Three Trends Impacting Retail Marketing and Shaping the New

Customer Experience

in 2025

By Brett Caine, Chief Executive Officer, Airship

As a result, retailers are being pushed to evolve their approach to customer relationships and focus attention on personalized experiences and seamless interactions wherever customers engage.

At Airship, we’re working with leading retailers around the world to navigate these challenges and capitalize on the opportunities ahead. Based on some of our conversations, here are three trends helping retailers overcome threats to referral traffic and customer loyalty.

The first is a need for retailers to prioritize direct customer relationships. Walled gardens are nothing new — search engines, social networks and marketplaces all offer massive reach for a price. But the cost keeps increasing. Fortified by data deprecation and growing privacy regulations, industry giants like Meta and Google will continue to tighten their grip on audiences, keeping more traffic on their pages while scraping content for large language models without an equitable value exchange. The result: plummeting referral traffic and soaring acquisition costs.

The need has never been greater for retailers to prioritize direct customer relationships or they risk being disintermediated by middlemen sitting between them and their customers. Data willingly and simply provided, and purposefully solicited, will be key to providing highly personalized interactions customers now expect and being able to unify those experiences wherever customers choose to interact — on the web, in apps and everywhere in between.

Amidst this disruption, first- and zero- party data are becoming more important than ever. Retailers are racing to advance their personalization strategies, and continually collecting customer data to fine-tune the path to conversion is key. First-party engagement data doesn’t provide enough context alone. Retailers need to understand customer sentiment, satisfaction, preferences and evolving interests over time. And they need to collect this information progressively and non-intrusively, putting customers in control of their data and immediately demonstrating how any data shared benefits their experience and perception of value.

Consumers are willing to share their personal data, but there must be a mutual benefit. It’s a value exchange. According to Gartner, “68% of consumers are unlikely to allow sites, apps or operating systems to track their online data.” This might seem discouraging, but when you dig in deeper, the data reveals a crucial caveat: “67% of these consumers will make exceptions and would allow personal data tracking given the right incentive.”

Retailers that can provide clear and tangible value in exchange for that data will be the winners in the data privacy era.

But collecting data is just the first step. We’re already seeing how AI-powered hyper-personalization and experimentation changes the game for marketers, making it much easier and faster to scale individualization based on real-time customer behaviors, zero-party enriched profiles and predictive models. With more focus on context — leveraging in-app and website behaviors, preference centers and adaptive in-session surveys— retailers can boost engagement and loyalty with more relevant content, offers and recommendations. Advanced algorithms and GenAI will handle the data crunching and content creation to scale up these personalized experiences, making time-consuming and tedious marketing tasks a thing of the past.

It all starts with a strong foundation of data, experimentation and goal-setting to ensure AI optimizes both immediate conversion and long-term customer relationships and value.

While personalized experiences are essential, they can’t exist in isolation. To truly maximize long-term long-term value and cultivate lasting customer loyalty, retailers must ensure customer experiences are unified across all touchpoints.

Many retailers wrestle with the burden of managing multiple digital channels, which are often owned by separate teams — amplifying the disconnection customers often experience. By meeting customers where they are, and orchestrating experiences and messages from a common, real-time data set, retailers can serve customers seamlessly and focus on advancing them through the lifecycle wherever they interact — apps, websites, physical storefronts, email, mobile wallets and everywhere in between.

In 2025, retailers that consistently leverage owned channels to collect customer data to tailor interactions will boost conversion rates, spend and frequency. Not only will these brands be better able to track, prove and grow ROI and customer lifetime value, their competitive advantage will be boosted by bottom-line savings of not having to repeatedly pay to re-engage

the same customers.