The landscape in 2026 is fundamentally different from years prior. Recent regulatory shifts—most notably the stringent sender guidelines enforced by Google and Yahoo in early 2024—have transformed technical deliverability from a back-office IT concern into a boardroom-level strategic imperative. Whether you’re launching a new sending domain, migrating to a new email service provider’s platform, re-engaging an outdated subscriber list or reviving a dormant IP, a disciplined and cautious approach to IP warming is now a requirement to protect your email deliverability.

First, a quick vocabulary recap is in order.

Before diving into the IP warming process it is helpful to clarify the technical components at play:

• MBP: Mailbox Providers offer email hosting, storage, and client access, allowing users to send, receive, and manage messages through web interfaces or apps, integrating features like spam filtering and security. Major mailbox providers include: Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo and Apple iCloud.
• ESP: Email Service Providers are the software services used to send marketing emails (e.g., Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Bloomreach, Iterable, Braze, Marketo, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Klaviyo and a host of others).
• IP Address: An Internet Protocol address is a unique numerical address that identifies the specific server sending your emails. Think of it as the “digital return address” stamped on the envelope.
• Domain: The web address associated with your brand (e.g., @yourcompany.com) that appears in the “From” line. It validates who is actually sending the email.

What is IP warming, and why do we need it?

IP warming is the practice of gradually increasing the volume of email sent from a new or dormant IP address. The goal is to build a positive sender reputation with mailbox providers (MBPs) over time.

Think of it like starting a new job: you don't walk in on day one and lead the biggest project. You handle small tasks to prove reliability first. Providers likewise treat unknown or dormant IPs with suspicion before they’ve proven themselves trustworthy. They monitor for positive signals—like opens, clicks and replies—and negative signals, such as bounces and spam complaints.

Warming an IP usually takes four to eight weeks. During this period, you verify to the mailbox providers that you are a legitimate sender rather than a spammer. This process builds the trust required to eventually handle your full sending volume without emails being diverted to the junk folder.

It’s also important to remember that while the IP address is crucial, your sending domain carries its own reputation. If you are introducing a new sending domain (e.g. launching a new brand website) alongside your new IP, the parallel process of domain warming will help establish authority for both simultaneously.

What is a dormant IP?

A sending IP is generally classified as dormant when there is no recorded activity—including email sends, opens, or clicks—within a specific window of time. For the majority of senders, the standard threshold for dormancy is 30 days. During this month-long silence, mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook begin to treat the IP with increasing suspicion. While very high-volume senders might occasionally see this window extended to 60 days, the risks of inactivity remain the same across the board. Once an IP crosses the 60-day mark, and especially as it approaches six months of inactivity, its standing is effectively reset. At this stage, the dormant IP is considered as good (or as bad) as a brand-new “cold” IP that has never sent a single email message.

Monitoring your IP’s health is the only way to ensure you aren’t walking into a deliverability trap. Beyond tracking your own email deliverability logs to ensure deliverability remains above 95%, using third-party tools provide essential perspectives on your reputation. For instance, Google Postmaster Tools offers a direct look at how the world’s largest email service provider views your infrastructure; a reputation score of “Low” or “Bad” is a clear signal of trouble. Similarly, platforms like Everest by Validity provide an IP Health Score where a rating below 70 suggests significant underlying issues that could lead to blacklisting or heavy filtering.

A strategic warming plan relies on these key components.

A successful warming plan calls for patience and precision. The most common mistake is rushing the process. Pushing too much volume too fast can get your IP blocked by mailbox providers, forcing you to restart the process and extending your timeline exponentially. To build a plan that works, focus on these critical areas:

Evaluate Technical Setup: When establishing a new IP, or warming up a dormant one, carefully assess if you have a shared IP (where you benefit from and share the risk of a pool of senders) or if you have a dedicated IP (offering absolute control, but requiring a full warm-up from a “zero” standing).

Phased volume increase: Create a schedule that gradually increases sending volume on a daily or weekly basis. Sudden spikes in traffic are a primary trigger for spam filters. By adhering to a strict ramp-up schedule, you condition the mailbox providers to expect traffic from your new address.

