Claudia, the eco-conscious freelance designer, looks great on a slide deck, but she was built from assumptions and has never actually bought anything from you. Meanwhile, the customers who converted most often last quarter have something in common. They had a specific problem, at a specific moment, that made your solution the obvious answer. That’s buyability.

To find out what they have in common and connect with more potential customers facing similar problems, you need to dig deeper than a basic buyer persona. You need to build an ideal customer profile (ICP) that tells you what to look for. 

ICP vs. the buyer persona

There are a lot of people out there who use the terms ICP and buyer persona interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. 

• Ideal customer profile: Your ICP is the type of customer or company that gets the most value from what you sell, defined by real data from your existing customers
• Buyer persona: This is the individual themselves; their motivations, pain points, behaviors, and channel preferences

Both are valuable, but there’s an order to follow. Your ICP should always come first. If you’re building personas before you’ve identified the customers who are a good fit, you may be creating detailed profiles of the wrong people. 

Put your ICP to the test

If you want to know whether you have a buyer persona or an ICP, ask around. If marketing, sales, and product developers all give you different answers to “who is our ideal customer?”, chances are you don’t have a real ICP. 

Sellability vs. buyability

Most marketing starts with a product or service and asks a simple question: “Can we sell this?” There’s a product, they figure out who might want it, and then come up with ideas to convince people they should get it.

This approach focuses on the sellability of your products. It’s often based on ideas and not data — crafting messages around the person you hope will buy, not people who have bought. 

But buyability flips that. It starts with the buyer and marketers asking who already has the problem and what motivates them to buy. Understanding what makes someone ready to buy means digging deeper to identify what your ideal customers have in common. Once you understand them, finding more of them will be easier. 

This matters because customer behavior has changed a lot in the last few years. The majority of research is happening before they speak to sales or add anything to their shopping cart. By the time they’re ready to convert, they already have a brand in mind. 

Figuring out who those people are and showing up in their world means you’re reaching the right people earlier, before competitors do. But their world looks different depending on who they are, and that varies significantly by generation and market. 

Dotdigital’s Customer Trend Index can help build out a strong ICP with data on where different shoppers actually discover new brands: 

• In-store and real-world experiences are the top channel for 49% of global consumers 
• 39% of Gen Z have discovered new brands through influencer content
• 42% of Gen Z in Australia “always” or “often” use AI to discover new brands 
• In the UK, search engines are the favorite discovery channel for 41% of Baby Boomers
• 50% of American shoppers turn to family and friends for new brand recommendations

Start with customers you’ve already won

You don’t have to host a big workshop or turn to an expensive external consultant to identify your ideal customer profile. The answer is sitting in your existing customer base. 

Look at who you consider to be your best customers. Not the biggest group, but the most valuable. The customers who spend the most, shop with you frequently, engage with your marketing, attend your events, shout about you on social media, and refer you to their friends and family. 

When you figure out who they are, find out what they have in common. These may be a mixture of demographic and behavioral signals, like: 

• Age
• Location 
• Products purchased
• Ads interacted with 
• Purchase recency
• Email engagement 
• Industry 
• Preferred channel 
• Company size 
• Referral source 

But many ICPs fall short because they don’t consider behavioral data. If you’re only focused on who the customer is, not on what they experienced before becoming a customer, you’re only building half a profile. Knowing who your best customers are is just the start. 

To create an ICP that focuses your marketing strategy, you need to listen to and learn from your best customers. Your ICP should be a living document that changes as customer behavior shifts. 

Use customer data to build an even bigger picture

Bringing all your customer data together into a single source of truth helps you identify patterns in customer behavior you might otherwise miss. It’s just one of the many benefits of having a unified tech stack. 

These patterns are based on data collected throughout the customer experience, from email engagements to browsing behavior. Two sources in particular reveal the most about who your customers really are: 

Zero-party data and preference centers

There really is no better source to discover what customers want than the customers themselves. Preference centers give you direct insight into what your customers care about; that’s why they need to go beyond just collecting first names and birthday dates. Ask them to share the products or services they’re interested in, and which channels they want to hear from you on. 

