In the Loop - March 2026
Welcome to the latest edition of In the Loop.
This month, we’re focusing on a challenge we see across almost every organisation: connecting digital behaviour with known customer data. It’s a gap that often limits how effectively teams can understand and act on customer intent.
Joe Church explores how bridging this gap can transform fragmented signals into actionable insight. Ata Mehmet then builds on this, sharing why better outcomes start with better data design - and why marketers need to be involved earlier in the process.
Together, these perspectives highlight a simple theme. When data is connected and intentionally designed, it becomes far easier to turn insight into impact.
Enjoy!
Most organisations collect huge volumes of digital data. Page views, sessions, clicks. Yet many still struggle to answer a simple question: which customer actually did what?
That's because most brands operate across two worlds that rarely connect. Anonymous digital behaviour on one side, and known customer data in CRM, booking or subscription systems on the other. Bridging that gap is where some of the highest-value work in marketing activation now sits.
The principle is straightforward. Every time a visitor reveals who they are, whether through a login, a purchase or a form submission, that moment creates an opportunity to link anonymous browsing behaviour back to a known person. When those links are captured cleanly and modelled deterministically, you start to build a persistent identity layer that connects digital interactions to real customers across systems.
Get that right and the value changes quickly. Instead of analysing sessions or cookies, you can work with customer-level behavioural signals like content affinity, visit recency and engagement patterns, and combine them with transactional and CRM data in a single modelling-ready view.
A good example is web intent feeding into propensity models for hero products and ranges. If a known customer starts browsing pricing or product comparison pages, that behaviour becomes a very strong signal when combined with CRM history. Without identity resolution, those signals stay anonymous. With it, they become features you can actually train on.
For organisations running both digital platforms and backend systems like ticketing or subscriptions, this is often one of the biggest unlocks in analytics maturity. Not a new tool, just a clearer view of the customer behind the data.
If marketers are the ones turning data into customer experience and revenue, they should be involved in designing it from the start.
For years, organisations have invested heavily in becoming ‘data-driven’ – and it’s something most marketers aspire to be!
Vast volumes of customer information now sit in data warehouses and campaign execution tools, waiting to fuel smarter marketing in form of better targeting and personalisation.
Yet a persistent problem remains: much of that data never gets used. The reason is simple. Data is often designed by technical teams in isolation, without enough input from the teams responsible for turning it into campaigns, journeys and commercial outcomes.
Marketers are effectively the end users of customer data. We apply this data and insight into targeting, segmentation and personalisation within customer touchpoints. When marketers are involved early in shaping new CRM fields or data structures, we can help ensure those data points map directly to real marketing use cases. Instead of asking “what data can we capture?”, we can ask a more valuable question: “What do we want to do, and what data will enable us to do it better?
Marketers can help define clear field purposes, standardised values and practical governance for how information should be captured and applied. The result is a more usable, more purposeful data foundation - one designed not just for storage or reporting, but for action. Without that input, companies often end up with vast datasets that look impressive on paper but rarely influence customer experience or revenue.
There are significant benefits to this sort of shift:
- Close the ‘activation gap’ between the data organisations collect and the data that is actually used.
- Prevent wastage from an ever-expanding library of poorly defined fields, that takes up data engineering resource time, database space, and funds.
- More readily prove the value of your data strategy – fuelling further innovation through measurable outcomes.
Ultimately, this represents a subtle but important shift in mindset. Instead of simply pursuing data-driven marketing, organisations can begin building marketing-driven data - data shaped around real customer engagement, real business decisions and real commercial value. When marketers are part of the design process from the start, data stops being something we accumulate and becomes something we intentionally build to deliver better outcomes for customers and brands alike.
We’re always on the lookout for interesting news and articles from across the industry. This month, we’ve been particularly impressed by…
A recent piece from Zeotap exploring how brands are improving retention through data-driven personalisation. The article highlights the importance of building a unified customer view - bringing together digital behaviour, transactional data and CRM signals to better understand and act on customer intent. It reinforces a key point from this month’s articles: the real value comes not from collecting more data, but from connecting it in a way that drives measurable outcomes.