Smart segmentation: During the warming phase, you cannot treat all subscribers equally. Start with a tiny fraction of your list, focusing exclusively on your most active users (those who have opened or clicked recently). These users are most likely to generate the positive engagement signals that providers look for. As your reputation solidifies, you can gradually broaden your targeting to include less active segments. It is often wise to segment by mailbox provider as well, starting with your most engaged users. Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo and Microsoft’s family of services (Hotmail, Outlook, Live, MSN) are all considered key players who expect individual volume ramp-ups without really any impact from the other. All these providers are typically slotted in the initial segmentations along with the engagement criteria.

Data hygiene: Before you send, scrub your data to remove known hard bounces and invalid domains. Sending to invalid addresses during warm-up spikes your bounce rate, signaling a poorly managed list. Implement validation tools on signup forms to catch typos and use reCaptcha to prevent bots. Always double-check consent preferences.

Engaging content: The content must drive high engagement, so prioritize emails with a singular, clear and compelling call to action (CTA). Maintain a text-to-image ratio of roughly 70:30, as image-only emails can trigger spam filters, and ensure all images are optimized for fast load times (generally under 400 KB in file size and 600 pixels wide).

Redefined engagement metrics: Due to technical shifts like privacy updates, open rates are unreliable. Focus on “harder” metrics to gauge true engagement: clicks, replies, low bounces and low complaints (under 0.3%). Treat open rates as a general trendline.

Strategic Campaign Deployment: Avoid a simple “lift and shift” approach during platform migration. Audit all existing campaigns by asking: Why is this needed? What is the goal/KPI? What is the cost vs. value? How does it contribute to company objectives?

Deployment Strategy: Start by activating a few high-performing, always-on triggers (like abandoned cart or loyalty emails) to provide a steady stream of positive engagement data. Be cautious with “welcome” journeys during the first four weeks, as they often have higher unsubscribe rates.

This measured approach to deployment ensures that your initial interactions with mailbox providers are characterized by high-value, low-risk engagement. However, the effectiveness of these strategic sends is inextricably linked to the underlying infrastructure you choose. Before the first message is even queued, you must align your tactical goals with the right delivery framework, ensuring that your technical foundation is robust enough to support both the immediate warming phase and your long-term volume requirements.

Evaluate your technical setup when establishing or resetting a reputation.

Choosing between a shared or dedicated IP infrastructure or assessing your current IP set-up is a critical step whenever you are establishing a presence with a new email service provider, re-evaluating your strategy for a dormant IP, or reaching out to an outdated subscriber list. While this is often viewed as a purely technical task, focusing only on the “lift and shift” of data overlooks one of the most critical risks in email marketing: the potential collapse of your sender reputation.

If you opt for, or find that you have, a shared IP, you join a pool of other senders. While you benefit from their established history, you also share their risks; any brand on that IP that triggers a block by a mailbox provider can bring down deliverability for the entire group. Conversely, a dedicated IP ensures you are the sole sender of the address. While this offers absolute control over your reputation, any IP that is brand new or has gone “cold” through several months of inactivity starts with zero standing and necessitates a complete warming schedule.

Ensure data hygiene before you send.

The fastest way to ruin a fresh IP reputation is with poor data quality. A common misconception is that a sophisticated new email marketing platform will automatically fix dirty data (spoiler warning: it won’t). It’s critical to scrub your data before importing it into the new environment.

During the audience set-up for the IP warming exercise, remove known hard bounces and invalid domains. If you send to invalid addresses during your warm-up, your bounce rate will spike, signaling to providers that your list is purchased or poorly managed.

Implementing two-factor or multifactor authentication for new subscribers on sign-up forms is a valuable security measure, in addition to the strategies already discussed. Furthermore, it is essential to double-check consent preferences. Sending communications to users who have previously opted out is a surefire way to trigger spam complaints and cause legal trouble for your organization, potentially resulting in hefty fines under consumer protection laws like CAN-SPAM (US), CASL (Canada), or GDPR (Europe).

Redefine engagement metrics.

Ten years ago, marketers relied heavily on open rates to identify engaged audiences for IP warming. We used open rates as the primary gate to determine if we could increase volume the following day.