Dotdigital’s Customer Trend Index reveals that email is the preferred channel for 45% of customers, while 40% of Gen Z love using apps for brand experiences. You’ll only know where on the spectrum your customers fall when you ask them. 

Web behavior and content engagement

This is where you’ll discover what people are reading, which pages they’re visiting, and what topics inspire them to click through in your emails. It also helps you see which stage of the customer journey they’re in. 

If they’re looking at pages about contract renewal, you can see what else they’re looking at, or what messages they’re engaging with to get a better understanding of motivations at that stage. Similarly, if someone repeatedly clicks through on links about your ‘Essential Oils’ collection, you’ll learn what products are hot topics for them.  

How to make sure your ICP is successful 

When you go through the effort of building a well-informed ICP, you don’t want to see its value degrade too soon. This often happens because ownership is ambiguous. Sales, product, and marketing all claim ownership, which ultimately results in no one overseeing its maintenance. 

When multiple groups don’t agree on who the ideal customer is, every handoff in the funnel introduces friction. Marketing generates leads that sales doesn’t want. Sales chase accounts that marketing never targeted. And the ICP document gets updated once and then sits untouched.

The only way around this is greater cross-team collaboration with regular check-ins with the ICP as customer behavior changes. Thankfully, a unified customer data platform makes it easy for all teams across your business to feed valuable customer insights into a single source. This makes sure all teams are adequately represented as your ICP develops. 

Know your customers, grow your marketing

For marketers, the need for an ICP has never been greater. Only 15% of customers think the marketing they get is “very relevant” to them. They need personalized experiences that speak to their needs and wants in the moment. But you can’t personalize to people you don’t know, and you can’t really know your customers based on a buyer persona that isn’t grounded in real customer behavior. 

Taking the time to build your initial ICP arms you with a better understanding of your customers. You’ll be able to target similar audiences more efficiently by knowing which discovery channels they use, how often they engage with their favorite brands, and which channels they use to convert. 

To get started, read Dotdigital’s Customer Trend Index to discover where your customers are, what they want, and how they like to be reached. 

When you’re deep in the day-to-day of ‘wearing many hats’, an extra pair of hands is always welcome.

That’s where customer success can be a real help. People often conflate customer success with customer support, but they’re actually pretty different. Customer success can (and should) do a lot more than react to issues as they come up.

We spoke to Customer Success Director, Lauren Hunt, to get advice straight from the source. Hear what you can actually expect from your Customer Success team, and how to make sure you’re getting the most out of the relationship.

What is a customer success team responsible for?

I know first-hand that many marketers don’t realize how much value customer success teams can offer beyond reactive support. A lot of people naturally see customer success as somewhere to go when something breaks or needs fixing, but often the biggest value comes from involving us much earlier.

Customer success sits somewhere between strategic consultancy, onboarding support, platform expertise, and account management.

The goal isn’t simply to help customers use a platform. It’s to help them get meaningful value from it and support them as their marketing evolves.

That could be:

• Helping you simplify your processes
• Improving customer journeys
• Adopting new functionality
• Improving ROI from your marketing channels
• Reducing churn
• Discussing how you can connect marketing activity more clearly to business outcomes

How to work effectively with your customer success team

Come to us as early as you can in the project; we don’t expect you to have everything figured out, and we can probably help you get there.

You don’t need a fully signed-off strategy to have a useful customer success conversation. “We’re reworking part of our tech stack and want to improve onboarding by June” is enough context to start helping.

The best customer relationships are transparent ones.

Things we need to know:

• Priorities have changed
• Someone senior left
• Budget is frozen
• You don’t actually have KPIs yet
• Your team is overwhelmed
• Your agency relationship is changing
• You’re struggling to get buy-in internally

That context is incredibly useful and lets us fully understand where you’re at and where you need support.

3 ways to get more out of your customer success team

1. Be proactive

The earlier we know about something, the more useful we can be.

