more actionable, and the path to personalization becomes clearer. Selligent’s local teams of experts help marketers worldwide to work from a privacy-first foundation and activate data in ways that feel natural to the consumer.
L’Étudiant uses behavioral data to build journeys that match user intent—from students to parents—delivering content that resonates and converting readers into loyal audiences.
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Today’s consumers want relevant experiences, but not at the cost of their data being used carelessly.
According to the 2025 Consumer Trends Index:
The line between helpful and intrusive is narrower than ever. When personalization feels disconnected from past interactions, it can foster discomfort instead of connection. Often, the underlying issue is data: many of these moments depend on information the customer didn’t knowingly share.
Some data sources marketers frequently rely on:
Third-party data can be outdated, inferred, or gathered without explicit consent. Zero- and first-party data offer higher accuracy, transparency, and relevance. They are not only more compliant with privacy regulations but also more trusted by consumers, which makes them a smarter and more sustainable path forward for personalization.
Top tip
Embed zero-party data collection within your brand’s messaging strategy, from onboarding quizzes and polls to preference centers and interactive content. You can then use the information collected to better personalize customer experiences.
How do you get consumers to share their data?
Be transparent about how the data will be used and offer a clear value exchange. When your audience sees how their data is used to make interactions more relevant, they’re more likely to understand (and appreciate!) why you asked for it in the first place.
Zero-party data represents a shift from assumption to understanding, and personalization powered by zero-party data is founded on a respectful, trust-based relationship with the consumer. Selligent gives marketers the tools to create personalized, high-value moments that deepen the brand relationship.
AXA Direct Assurance automated helpful weather updates and automated claim journeys to help their customers stay informed when affected by a severe weather incident.
Email remains the leading channel for driving purchases, with 54% of global consumers saying they’ve made a purchase as a result of an email in the past year, surpassing all other digital channels, including social media ads (44%) and SMS (26%). But today’s consumers expect experiences across channels, which means that relying on just one channel is a missed opportunity.
Align your channel mix with what each customer expects and how they prefer to engage. For marketing to feel genuinely personal, data must work together across every channel, such as email, mobile, app, loyalty programs, and in-store experiences.
The challenge of multilingual needs, distributed teams, and regional marketing structures adds complexity.
Top tips for marketing leaders scaling across regions:
Pimkie needed to support local marketing incentives while maintaining a cohesive brand voice through automation.
To deliver personalization at scale, data must be unified and accessible across every channel. This is the foundation for seamless, automated experiences. When tools don’t communicate, data becomes fragmented and siloed, losing context and value.
How can brands set up their technology to create connected customer experiences?
How can brands set up their technology to achieve this?
Consolidation
You can consolidate data and activation in one tool, unifying and executing data from a single system. An advanced cross-channel marketing automation platform such as Selligent by Marigold can handle complex data needs, collect and unify data from multiple touchpoints into individual customer profiles, continually enrich data, leverage it in real-time, and capture customer attention through advanced cross-channel execution.
You can go down the integration route and use multiple tools for data storage and activation. For this scenario, you need a marketing automation platform that is open and flexible, allowing you to connect it to the rest of your technology stack. Selligent integrates seamlessly with your existing data ecosystem, allowing you to access your data wherever you store it to handle automated cross-channel execution in real time.
To deliver the connected customer experiences consumers expect, marketers must first connect their data. By shifting focus from big data to good data and activating that data responsibly, brands can scale personalization, increase loyalty, and create lasting customer relationships.
Contact our regional teams of experts today to learn how our technologies help you make your marketing theory a reality.
Make your marketing theory a reality.