Today, open rates have become increasingly unreliable. Privacy updates (such as Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection), bots and email prefetching can all skew data, registering “opens” where no human actually saw the email. Or vice versa: consumer preferences, like disallowing the automatic downloading of images, may not register an open even if they do open it. Because of these technical shifts, we need to look at harder metrics to gauge true engagement.

• Clicks: A click is a definitive sign of human interest.
• Replies: A user replying to a marketing email is a strong trust signal.
• Low bounces: This proves list hygiene.
• Low complaints: Keeping spam complaints under 0.3% is vital for maintainability.

When monitoring your warm-up, treat open rates as a general trendline rather than the only KPI. Focus on clicks and conversions to tell the real story.

Relying on a “lift and shift” approach can hold you back.

To minimize disruption to day-to-day business operations, many organizations attempt to migrate everything exactly as is when moving to a new email service provider. While the desire for continuity is valid, these transitional periods are the perfect time to audit your strategy, expand on what is working, and fix what isn’t. Whether you are switching platforms or re-engaging a legacy list, taking an inventory of your current program is essential.

As you inventory your current automation and blasts, consider these four questions:

1. Why do we need to migrate this? “Because it’s currently running” is not a sufficient answer.
2. What is the goal, and how do we measure success? If there is no clear KPI, or if you are testing without a plan to act on the results, the campaign may be dead weight.
3. What is the cost versus the value? Specific campaigns may cost more to migrate, maintain and monitor than the business value they generate.
4. How does this contribute to company objectives? Every email should be part of a cohesive strategy, not an isolated tactic.

Deploy your campaigns strategically.

A successful deployment—whether part of a platform migration or an IP warming effort—calls for a blend of automated and manual sending strategies. Start by activating a few of your best-performing “always-on” journeys. In many scenarios, the ideal candidates are high-engagement triggers like abandoned cart emails, loyalty program milestones, or birthday promotions. These typically generate consistent daily volume and high interaction rates, which provides a steady heartbeat of positive data for the email providers. 

However, be cautious with “welcome” journeys. While they are essential, they often carry slightly higher unsubscribe rates than other lifecycle messages. If possible, avoid prioritizing welcome series during the first four weeks of the warm-up phase to keep negative signals to an absolute minimum.

Build a foundation for the future.

Beyond clearing a technical hurdle, IP warming serves as a foundational investment in your email marketing program. By taking the time to assess your infrastructure, clean your data, audit your content strategy, and ramp up volume patiently, you do more than just appease the mailbox providers. You set a standard of quality that protects your brand's reputation and ensures your messages continue to land where they belong: in the inbox.

Our talk, “Combating Early Student Drop-Off with Conversational SMS Journeys in Marketing Cloud,” focused on a use case well known in the education sector: addressing drop-off rates for students embarking on their first experience with online learning. However, the tools and strategies we covered are just as relevant for brand marketers of online or SAAS products who are looking to combat similar issues when needing to comprehensively onboard customers to prevent churn. By understanding how to maintain engagement and foster loyalty from the start, businesses can drive significant growth and success.

In our presentation, Ghea and I demonstrated how personalized, multi-touchpoint SMS journeys can keep students—or any customers—engaged. We utilized Salesforce Marketing Cloud's powerful SMS features and used data extensions and AMPScript to craft dynamic and responsive communications. By leveraging these features and the integration of Marketing Cloud with Salesforce CRM, we created a framework that enhances customer support and interaction. This integration also enables real-time insights and proactive support, ensuring that your brand can meet the needs of your audience promptly.

 The journey we designed also highlights the use of Salesforce Sales Cloud to keep student advisors abreast of their cohort’s journey, and for advanced tracking and reporting that provides a comprehensive view of customer interactions. If you're interested in discovering how these techniques can help your business reduce churn and build stronger customer connections, I invite you to watch the full presentation. You'll learn how to implement a proactive, personalized approach that not only addresses existing challenges but also anticipates future needs. You'll also gain valuable insights into creating personalized communication that resonates with your audience, driving lasting engagement and loyalty.

But a key theme was the need to unify disparate data sources, orchestrating teams around unified workflows to maximize data impact—in one word, the event focused on integration. This strongly resonated with me, because it’s exactly what my team is built to help brands achieve; as a unitary partner and systems integrator, we specialize in creating platform solutions that seamlessly integrate AI and customer data to drive growth. From new product announcements to sales stories, let’s look at the growing need for an integrated approach to customer relationship management (CRM) and the role that a unitary partner can play in helping brands maximize its impact.