There have been times when a customer has told us they’ve started a project, chosen an agency, started a transformation, changed a process, bought another tool, or spent months building workarounds that we could have helped with and saved them a whole lot of time and investment.

Many people still see customer success as reactive support instead of a strategic sounding board. We’re always happy to help you figure out something, of course, but we can do so much more than that.

2. Even if your project is broader, loop your customer success team in

Even if something sits outside your core platform or tools, it will usually still have an impact on how everything connects together. Customer success teams are often speaking to agencies, partners, technical teams, implementation specialists, email deliverability experts, and other customers, so they tend to have a broad view of what’s working across different setups.

Keep them in the loop, and they can bring useful context, share patterns they’re seeing elsewhere, and help you spot potential issues or opportunities earlier, even when the work isn’t directly tied to your day-to-day platform use.

3. Benefit from our wider network and experiences

There’s a lot of industry knowledge and trend information that our customer success teams have built up. Together, we can be the perfect team, as you know your brand well, and we know the wider market.

We’re constantly seeing:

• What works
• What fails
• What scales badly
• What customers are struggling with
• What teams are overcomplicating
• Where businesses are getting stuck day-to-day

We can share this insight with you, so your project is always starting from an informed place, and you’re already a couple of steps ahead.

How to get the most from customer success meetings

Treat meetings as a working session rather than a status update.

I recommend starting with what’s going on right now. Then your customer success team can highlight what’s new and relevant to you as you go, sharing how you can use it to remedy an issue or optimize something you’re currently working on.

Meetings where both sides present updates to each other can be useful, but it’s not the best use of our time together. Updates can always be shared in advance, and our time together can be spent working out what comes next.

The most valuable things to share are:

• Ideas
• Goals
• Timelines
• Blockers
• Frustrations
• Commercial priorities
• Internal politics
• Context

The most valuable questions to ask:

• What’s low effort and high impact?
• What obvious thing are we missing?
• What are other successful customers doing well?
• What should we stop doing?
• What bigger strategic project would make the biggest difference?

And always be open and honest about your capability for execution. If you’re very limited for time and can only get tasks done during meetings with us, we can work with that. We’d rather spend our time doing things together in the session, instead of planning things with you that you’ll never have time to implement.

3 traits successful marketers share

We work with tons of marketers, and there are some characteristics and approaches that we always see in teams that get the best results.

1. Appreciate the ‘small’ stuff

When you improve the core parts of your customer journey, the impact can ripple much further than you’d think.

The basics are the foundation of a strong strategy, but that doesn’t mean they have to feel basic. It’s easy to get distracted by shiny new features, but often it’s the small improvements to the processes you use every day that make the biggest difference over time. Such as A/B testing small but important details like subject lines, send times, and CTA styles to understand what resonates most with your audience.

2. Don’t be afraid to break things

The customers who grow most are usually willing to try things, break things slightly, learn, and refine.

A first go is rarely perfect, and optimization is the process of seeing what works and what doesn’t and learning from your own customers in the process. Marketing is an ongoing process of testing what resonates, refining it, and going again.

3. Don’t let perfection be a blocker for progress

As much as securing buy-in and alignment at the start of a project can eliminate a lot of back-and-forth later down the line, spending too long in the weeds of a project at the start can really hamper your progress.

Getting started is often the most daunting part, and it’s tempting to stay in planning mode for too long. Putting something live is usually the most valuable step and is where your real learning starts.

A simple checklist for getting more from customer success

A strong customer success relationship usually comes down to a few simple behaviors:

• Bring your customer success team into conversations early
• Share context openly, even if it’s incomplete
• Focus on progress over perfection
• Treat meetings as collaborative working sessions
• Ask questions that go beyond technical delivery
• Stay open about blockers and constraints

None of these things need you to adopt more processes, just openness and collaboration.

The dream team

The strongest customer success relationships feel like an extension of your team, built on openness, shared context, and a focus on making steady progress rather than perfect plans.

