Published on May 02, 2025/Last edited on May 02, 2025/12 min read
You know your customers aren’t all the same, so why treat them like they are? Personalization helps your brand stand out and build meaningful connections with your customers—but how do you do that for all of your customers?
In this guide, we’ll break down how to personalize your messaging at scale, why it works, and how marketers are making it happen across channels, touchpoints, and whole customer journeys.
Contents
Personalization at scale is the practice of brands using real-time customer data and dynamic personalization tools to deliver relevant, valuable experiences to their customers.
Most of us have received an email from a brand that uses our first name or perhaps a message on our birthday with a special treat, but it’s so much more than this. It’s connecting the dots between behavior, preferences, context, and more to create tailored experiences for each of your customers.
Personalization at scale blends data, technology, and strategy to adapt messaging and content in real time. Think dynamic emails with product suggestions based on recent views, push notifications triggered and customized by behavior, or even unique journeys that adapt as customer interactions change.
This level of personalization goes beyond segmentation. It brings together your data to form a holistic view of each customer—whether they’re known, new, or anonymous—so you can engage them with relevant content across mobile apps, websites, email, SMS, and more. Done right, it helps businesses move from one-size-fits-all to 1:1 at scale.
When messaging adapts in real time based on behavior, preferences, and context, it creates experiences that feel natural and relevant as customers change and interact with your brand.
It’s not always easy. Unifying and coordinating live data, including zero-party and first-party data, as well as content logic and cross-channel delivery, can be resource-heavy without the right infrastructure. But with the right systems in place, like a connected tech stack and a journey orchestration tool built for speed, marketing teams can move faster and work smarter.
Tools like Braze help bring everything together in one interface, so marketers can create responsive journeys, automate decisioning and launch personalized campaigns that strengthen relationships with each customer.
The potential?
Scaling your personalization efforts means working smarter with data and tools that can support your efforts. It’s creating a system that can adapt and grow with your customer base to increase engagement and customer satisfaction. Here’s how you can build at-scale personalization into your marketing strategy.
If disconnected systems means you can access or activate the data you need, personalization becomes guesswork. To build a personalization strategy, create a single customer view that combines purchase history, product interactions, messaging behavior, preferences, etc—whatever makes sense for your customers. Once you have a 360 user view in place, lets you move from channel-specific campaigns to cohesive, customer-centric experiences.
Once your data is in one place, you need tools that can activate it across your marketing campaigns and channels. Did they browse but not buy? Abandon a cart? Respond to a promotion? Each touchpoint can be part of a broader, seamless experience, and the tools are the right nuts and bolts to help maximize the power of personalization.
With Braze, you can create messaging and build journeys that adapt in real time, based on how customers engage. For example, dynamic personalization tools like Braze Connected Content makes it possible for brands to customize their cross-channel campaigns with personalized information from the company's own internal servers, as well as from third-party APIs.
AI and machine learning help you scale by making smart decisions at speed. Automatically recommend the content or products that’s most likely to resonate with a customer, optimize channel or timing, and create personalized joureys with AI-driven insights.
Customers don’t think in channels, they think in moments. They might open your app in the morning, browse your site at lunch, and read your email in the evening. When those touchpoints feel connected, the experience flows. When they don’t, it stalls.
Cross-channel personalization coordinates content, timing, and context across email, push, SMS, in-app messages, and more—so messages feel like a natural next step, not a disconnected nudge. It is about moving from siloed campaigns to truly unified journeys. Whether you’re guiding new users to value or re-engaging a long-time customer, messages should feel like part of the same conversation.
The true power of personalization is that it shapes how customers experience your brand. It can help deepen relationships and create long-term value, but that’s not all.
Relevant experiences help spark action. When a customer receives a message that speaks to their habits, preferences, and context, it’s more likely they’ll engage. Personalized customer experiences—whether through dynamic content, tailored messaging, delivery time personalization, or AI-powered recommendations—create a sense of connection that generic marketing can’t replicate.
Consumers who are messaged effectively are often more likely to return. Personalization can play a key role in reducing churn, increasing repeat purchases, and strengthening brand affinity—especially when supported by lifecycle marketing and cross-channel strategies that meet customers where they are in their journey.
Brands that adopt a customer personalization strategy often see an uplift in metrics that matter. For example, personalization can lead to a 10-20% increase in revenue, on average.
Let’s take a closer look at how some Braze customers are using personalizing their marketing efforts at scale to connect with their audience across different channels, lifecycle stages, and business models.
Dutch Bros is a drive-thru coffee company on a mission to serve up high-quality drinks with a side of good vibes. With a growing customer base and a culture rooted in connection, Dutch Bros wanted to bring their warm, people-first approach into their buyers' digital experiences.
Dutch Bros set out to scale personalized messaging and create more consistent, consumer-first experiences. The team wanted to simplify their tech stack so they could better fuel connection and consistency with the company’s loyal fanbase.
With Braze, Dutch Bros launched a personalized messaging strategy that delivered relevant, 1:1 content across SMS, email, push, and in-app—at scale and with consistency. Using the Braze platform’s integration with Segment, they fed a wide variety of data and data sources from their CDP into Braze, where it could manage offers, understand its customers better, and drive insightful analytics.