Here's what Salesforce announced this year.

One of the most exciting announcements was the introduction of Einstein Copilot for Marketers, set to release in June. This tool translates customer data into actionable campaign briefs, offering generative AI features like copy creation and automated communications. Salesforce is also now orchestrating seamless handoffs between multiple Copilots to enhance team collaboration. These innovations bridge the gap between customer data insights and content creation to drive impact across the business. For example, you can pair Einstein Copilot for Marketers with Einstein Copilot for Merchandisers to uncover up-selling opportunities.

Salesforce also announced enhancements to Data Cloud for Commerce, providing a unified view of customer data from numerous commerce data points. This empowers marketers to create hyper-personalized experiences—but when paired with Einstein Copilot products, these efforts become even more impactful.

Another major announcement was the Zero Copy Data Partner Network, connecting technology, system integration, and data ecosystem partners. This network allows marketers to draw data from a broader array of sources (without that data needing to be housed on their Salesforce platform), amplifying their AI-driven efforts.

What’s interesting about these announcements is the emerging, overarching theme of integration and collaborative workflows to help marketing teams work better together. This is the bread and butter of a unitary partner who can ensure that data accessibility, unified customer views and team collaboration are optimized across the business. By bridging together expertise across disciplines like data, media, content, and technology, such a partner is best suited to deliver the full potential of these solutions as they work in harmony with one another.

Peek inside the success stories that were shaped by seamless integration.

While at Salesforce Connections, I had the chance to speak with brands—learning their needs, pain points and the opportunities they most look forward to—and got to watch the different speaker sessions that we hosted or participated in. These conversations presented a range of success stories demonstrating how integrated solutions helped brands unlock new possibilities in their marketing. Here are three goals that my team has been able to help brands achieve.

Data integration and unified customer views. In a talk that is available on demand, Alex Furth, Marketing Manager, Digital Innovation from Gatorade shared how Einstein AI and Data Cloud unified fragmented consumer data, enabling effective and tailored marketing strategies. Theresa McCombs Marketing Director, Brokerage Services and Julia Homier Digital Marketing Consultant, from Holmes Murphy told a similar story in the talk “Drive Financial Services Marketing ROI with AI-Powered Data,” where they detailed their journey with Salesforce's Marketing Cloud to enhance customer engagement and data management through centralized automation tools and Einstein AI. Both brands’ successes show how unified data solutions significantly enhance engagement and performance metrics, exemplifying the need for centralized, strategic data management.

Personalized engagement and customer loyalty. Our session with PepsiCo, “Data-Driven Engagement for PepsiCo Tasty Rewards,” focused on their Tasty Rewards loyalty program, which uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Einstein to drive loyalty and increase long-term value. They achieved a 100% increase in open rates and a 170% increase in click rates. If you missed the talk, you can still learn more about PepsiCo’s approach to scaled personalization from a different angle in a previously recorded webinar.

Meanwhile, Broadway Across America showcased how Salesforce’s solutions personalized customer experiences, significantly increasing month-over-month (MoM) subscriptions. “My favorite part of Connections was talking about some of the innovations we’re helping Broadway Across America with, mainly the SMS texting strategy for them in 25 different markets, and they’ve seen awesome results,” my colleague Amy Downs, VP of Commercial at Media.Monks, noted. “Their MoM subscription increase was 7%, compared to a 0.14% increase before we implemented that strategy.”

The lesson: data-driven engagement strategies drive significant increases in subscriptions and long-term customer loyalty—an important consideration for marketers who are embracing product-led growth strategies.

Marketing automation and strategic alignment. Another significant consideration that Theresa and Julia at Holmes Murphy emphasized was the importance of consolidating varied automation tools. By implementing Einstein AI and aligning marketing strategies with business objectives, together we were able to streamline operations and surpassed industry engagement benchmarks. Centralizing operations through consolidated automation tools not only boosts engagement but also enhances overall marketing efficiency, demonstrating the critical role of integrated, strategic automation in achieving business goals.