In most cases, the teams that get the most value aren’t the ones with the most advanced setups, but the ones willing to engage, experiment, and treat customer success as a genuine partner in their marketing strategy.

Marketers need data that‘s complete, current, and immediately usable. When it’s fragmented, decisions slow down for your marketing team and for your business as a whole. Opportunities pass by, results plateau, and manual data exports create more chaos than clarity.

And when you could outperform your peers by 26% using real-time data, a single, connected data stream is the difference between reacting and staying ahead. It gives marketing, tech, and operations teams a shared, live view of every customer, ready to power the right message at the right time.

Dotdigital connects with your data warehouse so you can quickly turn insight into action. By syncing with platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks, you can start building campaigns using real-time data, so every message lands at the right moment, feels genuinely relevant, and doesn’t require a heavy lift from you or your team.

Connecting your data warehouse to your marketing channels

Data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks give businesses a secure, unified place to store and govern their data. So, when we launched integrations with these platforms, it was a chance to bring marketers the seamless data flow to turn data into unforgettable customer experiences. Combined with Dotdigital, your data stops sitting in storage and starts driving meaningful moments across channels like:

• Email
• SMS
• WhatsApp
• Web
• Push
• Social 

Our integrations leave no gap between knowing and doing. Information in your data warehouse flows straight into Dotdigital to be used in your campaigns, while engagement results from Dotdigital return to your warehouse for deeper insight. Your data keeps moving, your marketing keeps learning, and nothing goes stale.

Reducing friction between marketing and tech teams

Busy marketing teams can’t wait three days for the latest results to be downloaded, then uploaded to your email automation platform. When data feeds directly into Dotdigital, you can:

• Adjust journeys mid‑flow
• Launch segments in minutes
• Deliver hyper‑relevant content based on the latest customer behaviors

At the same time, data and tech teams need precision and control. These integrations help you:

• Meet governance standards
• Keep sensitive data securely housed
• Remove duplicate storage and risky sharing practices

When everyone works from the same single data source, friction between teams disappears. Plans move faster, creativity gets sharper, and everyone’s working toward the same goal with the same information.

The business impact of connected data

Connected data makes your marketing work better:

• Campaigns land because they’re timed and relevant
• Teams stop wasting hours on avoidable data exchanges
• Compliance becomes simpler because the governance sits inside the integration

As marketing execution speeds up, you see a direct impact with quicker campaign launches, higher conversion rates, and engagement that doesn’t plateau six weeks later. 

A customer data platform (CDP) trusted by marketers

One more thing before we share what connected data looks like in action: Dotdigital was recently named a G2 Leader for Customer Data Platforms (CDP) in the Summer 2026 rankings. Every ranking is based on verified reviews from real customers, so you know you’re in good hands.

What this looks like in action

When Dotdigital connects with data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks, it starts to change how everyday marketing gets done. With data syncing smoothly in the background, teams can:

Capitalize on sudden spikes in interest

Your data warehouse shows an unexpected surge in sales for a product. Dotdigital then pinpoints customers who’ve shown interest and sends timely promotions without waiting for a data upload.

Personalize product recommendation journeys

Your data warehouse reveals the product categories customers explore most. Dotdigital turns that insight into personalized emails, push messages, and social ads with product recommendations based on what’s trending.

Deliver back‑in‑stock and new‑arrival alerts

When product availability changes in your data warehouse, whether an out‑of‑stock favorite is replenished or a new item lands, Dotdigital instantly sends a customer a personalized alert.

Prevent customer churn in real time

When your data warehouse indicates a premium subscriber is overdue for a repeat purchase, Dotdigital enrolls them into an automated cross-channel retention sequence. Once they buy, that transaction flows back into your data warehouse, closing the loop and keeping their profile up to date. 

Ready to push, pull, and personalize?

Dotdigital’s data warehouse integrations help you avoid compromises, like finding clunky workarounds or having to duplicate data at the expense of accuracy. It’s built for marketers and data teams alike. With one source of truth, you’ll have endless opportunities to turn data into meaningful moments for your customers.