By consolidating tools and scaling smarter, Dutch Bros saw a 230% increase in ROI from CRM campaigns and 31% cost savings across their tech stack. With Braze powering more personalized, real-time engagement, the team drove stronger retention, higher engagement, and a more efficient path to growth.
Equinox is a luxury fitness brand known for world-class training, design-driven gyms and an all-in commitment to high-performance lifestyles.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Equinox to temporarily close its physical locations, the brand faced the challenge of replicating its premium in-club experience within its digital platforms.
Club check-ins and class bookings were the primary uses of the Equinox app, resulting in limited awareness and engagement with the on-demand content. The aim was to make the app better for members by adding new features and improving value.
Equinox leveraged Braze Content Cards™ and Connected Content to transform their app's homepage into a personalized and dynamic interface. By integrating these tools, the team could tailor content recommendations based on individual member behaviors and preferences.
This approach allowed for the promotion of on-demand classes and articles, creating a more engaging digital experience and environment.
Implementing this personalized strategy led to a 150% increase in members engaging both in-club and online during September 2022. Test campaigns conducted in July and September also resulted in a 21% boost in engagement compared to the control group from August to September.
Life360 helps families stay safe and connected, offering real-time location tracking and emergency assistance.
With over 55 million monthly active users, Life360 sought to deepen user engagement by delivering more personalized experiences. However, achieving this level of personalization at scale posed challenges in terms of resource allocation and operational efficiency.
Life360 turned to Braze to launch a dynamic, cross-channel "Year in Review" campaign. They utilized Connected Content to send approximately 20 million unique in-app messages tailored to each subscribers’ preferences and activities by pulling in information via API.
They also employed Liquid code to award creative badges based on consumers’ personal highlights, enhancing engagement through personalized content. The marketing team delivered the campaign across email, in-app messages, push notifications, and Braze Content Cards™, creating a cohesive and personalized experience.
Life360’s “Year in Review” campaign drove a 105% lift in annual trials, a 15x boost in social shares and a 20% increase in personalized experiences year over year. By using Braze to deliver relevant content across push, in-app, email and using Content Cards, they created a full 360° engagement strategy that they could scale.
Taxfix, a leading tax platform operating in Germany, Italy, and France, simplifies the tax filing process through an intuitive app and web interface. Consumers can complete their tax returns in approximately 22 minutes, answering only relevant questions to maximize their refunds.
As Taxfix expanded into new markets, the company faced the need to enhance user activation and retention, gain deeper insights into their user base, automate messaging campaigns, reduce churn, and maximize conversions. Achieving these objectives required a robust consumer engagement platform capable of delivering personalized experiences at scale.
Taxfix integrated Braze into their iOS, Android and web applications using the Braze SDKs. They used Segment to unify customer information and Snowflake, for real-time data sharing across cloud regions. By leveraging Braze Currents, Taxfix seamlessly moved data between Braze and other components of their tech stack. They also utilized Looker to visualize and analyze customer behaviors, enabling more informed engagement strategies. To personalize communications, Taxfix employed Liquid Personalization and Content Blocks, allowing for dynamic and consistent messaging across campaigns.
Implementing Braze led to a 15% increase in tax return submissions and a 25% rise in product feature upsells compared to those not receiving CRM campaigns. Message deliverability improved significantly, reaching an average of 99.8%, up from the previous 60-70% range. The ability to visualize and act on customer data within Braze resulted in a 50-70% time savings on data analysis. CRM managers also experienced a 50% reduction in time spent on tasks, allowing for more focus on strategic initiatives.
Download our guide to uncover benefits such as automated content generation, data-activated creative, and contextual, in-the-moment content.
While the benefits are clear, scaling personalization across a growing customer base comes with a few challenges too. Here are the primary culprits to be aware of:
Brands often collect more data than they can use effectively. The challenge lies in identifying what’s actually useful, connecting it across systems, and making it actionable.
Many teams still plan campaigns around seasons or general promotions. Real-time consumer personalization thrives on specific triggers—like browsing behavior, cart abandonment, or lifecycle stage—not broad calendar dates.
Personalization at scale works best when marketing, product, and tech teams collaborate. Without cross-functional alignment, efforts can stall in disconnected workflows or inconsistent experiences.
Agile testing and a willingness to experiment are key to personalization success. But some teams struggle to adopt a test-and-learn mindset, especially in traditional or highly regulated industries.
Juggling too many point solutions, or not having the right infrastructure in place, can create friction. The key is choosing tools that connect easily, activate data in real time and support omnichannel execution.
Scaling personalization across channels, devices, and customer journeys doesn’t have to mean juggling a dozen tools or building a custom tech stack from scratch. With Braze, marketers can deliver real-time, relevant, and responsive experiences, all from a single platform.
We built Braze for the kind of personalization today's consumers expect: Fast, flexible, and deeply human. Whether you’re nudging a new user toward their first purchase, re-engaging a lapsed subscriber, or tailoring content based on real-time behavior, Braze gives you the tools to act in the moment—with context that matters.
What makes it different?
Personalization at scale is the process of delivering tailored, relevant experiences to large audiences using real-time data and automation.
The 4 D’s of personalization are: Data, Decisioning, Delivery and Design. They are a common guide on how to create and deliver personalized experiences.
The 3 levels of personalization are: Basic (name/location), segment-based (group traits) and individualized (real-time, 1:1 experiences).
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