Arek Kustra speaks with Anna Winnicka about Marketing Automation and CRM in B2C business – the challenges, new opportunities, and the road ahead. 

Interview participants:

Anna Winnicka – Data and Customer Growth Officer w Decathlon Polska. 15+ years of experience in Data & Analytics fuels Anna’s passion for empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions that unlock growth. Anna helps companies translate complex data insights into actionable strategies, leading to improved performance and a competitive edge.

Arek Kustra – Founder and CEO of Vecton. Customer analytics expert and the head of Vecton, a CRM and Marketing Automation consulting agency. With 20 years of experience in market research, data analysis, and personalized marketing, he helps companies unlock the potential of CRM in their businesses.

Arek Kustra Hi! To start, could you tell us about your role in the company and how you engage with customer experience personalization and marketing automation in your work?

Anna Winnicka: In my work, I am a Data and Customer Growth Officer. It’s a position that combines two key areas: on one hand, hard data, and on the other, leveraging that data to manage the customer lifecycle. My daily responsibilities primarily involve extracting insights from data to optimize the loyalty program and mass communication.

So, it’s both an analytical role and one directly connected to what the end customer sees and experiences – do I understand that correctly?

Yes. Our typical project cycle always begins with data analysis. The results of these analyses lead us to testing. From the tests, we extract learnings. And the cycle continues. We work in a loop of test, learn, optimize – test, learn, optimize.

I assume that the “optimize” stage is the implementation phase. That means your teams are introducing changes to something that already exists. In a large organization like yours, this seems like it could be a highly complex process. What’s your role in it?

I’m primarily focused on two key areas. The first is the loyalty program – how to make Decathlon’s loyalty program as attractive as possible to encourage customers to return more frequently. The second area is marketing automation communication, where we use email and web push notifications. All our activities revolve around one of these two areas.

That means you’re implementing a broad range of customer communication strategies, reaching probably thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people.

I’d say we’re talking about millions.

Now, I’d like to step away from your day-to-day work at Decathlon and ask you, as an expert in data and customer engagement, how you see the state of marketing automation in large B2C companies today – both in Poland and across Europe. Years ago, there was a big promise around CDPs (Customer Data Platforms), which were supposed to unify all customer data and create a seamless, automated, and personalized customer experience across all channels. Several years have passed – are we living in that reality yet? How do you see it from your perspective, looking at other companies and the broader industry?

That’s a really interesting question because when we think about the evolution of marketing automation, one of the biggest breakthroughs was when data processing costs dropped significantly. That was when we all entered this Big Data hype – believing that we could do everything. We could collect all the data, know everything about our customers, run real-time lookalike modeling, and suddenly, everything seemed possible. How many years has it been? Probably ten. And as an industry, I don’t think we’re quite there. What I still see is that many companies remain highly fragmented. They treat marketing automation in e-commerce one way, email as a separate channel, SMS as another, and so on. In doing so, they lose sight of the full customer experience. Because a customer isn’t just what they do on a website – it’s also how they interact with customer service and what they do in offline channels. The beautiful vision we once had – that we’d have a single, comprehensive data platform gathering all customer data and enabling perfectly tailored communication – hasn’t fully materialized. And I’m not sure if it ever will. Is it a data problem? I don’t know. Do the platforms exist? Yes, they do. However, I think very few companies truly approach customer communication holistically. They don’t think in terms of the entire customer journey, customer experience, and managing communication consistently across all channels.

You brought up data and the fact that it’s been ten years since Big Data technologies emerged and lowered data processing costs. Over this time, we’ve gained a wealth of experience and conducted various experiments – some successful, some not. What’s the best approach to data organization in a large B2C company like yours? Is there even such a thing as a “best practice”?

Is there one universal approach? I don’t think so. But what we should be talking about is customer-centricity. Not isolated events or individual purchase behaviors, but a customer-centric approach. We need to see the customer as a whole – not just in the moments when they are on the buying path. There are CDP platforms available, advanced CRMs, and Customer 360 platforms that try to fulfill this promise. But let’s be honest – data integration is never an easy project. It’s never easy, especially since customers don’t always reveal themselves consistently across different channels. It’s difficult to find a single unique identifier that connects data across all platforms – especially now, with privacy regulations and GDPR. Collecting customer knowledge in one place is challenging. But I believe we shouldn’t stop trying. We need to put the customer at the center. We must gather as much information as we can – what they tell us about themselves, how they behave in our e-commerce channels, how they act in offline channels, and their interactions with our ads, or customer service. And we need to learn from that. But we must also recognize that true personalization will never happen if we don’t genuinely understand our customers. Data plays a crucial role in that.

Of course, this also involves investment in integrating data from various systems. These are expensive, long-term projects. Companies today look at costs opportunistically and pragmatically. That raises the question: what’s the ROI of this data-driven, systemized, and communication-focused customer-centricity? What financial benefits does a company gain from having a system that enables coherent marketing automation?