Paid channels are getting more expensive, with customer acquisition costs jumping 40–60% between 2023 and 2025. Organic reach can vanish overnight thanks to algorithm changes, and tighter privacy rules make tracking and attribution harder than ever.

All of this points to one thing: the growing importance of owning your audience.

What is an ‘owned audience’?

When we say ‘owned audience,’ we mean the people whose contact details you actually hold yourself, rather than relying on a third-party platform like Meta or Google to give you access (and charge you for it).

Owned channels like email and mobile give you direct access to people who’ve chosen to hear from your brand. These people give you their contact details, such as email and phone number. That connection brings stability, visibility, and long-term value – things rented channels can’t match.

At Dotdigital, we really believe that focusing on owned channels is where marketers can benefit the most. Our recent acquisition of Alia Software reflects that focus, responding to the challenges marketers face every day.

Milan Patel, CEO of Dotdigital, explains:
“Over the past few years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with CMOs and ecommerce leaders and a consistent challenge keeps coming up. Paid marketing channels are becoming harder to control, more expensive to scale, and are delivering less predictable returns.”

Alia helps ecommerce brands capture onsite visitors with sophisticated pop-ups. Beautifully designed pop-ups, AI-powered no-code A/B testing, and smart triggers all work together to enhance the customer experience and gather valuable contact info, often achieving a 15%+ opt-in rate.

Shaan Arora, CEO of Alia, says:
“Capturing the earliest moments of the customer journey helps brands improve conversions and build richer relationships.”

The hidden costs of relying on other channels

The drawbacks of social media marketing:

• Algorithm guesswork: social media platforms don’t publish their algorithms, or when they’ll change, so what works one day can flop the next. The mystery around these algorithms can keep you guessing and feeling obliged to watch every one of Adam Mosseri’s Instagram stories, or following a plethora of LinkedIn ‘experts’ to try and keep up.
• Account instability: platforms can suspend or ban accounts with little notice. Appeals are frustrating and not guaranteed, and getting support from Meta Business Suite is often a headache. Anyone who’s been there knows the struggle.
• Limited data ownership: social platforms collect tons of insights about your audience, but that data stays with them. If you switch tools or pivot your strategy, those valuable insights don’t follow.

The drawbacks of paid ads:

• Volatile costs: competition, bidding, seasonal trends, and market conditions all affect how much you pay.
• Unpredictable outcomes: sudden rule changes or platform updates can drastically alter campaign performance.
• Short-term focus: paid campaigns are great for immediate acquisition, but they don’t build long-term customer relationships on their own.

The drawbacks of display ads:

• Engagement can be low: audiences often scroll past ads, and conversions aren’t guaranteed.
• ROI can decline: relying solely on paid channels risks high costs and diminishing returns over time.
• Great for quick wins, not long-term growth: PPC and paid search get your brand in front of people ready to buy, while social ads help more people discover you. They’re powerful for results today, but they can’t replace the foundation you can build with owned channels.

Paid channels are an important part of a modern marketing mix, but they work best when paired with a foundation of owned channels that build lasting relationships.

How email and mobile marketing give you control of your audience

Owning your audience means having direct permission to communicate with customers through channels you control. Email and mobile marketing are two of the clearest examples of owned channels. When someone shares their email address or phone number with your brand, they are choosing to hear from you.

You can communicate with your audience directly. That can be through newsletters, promotional emails, loyalty updates, event invites, fundraising updates, and so on. These channels give you much greater control over delivery, timing, and messaging as you can personalize for each recipient.

The practical benefits of owned channels:

• Full control over delivery and timing: schedule sends or trigger campaigns based on real customer behavior.
• Personalize at scale: use real customer data about preferences and actions, rather than relying on a third-party platform’s categories.
• Predictable rules: unlike social platforms where algorithms can change overnight, updates are largely published in advance, so you can adapt and optimize.
• Compounding relationships: the more you learn about your audience, the better your campaigns get, and engagement grows over time.