That’s a wrap on an event that’s all about connections.

Attending Salesforce Connections was an exhilarating experience, showcasing the transformative potential of integrating AI and data to drive marketing innovation. The success stories from brands like PepsiCo, Gatorade, Broadway Across America and Holmes Murphy highlighted how unifying data with Salesforce's powerful tools opens up new possibilities. These brands have achieved remarkable success by leveraging coordinated workflows and seamless data integration, and I’m excited to continue supporting brands in their journey to do the same by unlocking the full potential of their CRM and the technologies like AI that rely on it.

For all these reasons, the praise for AI among marketing experts is ceaseless; but while much ink has been spilled about it, we’ve merely begun to scratch the surface. This month, our team was part of Salesforce Connections, where the topic of AI and its impact on customer relationships dominated conversations. The two jam-packed days of sessions were all about creating strong, lasting customer connections with meaningful interactions—using AI combined with the power of first-party data to ideate, create and deliver them.

As the event kicked off, Salesforce unveiled their new AI-driven tools for personalized customer experiences, and we were honored to be featured in their announcement as one of the partners contributing to their generative AI ecosystem. If you want to learn more about AI and its impact on customer relationships, here are some of the main takeaways from our people’s keynotes and panel discussions.

AI empowers CMOs as their roles evolve. 

On the first day of the event, our Chief Innovation Officer, Henry Cowling, and S4 Capital Group Executive Chairman, Sir Martin Sorrell, shared the main stage. Together with industry experts such as Salesforce President Sarah Franklin, they unpacked the role of AI in consumer engagement at the CMO+ experience, which convenes an intimate group of the world’s most influential CMOs for hyper-relevant networking.

As we know, the role of the Chief Marketing Officer has undergone a significant transformation. The CMO is no longer solely responsible for overseeing marketing campaigns; instead, they have become a crucial strategic partner to the CEO and the C-suite. Today, the CMO’s role is to take business insights and bring them to market so that value can be realized. But in an always-on environment, that value can only be realized through personalization at scale, data-driven decision-making and the addressing of regulatory pressures and privacy concerns.

To unlock all of that and more, the aid of AI is key. For years, data experts have banked on predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to help identify patterns, trends and customer segments, leading to more targeted and effective marketing strategies. Now, we’re finally approaching the promised land of hyper-personalization, where real-time insights inform each customer’s experience on a granular level and personalized content can be generated at scale.

Enhance customer experiences with cross-functional data systems.

Cowling puts it simply, “In an AI-enabled marketing landscape, the smartest data set wins.” First-party data is at the center of any journey of digital transformation, and through their marketing leaders, brands have an opportunity to capitalize on their unique data and intellectual property. By doing so, they can strengthen customer relationships and offer groundbreaking experiences that are key for success.

However, leveraging your data to its full potential also demands that CMOs partner with peers within and outside their organization. It’s important for teams to look beyond their specific perspectives and collaborate with their counterparts in IT, data science, product development, customer service, sales and even external partners who can provide valuable solutions. 

On top of that, the transformative potential of AI is fundamentally changing how we see, understand and use data. Therefore, it raises new ethical, social and legal questions, requiring a reevaluation of our current systems and frameworks. The sooner brands address those with the input from their different teams, the sooner they’ll be able to leverage AI as a customer engagement tool.

Activate loyalty with a strong data strategy.

Hot on the heels of Cowling and Sorrell’s insightful chats, our customer relationships experts and Directors of Go-to-Market Ashley Musumeci and Nich Seo shed some light on the future of loyalty. Their presentation emphasized an important fact: in today’s ever-elusive landscape of consumer attention and loyalty, brands have a golden opportunity to set themselves apart by delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Contrary to outdated notions, true customer loyalty goes beyond a rewards program and requires ongoing, meaningful interactions with your customers. It hinges upon the emotional connection customers develop through their collective experiences with a brand—and there are three approaches to consider as you strive to create those bonds:

• Forge deeper connections by making sure consumers feel your brand values and understand them. Achieving this entails aligning personal values, creating impactful content, implementing personalization strategies and fostering a sense of community. It also requires the ability to anticipate customer needs and desires, exceeding their expectations at every turn.
• Offer meaningful experiences that provide genuine and relevant value for people’s interaction with your brand. This can be achieved by creating unique branded moments that leave a lasting impression, tapping into exclusivity, enhancing gamification elements to make interactions more engaging and embracing a purpose-driven approach.
• Building integrated ecosystems that expand the customer-brand relationship in innovative ways. For example, by connecting all physical and virtual touchpoints and forming an accessible universe that consumers can seamlessly navigate. 

