This is not an article that aims to convince you email personalization is important. You already know that, and you're probably already doing it.

But, like most marketers, you can't help but feel you've got room to improve—but you're facing challenges unlocking the opportunities that AI and modern marketing automation tools have presented.

What Do B2B Customers Expect in Email?

The savvy B2B customer knowingly shares data and engages with your brand, expecting that the information they provide will be put to good use.

To stand out in this audience's busy inbox, you need to adapt messages to behaviors, preferences, and current contexts, delivering an experience that feels uniquely tailored.

Hyper-personalization, one-to-one personalization, individualization... Call it what you will, but the idea is to leverage real-time, dynamic data to tailor your messaging to each customer.

Overcoming Personalization Challenges Marketers Face (And How You Can Solve Them)

If you're struggling to achieve true personalization, you're not alone. Even in the age of AI and sophisticated automation tools, many marketers face challenges getting it right or they have concerns about how reliable AI's predictions really are.

Here are four of the most common challenges marketers face, and ways you can solve them.

1. Disparate Data That Is Not Easily Accessible

The challenge: You have plenty of data, but you struggle to operationalize it in time. This challenge is usually a result of disparate data, inaccessible data, or both.

The solution: Look at your martech stack. If your marketing automation platform does not give you instant access to complete, real-time customer data, or if you find that using that data for personalization difficult or overly time-consuming, consider switching to a modern platform that makes personalization possible.

2. Overwhelm

The challenge: Many marketers simply feel overwhelmed by the number of data points, the possibilities, the tools, and the content requirements to achieve a personalized experience end-to-end.

The solution: Consider how you could consolidate your tools to get a single source of truth and a complete automation tool in one place—or whether you could switch to a tool that is easier to use or more intuitive.

3. Bad Data or Unreliable AI 'Predictions' That Muddy Your Marketing

The challenge: If your data is incomplete or an AI tool has led you astray, you probably feel that you can't trust the data anymore—and you'd rather stick to very basic personalization than to get it wrong.

The solution: If messy, incomplete, or outdated data is the problem, start by using only the most reliable data points to personalize while you get your house in order. Often, that reliable data is behavioral data.

If AI "predictions" have been unreliable, it could be connected to a data issue (you may not have enough data for the AI to learn) or you could be using a tool that launched predictive analytics before it was ready. In 2025, new and more reliable iterations of predictive analytics and AI-powered decision-making tools will win your trust back.

4. Balancing Privacy and Security Concerns

The challenge: You are concerned about veering from "personal" to "private." In other words, you want to ensure your personalization efforts are perceived as friendly, not creepy.

The solution: Show your customers they can trust you with their data by complying with global privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, and diligently respecting their communication preferences. Achieving the right tone is a little less prescriptive—but it starts with building an internal culture where customer data is treated respectfully and responsibly.

Relevance and Responsiveness: Simplifying the Personalization Puzzle

If you think of your brand's relationship with your customers and prospects as a two-way conversation, their actions and behaviors are statements or questions:

• "I am here because I have this problem."
• "I need help achieving this goal."
• "I am actively looking for an alternative to this product or service."

Your goal as a marketer is to keep the conversation going, allowing it to grow richer as you learn more about one another.

Achieving understanding requires two things: Relevance and responsiveness.

Three Ways to Make Your Email Marketing More Responsive

Responsiveness is about timing—the best time to send an email is not "Monday at 8 AM," it's when the individual has taken a relevant action in the past.

Here are three ways to make responsiveness happen.

1. Use behavioral data to segment audiences and trigger campaigns

Behavioral data is your personalization superpower. It also tends to be more plentiful and reliable, and it feels more appropriate for B2B audiences.

Most marketers have plenty of behavioral data at their disposal—website and/or app activity, engagements with marketing messages, interactions with sales or support teams, purchases or bookings. Choose the most meaningful interactions to segment your audience or trigger emails, and track performance to see what works.

You can take it one step further by using behavioral data in merge tags or liquid language, but it's not always necessary.

2. Pay attention to preferences and settings

When responsiveness is a core tenet of your marketing strategy, untangling the web of automated messages can be difficult and you may wind up unintentionally overcommunicating.

To safeguard yourself against doing that, first set up a robust preference center that will give your prospects and customers the chance to opt in or out of specific campaigns or communications. Adherence to their preferences is important not just to achieve responsiveness, but also to protect your domain reputation and deliverability.

Next, set sending limits to quickly and simply get control over how many messages are sent per day or week. To ensure essential communications, such as booking reminders, are received, always set them as transactional.

3. Manually intervene when necessary

Automation is essential to responsiveness. There is no way any marketing team, no matter how large or sophisticated, could achieve responsiveness without it.

That said, even the best automation and AI can't read the global room, and sometimes human intervention is essential to postpone a campaign or manually intervene after a customer's complaint.

Three Ways to Make Email Content More Relevant

Relevance is responding to your customer or prospect's actions and behaviors with connected ideas, content, advice, or recommended next steps. Relevance is a little trickier to deliver than responsiveness.

Here are three tips to simplify the process.

1. Create always-on audience segments in line with your lifecycle and ICP

The content that is relevant to an early-stage lead will look a little different from the most relevant message for a loyal customer.

Using always-on, dynamic audience segments to identify lifecycle stage and industry or ideal customer profile (ICP) alignment ensures you can send relevant messages to your audience.

2. Consider sequential relevance

Each email you send within a campaign should be a part of a larger story or message. Even if messages are left unopened, crafting your content this way will go a long way toward creating a more relevant experience for your customers and prospects.

3. Build your content library

Having a large content library to draw from will be incredibly helpful, so get strategic about what you produce and how it can serve your personalization engine.

There are lots of ways to do that. One of the simplest is to create a backend tagging system (for example, in a content calendar or CMS) that can be filtered for stage of lifecycle, target audience, or any other relevant information related to behavioral triggers you commonly use.

Rolling out tagging to all content types across the company—case studies, articles, opinion pieces, videos, podcasts, and even social creative—will make this a multi-use exercise. It can help with account-based marketing efforts, sales outreach, and support.

Setting the Stage for the Future

Getting your data house in order and achieving relevant responsiveness in your marketing messages will help you reach your near-term objectives.

Perhaps even more important: the steps you take to get there will ensure you are ready to strike when the promise of reliable, sophisticated predictive analytics is finally delivered.