Why first-party and zero-party data matter

Owning your audience isn’t just about having a subscriber list. You also get to own the customer data that comes with an email address, building up a clear picture of each contact over time as you record each individual’s interactions with your content with a mixture of zero and first party data.

First-party and zero-party data explained

• First-party data is data you collect via your own channels, such as purchase history, email engagement (like clicks), website behaviour, and app interactions.
• Zero-party data is information your customers proactively choose to share with you when you ask for it. This includes their name, preferences, interests, communication choices, and product needs.

Benefits of owned data

Together, these let you build experiences that feel genuinely personal and relevant. Better segmentation, more relevant messaging, campaigns that reach people through the channels they actually prefer. And crucially, the data belongs to you, regardless of how the advertising landscape evolves.

How to grow your email and mobile audience

Building an engaged and loyal subscriber base takes time, but there are smart ways to make sure you’re attracting the right subscribers and setting up the relationship for long-term success.

Practical ways to grow your owned audience

• Offer real value upfront: exclusive content, early access, or loyalty perks give people a genuine reason to subscribe.
• Make it easy to subscribe everywhere: add clear sign-up moments via pop-ups, website forms, checkout flows, apps, and social channels.
• Use social to feed your owned channels: encourage existing followers to join your email or mobile lists. This boosts reach and protects your audience if a platform changes or disappears.
• Launch a referral program: subscribers who join through a trusted recommendation come in with built-in trust.
• Start strong with a welcome series: set expectations, deliver value early, and improve long-term retention.
• Encourage sharing: include a “forward to a friend” link in emails and invite your audience to create user-generated content (UGC) on their own channels that will boost reach and grow your list organically.

Over time, these strategies help turn anonymous visitors into known contacts who have chosen to build a relationship with your brand.

Take control of your audience and future-proof your marketing

Owning your audience does not mean abandoning paid search, social media, SEO, or influencer marketing. These channels still play an important role in helping brands reach new audiences and build awareness.

The shift is about where the weight sits. When email and mobile marketing form your foundation, everything else becomes a funnel that feeds into it. Paid campaigns drive traffic, social builds awareness, search supports discovery, and the long-term relationship happens in channels you own and control.

On top of that, owned channels are more predictable and cost-effective: you don’t have to worry about sudden algorithm changes or bidding wars, and the audience you build is yours to engage anytime.

If you’re looking for greater consistency, stronger customer relationships, and more predictable results, building your owned audience is the smartest investment you can make.

Trust is vital for any relationship to thrive, but here’s the problem. PwC research shows that while 90% of business leaders believe customers trust their brand, only 30% of customers actually do. That gap is huge, and it has knock-on effects. 

Whether they’re booking a vacation, buying new clothes, or signing up for a food service, shoppers want to know if a brand will deliver on its promises. If they don’t trust a brand, they won’t convert. They won’t sign up for email updates, they won’t check out, and they won’t return. 

This is why marketers need to add trust-building features into the customer experience, not just hope it happens. Every interaction is a moment to earn confidence, support decision-making, and encourage the next step in the journey.

The good news is that the tools and content already exist in your tech stack. Reviews and personalization in particular can work together to build, test, and scale trust-building experiences at every stage of the lifecycle.

Here are five practical steps to help you do exactly that.

1. Treat reviews as customer insight, not just reputation management 

Reviews are often used only as social proof — a star rating to be placed on a landing page or in an email footer. While these are great, always-on tactics to reinforce a customer’s trust in your brand, they’re not the only ways reviews could (and should) be used. They’re also powerful as a source of live customer insight.

You can use reviews to: 

• Identify recurring pain points and quick wins
• Uncover what customers value most about the experience
• Inform messaging, offers, and journey design
• Measure sentiment shifts over time

So, it’s important you don’t just collect reviews, but you also analyze, share, and act on insights gathered from them. 

Turning review insights into actionable strategies

Reviews often don’t live in one department. Marketing, customer service, and product teams all have a stake in them, which can mean insights get stuck in different corners of the business. Breaking down these silos ensures reviews drive real improvements and show your customers their feedback matters.