When we talk about ROI, we must acknowledge that for many years, marketing automation has been evaluated purely through a performance-driven lens. The mindset was: email – click – order. That’s it. But we need to think about this world more broadly. A consistent customer experience, which we build through communication, pays off not just in the short term. I think a big mistake many companies make is measuring ROI only in terms of immediate performance. In my work, I get performance-related questions all the time. Every year during budgeting, the same question comes up: “How much revenue does marketing automation generate?” And that’s a tough question to answer. I use an incremental approach. I believe it’s the only way to truly assess the impact of marketing automation on customer behavior. We look at the lifetime value of customers who are exposed to our communication versus those who aren’t. This method isn’t widely used in the market. Why? Because it requires excluding some customers from communication. And if we exclude some customers, they won’t perform as well – they won’t generate revenue that they might have otherwise. However, only this approach allows us to assess the full impact of marketing automation.

Exactly. That’s very interesting. How do you select the test group? I imagine ensuring the control group’s representativeness – this is the crucial part of this methodology. Could you share a bit more about that?

Representativeness is the keyword. We need to ensure that the control group is as similar as possible to the rest of our customers. There are various statistical methods we use – mainly ones borrowed from marketing research and sample selection. The sample size is also critical.

Given the scale of your operations – selling both online and offline, communicating through various channels like email, push notifications, and loyalty programs – your level of complexity must be enormous. How do you manage it?

I hope we manage it well! But yes, the greater the complexity, the more coordination is required. We’ve had projects fail simply because different teams were working on similar things, making tests inconclusive. So, we plan everything together. That’s not always a popular approach, because meetings are expensive. But we regularly meet and discuss our plans to ensure alignment. This also requires a highly competent team – people who understand all these processes, and dependencies, and can manage projects efficiently.

What skills are essential in a marketing automation or CRM team?

A Marketing Automation or CRM team needs a broad mix of skills. We’re talking about marketing expertise, graphic design, programming, copywriting, analytics, and, above all, strategic thinking. But when building such a team from scratch, not all of these roles need to be filled immediately. You can leverage the skills of people already within the organization, working across different teams. You can also seek support from agencies. When launching a new team, collaborating with an agency can be invaluable. It gives you access to market experts who can help implement marketing automation while simultaneously building in-house expertise. If I were tasked with building a team today, that’s the approach I would take.

Would you say that your organization has reached a high level of maturity in this area? From my perspective, most companies on the market are still in the early stages of development when it comes to marketing automation. There aren’t many companies like yours that have been consciously and strategically developing in this area for years. What sets more advanced companies apart from the market average?

I think what really differentiates them is a customer-centric strategy. And it’s not just a strategy that sits within the marketing team, the Marketing Automation team, or the loyalty program team. If the entire company isn’t customer-focused, marketing automation will remain on the sidelines. In that scenario, there’s an expectation of immediate results – purely a performance-driven approach. That leads to fragmentation. Companies optimize abandoned cart flows, and abandoned visits, and focus on isolated sales campaigns, but don’t build long-term relationships with customers. The key difference is whether the entire organization understands that, at the end of the day, it’s the customer who sustains the business.

That’s a great insight. How do you see the future of CRM and marketing automation? What direction is it heading in, and how do you think it will evolve over the next few years?

The future holds both – challenges and opportunities. On the challenge side, we have increasing privacy concerns and data protection regulations. We’ll need to be more consistent and accountable in this area. Customers will demand more transparency and greater control over their data. On the opportunity side, AI is a game-changer. The AI boom that started two years ago presents an enormous opportunity for our customers. It enables hyper-personalization – finally allowing us to speak to each customer in a way that’s most relevant to them, at the right moment, and about things that truly matter to them. Looking ahead, I don’t know exactly what the next five to seven years will bring. But I believe companies should focus on two things: Firstly, it is data protection and transparency – ensuring customers know why we collect data, how we process it, and how they can manage it. Secondly, the advancing predictive models and AI-driven tools – using new technologies to make communication more personalized and meaningful.

And what about you personally? After years of working with data and marketing automation, do you still feel motivated? What keeps you passionate about this field?

You can’t get bored in this field, that’s for sure. Looking back at the last ten years – since the rise of Big Data – I can’t recall a time when things weren’t evolving rapidly. It’s a fascinating industry because new opportunities and challenges constantly emerge. One of the first big shocks was GDPR. Customer expectations are also changing. Today’s customers are highly aware of the data we hold about them, and they expect us to deliver fully personalized experiences. That’s a challenge – but also an opportunity. At the same time, customers want to share less and less personal data. It’s a paradox. They expect ultra-personalized interactions while being increasingly cautious about the information they provide. I believe transparency will be key. We need to be open with our customers about why we collect certain data, how we use it, and what we won’t do with it. We also need to give them a voice – simple things like asking in an email, “Was this message interesting to you?” Right now, we collect data passively – tracking email opens, clicks, visits, and purchases. But creating a two-way conversation, where customers actively share feedback, will give them a sense of control. And I think that’s something they expect. If I had to pinpoint what keeps me motivated, it’s this next big challenge – how to personalize the customer experience to the highest level when customers are becoming increasingly cautious about sharing their data.

I hope you turn that challenge into a success. Thank you very much for the conversation.

Warsaw, February 2025