Now, you may be thinking: this sounds great, but where do I even start? As we discussed earlier, data plays a crucial role in the marketing lifecycle, enabling the delivery of enhanced value. Therefore, the initial step toward creating seamless, personalized and meaningful experiences is to establish a robust data strategy. Customer data resides on various platforms, and collection points are scattered throughout the entire customer journey. To overcome this challenge, identify integration points between existing technologies and unify the ecosystem.

The importance of cross-functional collaboration and leveraging first-party data to enhance customer experiences cannot be overstated. With AI enabling hyper-personalization, real-time insights and effective decision-making, it’s crucial to embrace AI-driven tools and establish a robust data strategy as a foundation for success. Now is the time to harness the power of AI and unlock its full potential in driving customer engagement and empowering CMOs.

CRM is crucial to any first-party data strategy because it sits at the center of every customer interaction: through behavioral and environmental triggers, your customer is feeding inputs that influence future experiences, like product recommendations and personalized messaging. Essentially, data makes personalized experiences possible—and when done right, those experiences in turn generate more data that brands can act on. With the death of the cookie on the horizon, these insights will become even more critical to your marketing strategy.

There’s no better time than now to unify data within a CRM ecosystem to improve the efficiency of teams, inform future business strategies and, of course, enhance customer experiences overall. These efforts involve building data pipelines that help them better learn about their customers and engage with the right message at the right time. With the help of automation, a powerful collaborator that helps teams pull off outcomes that only eluded them before, the sales team can focus on only the most qualified leads. 

Not sure where to get started? No worries; I’ve gathered a couple brands who have successfully transformed their CRM ecosystems to fuel personalized experiences at scale.

Translate behavioral cues to key business insights.

Beyond driving conversion, one of the most impactful results of a strong CRM strategy is being able to leverage behavior data to guide better consumer experiences—of which Australian Community Media (ACM) makes a prime example. ACM is a large media organization that operates over 140 local news mastheads across Australia, serving both free visitors and paying subscribers. That’s a lot of relationships to manage and readers to serve. To those ends, the brand relies on email marketing and onsite personalization via Salesforce Marketing Cloud to reach and continually engage with readers.

ACM wanted to better understand subscriber behavior to create more personalized, relevant experiences in the form of automated content recommendations. Previously, this content was manually selected by editors or determined by publish date. Using Marketing Cloud Personalization, we were able to pull from subscribers’ engagement and platform behavioral data (like affinities toward news categories) to build personalized recommendations—boosting not only relevance but also employee efficiency.

This data did more than simply help serve personalized content to email subscribers. Armed with insights into which topics readers enjoy the most, editors can now easily plan out future content and focus on the kinds of stories their readers care about the most. More broadly, these same insights allow ACM editors to better predict engagement across the user journey—showing how CRM data can extend beyond marketing to unlock critical business insights that ultimately serve audiences. The best part: automated content recommendations free the editors to focus more on these strategic concerns of how to build better impact.

Elicit engagement to personalize at scale.

If you struggle to glean insights from audience behavior, here’s a tip: make it as easy as possible for customers and prospects to tell you more. This simple step was the cornerstone of Woodlea’s CRM refresh. Woodlea is a master-planned community of 7,000 lots located 30km west of Melbourne. With a need to focus on buyers at the right time, their sales representatives wanted to be able to give special attention to novice buyers. But this posed a challenge: how could they personalize communication and experiences at scale?

We began by helping the brand insert forms into email sent to buyers, a move that increased engagement while generating significant user data in the process. The newly interactive emails included simple questions and a prompt for recipients to build out their profile in Woodlea’s customer portal (powered by Salesforce Experience Cloud). The fact that these forms were embedded into the actual email content made it a seamless user experience and increased the percentage of leads who engaged. This first-party data then fed back into Woodlea’s Salesforce CRM, allowing for automated lead nurturing and qualification. These efficiencies freed the sales team to focus on two key buyer personas: those ready to make a purchase and first-time buyers who needed more attention throughout the buyer’s journey.