Try these steps:

• Build a simple monthly review insights report
• Share it with customer service, operations, and product teams
• Highlight one change made because of customer feedback
• Communicate those changes back to customers

2. Use personalization to make trust feel relevant to each individual

Trust signals become more meaningful when they are contextual and personal. By combining review data with personalization capabilities like those in Dotdigital, you can: 

• Adapt journeys based on customer behavior and preferences
• Surface relevant reviews for the product, category, or experience being viewed
• Deliver one-to-one content across email, SMS, and on-site experiences

For considered purchases or longer buying cycles common in travel or higher-ticket products, relevance is especially powerful. Showing reviews that match the exact product, destination, or package a shopper is browsing removes uncertainty and supports confident decision-making.

How to create relevant, personalized experiences

Experiences that feel personal and reassure customers at the right moment are huge trust drivers. To create these experiences, you can: 

• Use behavioral data to trigger journeys after browsing or abandonment
• Dynamically insert relevant Trustpilot review content into emails
• Personalize website experiences using recent browsing activity 

3. Place trust signals at critical decision points in the journey

Adding trust signals at key moments can dramatically improve conversion. Reviews help prove your brand is reliable, based on real customer experiences, not just marketing claims. Key moments to prioritize include:

• Comparing options on product or listing pages
• High-intent browsing pages with longer dwell times
• Checkout or basket abandonment
• Landing pages from paid ads and keyword campaigns

Improving trust at decision points

Identify where customers hesitate or reconsider, then use social proof to guide their decision:

• Add Trustpilot widgets or reviews to key conversion pages
• Test with and without reviews to measure impact
• Embed social proof into abandoned browse and cart emails
• Ensure AI and search discovery content include trust signals

Overall, this helps customers answer the question they’re already asking: “Is this a brand I can rely on?”

4. Combine automation with human experience

AI and automation are reshaping how customers discover and interact with brands. But, research also shows many customers still value the ability to connect with real people when they need support. The key is designing automation that feels human. 

To achieve this, marketers can: 

• Automate journeys and recommendations based on real-time customer behavior
• Trigger service recovery flows for negative reviews 
• Use AI to assess sentiment to decide when human outreach is appropriate 
• Ensure communication is timely, transparent, and helpful

Adding a human touch to automated flows 

Trust grows faster when customers feel heard and supported. To maintain a human feel in your automated journeys:

• Route low-rated reviews into nurture workflows
• Follow up visibly when feedback leads to change
• Ensure automated messaging remains clear, empathetic, and honest (adding a human touch to any AI-generated copy)

5. Continuously test, learn, and optimize trust across channels

Trust shifts as expectations, technology, and experiences evolve. To maintain and optimize the experiences you’ve created, it’s important to treat trust as something you measure, experiment with, and improve over time.

Making trust measurable

• A/B test journey variations with and without trust signals
• Measure impact on conversion, rebooking, and lifetime value
• Analyze sentiment alongside performance metrics
• Scale strategies that demonstrably build customer confidence

Final thoughts

Customers don’t just want personalized journeys. They want relevant, reliable experiences delivered by brands they trust.

By adding reviews to personalized customer experiences, marketers can:

• Give customers more confidence during the discovery phase
• Reduce friction and indecision at critical conversion moments
• Strengthen loyalty, in turn driving repeat business
• Turn feedback into a continuous improvement loop

Remember, trust isn’t abstract; it’s an experience you create, step by step, across the entire customer journey.

For sports and entertainment brands, engagement is no longer about sending more messages. It’s about creating connected experiences that feel personal, exciting, and worth coming back for.

Here are the engagement strategies that matter most right now, and how to make them work harder for your brand.

Why fan engagement looks different now

Fans move fast. They jump between channels, follow teams and creators across platforms, and expect brands to recognize them wherever they show up.

They want content that feels real. Offers that make sense in the moment. And experiences that don’t stop when the final whistle blows or the credits roll.

