Today’s marketers face an increasingly high-stakes challenge: deliver seamless, real-time personalisation across channels – or risk being left behind. Evidencing this, three-quarters of respondents in our study Consumer Vision 2035: The Era of the Insight to Foresight Pivot expect that brands will send them personalised offers and promotions reflecting both real-time events (such as traffic, weather, etc.) and their personal context (e.g., the tone of the entertainment they are engaging with, their geo-location, etc.) Consumers now demand tailored experiences at every touchpoint, and they’ll quickly switch brands if those expectations aren’t met.
However, our recent Global CMO Navigator – CX Edition uncovered that less than half of organisations have effective personalisation or are using external identity solutions to improve their view of the customer. Behind the scenes, many organisations are grappling with disjointed systems, sluggish data pipelines, and fragmented customer views that stand in the way of truly individualised marketing.
In a world where engagement is currency, personalisation is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s the key to relevance, retention, and revenue. And the brands succeeding today are those that have made a deliberate investment in their data architecture to support scalable, agile personalisation.
So, what does a best-in-class architecture of personalisation look like? And how can marketers unlock its full potential?
Why data management is the foundation of modern marketing
Before messages, offers or experiences can be personalised, the groundwork must be in place. That means collecting, processing and activating data across multiple systems, often in real time.
The challenge is that most organisations weren’t built for this. Legacy infrastructure, siloed platforms, and batch-based processes mean that customer data is often out of date, incomplete, or inaccessible when and where it’s needed. And that limits marketers' ability to act on insight in the moments that matter.
To bridge this gap, brands need a flexible and robust customer engagement architecture that enables them to unify data sources, respond to behavioural signals, and orchestrate personalised journeys across platforms.
What best-in-class looks like: the new data stack for personalisation
High-performing marketing teams are embracing composable, real-time architectures that bring data together in ways that are both powerful and practical. This doesn’t require a full tech overhaul. But it does require choosing the right tools and frameworks – and ensuring they can talk to each other.
At Merkle, we’ve seen this approach in action through our work with clients across a variety of different industries, from retail to FS to travel. The shift isn’t just technological - it’s strategic. Brands that are serious about personalisation are investing in platforms that let them move from insight to action in real time, with minimal friction between systems.
That’s where platforms like Braze come into the picture – not as silver bullets, but as powerful enablers within a broader architecture designed for speed, scale and customer-centricity.
Inside Braze: a data platform built for action
Braze is best known as a customer engagement platform, but at its core is a powerful data management engine. For marketers looking to scale personalisation, Braze offers a flexible and intuitive framework to capture, unify, and activate customer data, thereby turning behavioural signals into timely, personalised experiences.
- Real-time event tracking
Braze allows brands to capture and respond to customer behaviour as it happens, whether it’s a product view, an app interaction, or an abandoned basket. These event signals form the backbone of dynamic personalisation strategies, enabling marketers to trigger communications based on actual customer actions, not guesswork.
- Rich user attributes
In addition to real-time behaviour, Braze supports the ingestion and use of user attributes such as preferences, lifecycle stages, subscription details and more. These can be both static and dynamic, from simple fields like postcode to predictive traits like churn propensity scores. This allows for precise segmentation and personalisation based on a full understanding of the customer.
- Scalable integration with your data ecosystem
Braze integrates seamlessly with leading data and marketing technologies, including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Tealium, and mParticle. This flexibility makes it easy to sync data from other systems and ensure a single customer view. At Merkle, we’ve delivered dozens of successful integrations with Braze, consistently finding its APIs and interface to be among the most frictionless in the market.
- Streamlined data ingestion with CDI Segments
One of the platform’s key differentiators is Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI) Segments, which let marketers focus on high-impact attributes without being overwhelmed by unnecessary data volume. By ingesting only the most relevant traits user cohorts, teams can maintain performance while still powering effective segmentation and personalisation.
- Personalised recommendations at scale
SPersonalisation isn’t just about timing; it’s also about content. Braze offers two powerful tools to serve up the right message every time:
• Connected Content, which fetches personalised data from external sources in real time to populate messages.
• AI Recommendations via Catalogs, which use machine learning to suggest products, content or offers based on user behaviour, preferences, and past interactions.
Together, these features enable marketers to scale their personalisation efforts without sacrificing relevance or accuracy.
The impact: from fragmented journeys to unified experiences
Brands that implement this kind of architecture are seeing meaningful results. Whether it’s increasing app engagement, reducing churn, or lifting conversion rates, the combination of real-time data, intelligent segmentation, and actionable insights is helping marketers drive measurable impact.
At a time when attention is scarce and customer loyalty is hard-won, this is what modern marketing success looks like: seamless, synchronised and rooted in data.
Getting started: what marketers need to consider
If your brand is looking to improve personalisation, the first step is assessing the strength and flexibility of your current data infrastructure. Ask yourself:
Are you able to respond to customer behaviour in real time?
Is your data unified across platforms and teams?
Can you scale your personalisation without overwhelming your team?
If the answer to any of these is no, it may be time to rethink your approach. Platforms like Braze don’t just support campaign execution; they enable the architecture that today’s personalisation demands.
At Merkle, we help clients evaluate and implement the right solutions to meet their engagement goals. Whether you're enhancing an existing stack or building from the ground up, our team can guide you through the strategy, integration, and optimisation needed to deliver experiences that matter.
If you’d like to learn more about how we work with Braze to deliver industry-leading personalisation for clients, check out our case studies for Burger King and Dyreparken.
Or if you’d like to discuss your own brand’s personalisation needs, do get in touch.