
Personalisation expectations are evolving—consumers are more aware and no more demanding personalisation just for the sake of it. Consumers globally are developing a nuanced understanding of what personalised offers entail in terms of the data they must share in exchange. They are no more seeking “personalisation at all costs” but are looking for personalisation that is relevant and valuable.
The only way for brands to achieve this is by utilising a comprehensive view of what the customer wants. Data from customer interactions from across multiple, varied channels must be brought together to build the complete customer profile.
With customers interacting with a brand across multiple media, it is vital to put in a place an effective cross-channel strategy. The three-pronged approach to seamless cross-channel marketing is: unified data, personalisation at scale, meeting customers across all touch points. Attempting to achieve this manually leads to a messy output comprising inconsistent messaging that leads to disjointed customer journeys. How does AI help? By unifying data.
The primary challenge that AI resolves by adding automation to the process is removing silos between the fragmented data and unifying it into a single stream, ready to be used for seamless personalisation. Furthermore, while marketing teams can work with existing data, AI brings in the power of real-time customer insights, which translates to the most effective form of personalisation. Add to that, scale. Customers are present across diverse touchpoints and converse with a brand from different locations at different times. Without the ability to offer personalisation at scale, brand growth isn’t achievable.
This is where AI steps in as a helpful aide by unifying data and offering quick, intelligent, real-time insights.
Data-driven personalisation is essential in the current day and age but fragmented data, outdated processes and an inability to efficiently leverage advanced technologies hinders the true utilisation of data. Where reading tons of data can be overwhelming for marketers, AI not only collects but stores and reads data to offer intelligent insights by identifying hidden patterns in the information. The aggregation of data from the multiple sources a customer chooses to interact with the brand, becomes fast and convenient with AI’s intelligent capabilities.
Without a comprehensive view of customer preferences and behaviour, personalisation is a far-fetched aim. The mismatch in insights and customer profiles can lead to misdirected marketing efforts. How can AI help?
In addition to analysing customer data, AI creates different segments for diverse customers. For example, SAP Emarsys’ AI marketing offering lets brands target customers by generating AI segments powered by its machine learning algorithms. Brands can use it to engage customers based on their predicted behaviors or affinities. Further, they can target offers based on lifecycle stage, engagement propensity or even estimated spend – such as first-time buyers likely to make a repeat purchase with high value.
When the right offer reaches the right person at the right time, the chances of converting a prospect into a customer become naturally higher. AI helps here by utilising historical and real-time data to build a true view of every customer. For example, SAP Emarsys uses visual affinity, channels and purchase predictions, to recommend products tailored to each individual customer, while maintaining consistency across multiple channels from email to web to mobile. This consistency, irrespective of where the customer interacts with the brand, helps create a personalised and cohesive journey, ultimately leading to higher chances of conversion and hence, an enhanced return on investment.
Each customer demands a unique engagement and experience. Achieving this manually isn’t feasible—AI automates the process, reads high volumes of data, gathers insights in real-time, and makes it possible to engage with every single customer separately, offering each a distinctive experience. SAP Emarsys’ platform offers a host of ready-to-use tactics that align to business outcomes. Its sophisticated campaigns, such as Abandoned Browse, Post-purchase Cross/Up-sell, Winback and more, use AI segments to define audiences and drive channel selection based on a customer’s likelihood to engage in each channel.
One of the most effective tips for data-driven personalisation is making the most of artificial intelligence. By automating the identification of profitable customer segments, AI tools aid in optimising cross-channel journeys and enhancing overall campaign performance through automatic optimisations. AI platforms like the one offered by SAP Emarsys help achieve the following:
Brands are fast moving towards AI-powered strategies to manage the complexity of cross-channel interactions. AI removes the guesswork and streamlines processes, ultimately providing faster and smarter insights that translate to enhanced conversions.
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Cindy Chua is the Senior Investment Lead at Jobstreet Singapore, part of the SEEK Group. She oversees full funnel marketing investments across digital and offline channels, shaping how brands connect with audiences and drive sustainable growth. Her focus is on aligning media strategy with brand and user journeys, creating meaningful engagement and measurable outcomes.

Harriet leads Singapore’s largest experience design team. She works end-to-end—from strategy to execution to enhance customer experiences and drive human-centered innovation. A natural connector, Harriet collaborates across technology, brand, transformation, behavioural science, and design to shape both present and future experiences.

Esther Tan is currently serving as the Global Director of Marketing & E-Commerce at Plaza Premium Group, leading the charge in crafting group marketing and digital strategies, driven by curiosity and a passion for data. Her expertise extends to e-commerce, digital marketing, CRM, and loyalty, with a background spanning over 20 years in aviation, travel, and hospitality

Yong Yau Goh is the Chief Marketing Officer at BullSwipe, a global fintech platform that converts crypto to fiat instantly. He helms BullSwipe’s brand, marketing and communication development across its African, Middle Eastern and Asian markets, and has over two decades experience as an award-winning brand communicator. Prior to BullSwipe, Yong Yau was the Chief Marketing Officer at the AWHL Group, Singapore’s largest conglomerate of integrated health, wellness and beauty brands. Leading regional teams across diverse business verticals, he oversaw the positioning, transformation and communication strategies for the group’s flagship brands. Most of Yong Yau’s career, however, has focused on the agency’s side, where he led full-suite creative and communication teams in Singapore, Myanmar and Shanghai at the Coal Group. This was where he consulted for and engaged CEOs and senior management in some of the region’s leading corporates to take their organisations to greater heights in terms of brand direction, communication approach and business strategy — with proven results. These corporates include regional giants like StarHub, DBS, Mapletree, the Mottama Group and the METRO Group. Yong Yau is also a doctoral candidate at the Golden Gate University, where his work focuses on AI-driven marketing and communication technologies.

I lead at the dynamic intersection of business strategy, technical infrastructure, and growth operations. My core philosophy is clear: architecting autonomous ecosystems that liberate global headcount growth from revenue expansion.
By weaving together complex SaaS telemetry with unified data taxonomies spanning sales, product, marketing, and customer success, I empower enterprises to evolve from reactive reporting to proactive, automated revenue engines. I built the “Single Source of Truth” (SSOT) that offers C-suite executives the clarity needed to navigate intricate customer journeys and make pivotal, board-level decisions.
Throughout my career, I have dedicated myself to optimising the vital balance between top-line revenue generation and systemic risk mitigation. At TikTok, I mapped risk-versus-revenue trade-offs, assessing initiatives across User, Regulatory, and Platform risk vectors against Tapped, Untapped, and Lost revenue to unlock $500M in untapped platform monetisation and prepare executives for US Congressional hearings.