That means engagement needs to be:

• Real-time, not reactive
• Personal, not generic
• Connected across every channel

Let’s break down what that looks like in practice.

1. Real-time personalization across every channel

Personalization still matters. But, speed is just as important as accuracy. Fans expect brands to respond to what they do, not what they did weeks ago.

That could mean:

• Triggering messages based on live behavior, not static segments
• Tailoring content based on preferences, location, or past engagement
• Adjusting journeys when interest drops or excitement spikes

When personalization happens in real time, it feels helpful. When it doesn’t, it feels invisible. So, the goal is simple. Get the right message to the right fan at the right moment, no matter the marketing channel.

2. Immersive and interactive fan experiences

Engagement doesn’t have to stop at content consumption. Fans want to take part.
Interactive experiences help turn passive audiences into active participants. And they give you valuable insight into what fans actually care about.

Think about:

• Live polls, quizzes, and voting during games or shows
• Gamified experiences that reward participation
• Digital activations that extend the event beyond the venue

These experiences don’t need to be complex. They just need to make fans feel involved.

When fans interact, they remember you.

3. Short-form and social-first content fans actually want

Social media is still where fans discover, follow, and connect with brands. But how they use it has changed.

Short-form video now drives discovery. Behind-the-scenes content builds trust. Fan-created content fuels community.

To keep engagement high:

• Focus on short, snackable video that fits the platform
• Share moments fans don’t get anywhere else
• Encourage fans to create and share their own content

Ultimately, the key is to show up where your fans already are, in a way that feels natural.

4. loyalty programs that go beyond points

About 30% of customers sign up for brand newsletters to join loyalty programs

Traditional loyalty programs still work, but fans want more than discounts. They want things like exclusive access, recognition, and experiences that feel unique.

Strong loyalty strategies reward:

• Engagement, not just spending
• Consistency, not one-off actions
• Passion, not just purchases

That could look like early access to tickets, exclusive content, or member-only experiences tied to behavior and interests.

When loyalty feels personal, fans stick around.

5. Seamless ticketing and commerce journeys

Friction kills engagement. If buying tickets, upgrading seats, or purchasing merch feels hard, fans will drop off fast. The best brands connect the entire journey, from discovery to post-purchase.

That means using:

• Clear, simple purchase experiences
• Timely messages that build excitement before events
• Follow-ups that keep fans engaged long after checkout
• Commerce should feel like part of the experience, not an interruption

6. Athlete and creator-led storytelling

93% of marketers agree that customers trust content created by other customers more than brand-created messages. And fans are no different.

Athletes, performers, and creators bring authenticity that traditional campaigns often lack. When done right, these partnerships feel real, not forced.

Effective creator and athlete strategies focus on:

• Long-term partnerships, not one-off posts
• Co-created content that fits the creator’s voice
• Storytelling that feels human and unscripted

When fans trust the messenger, they’re more likely to trust the message.

7. Purpose-led engagement that feels authentic

Fans care about what brands stand for. Especially younger audiences. Purpose-led engagement works best when it’s genuine and consistent.

That could include:

• Supporting causes that align with your audience
• Highlighting community initiatives
• Championing inclusion and accessibility

The key is authenticity. Fans can spot performative messaging instantly.

Focus on actions, not statements.

8. Measuring engagement that actually means something

Opens and clicks still matter, but they don’t tell the full story.

To understand real engagement, look at:

• Repeat interactions across channels
• Long-term retention and lifetime value
• How engagement influences purchases and attendance

The best insights come from connecting data, not viewing channels in isolation. When measurement improves, engagement follows.

Boost your customer engagement today

Customer engagement with sports and entertainment fans is an ongoing relationship. The brands that win focus on relevance, not reach. They connect moments across channels. And they treat fans like individuals, not audiences.

When engagement feels personal, timely, and connected, loyalty comes naturally. And that’s where long-term growth really starts.

To dig deeper into what drives loyalty and how you can build lasting customer relationships, check out our latest customer loyalty report.