Enhance CRM to start building your first-party data foundation now.

The best time to transform your customer experience was yesterday, but there’s still time before cookie deprecation to experiment with new ways of generating first-party data—and CRM is at the heart of the process. From eliciting user engagement to gain key insights, to building efficiencies through automation and automation, linking data and inputs across a connected CRM ecosystem goes a long way in serving stronger, more personalized customer experiences and key business goals—so don’t wait.

Need help or don’t know where to start? Reach out to learn more.

To explore how brands could innovate a scalable, customer centric Web3 strategy, we partnered with the Salesforce Web3 Studio to gather a team of experts for a Brunch ‘n Learn session at CES. Jordan Cuddy, Partner and Chief Client Officer at Jam3; Marc Mathieu, Co-Founder of Salesforce Web3 Studio; and Swan Sit, Independent Board Director, Advisor, Creator and Investor, discussed how early adopters have leveraged Web3 to create more meaningful connections with their customers—and how the technology represents a foundational shift in customer relationships.

While the conversation touched on several key insights and examples of brands in the space, the trio uncovered three key shifts in mindset that will help brands realize the true potential of Web3, whether by strengthening customer experiences, better understanding who they’re marketing to, or building long-term loyalty.

It’s about the value of the brand, not the product.

Whether it’s a loyalty program, a digital wearable collection or something different altogether, the true value in any Web3 engagement lies in whether it feels authentic to the brand. In short, no one is going to care about (or stick with) a Web3 project that’s at odds with what the brand stands for. So if you consider making moves in Web3, start by taking stock of what makes your brand valuable to people already. “In your P&L, when you look at the intangible lines and want to look at the value of a brand or community, that’s a representation,” says Sit.

As for what an authentic brand alignment looks like, Cuddy offered an example from our work with Adidas. The strategy team at Jam3 realized there was a shift in consumers’ minds from “Where can I go in the metaverse?” to “Who can I be in the metaverse?” Realizing the desire for unique ways to express oneself in this space, we built a platform that generates a unique, interoperable metaverse avatar based on each user’s personality. “It made sense for a brand that says ‘Impossible is nothing,’” Cuddy says.

Digital identities are complex and nuanced—not just numbers.

Consumers are people. It may sound obvious, but marketing teams everywhere are facing a reckoning for chasing cookies and arbitrary identifiers rather than forging meaningful, impactful personal relationships with their base. “We’ve forgotten that people are not just data and that we can just target them,” says Mathieu. “In reality, the underlying technology of Web3 is about giving back power to the user and creators, but that means we need to be ready to stop thinking of them as just consumers.” 

Think of them collaborators, co-creators, co-innovators or co-contributors—but either way, make sure the service you’re providing is actually valuable to them, because that’s what drives anonymous Web3 users to identify themselves. “Most people don’t want to give you their data if you don’t give them something in return,” says Mathieu, noting how in this way, Web3 technology can play a crucial role in future proofing brands’ CRM strategies as they head into the post-cookie future.

Beyond futureproofing, Web3 will make identity more complex. “A lot of people feel more authentic digitally because they’re able to express and experiment with who they are more freely without prejudice and inequalities,” Mathieu says. “We’re on the verge of having to deal with a very different concept of identities.” But that’s a good thing, because those complexities are rich for gaining deeper and more nuanced insight into your audience. What projects or communities a person chooses to invest in says a lot more about them than traditional identifiers like a phone number or email address, says Mathieu.

Loyalty is about being loyal to your customer.

“We’ve been thinking of loyalty as something consumers owe us,” says Mathieu. “Now, consumers are saying, ‘How will you be loyal to me? Are you going to serve me throughout my life through products, experiences and services?’” Again, looking at your customers as collaborators—in which brand and audience both have skin in the game—is a path to unlocking greater loyalty.

Web3 is a creator space, and brands who are comfortable collaborating with their consumers will come out on top. In fact, there may already be a community dedicated to your brand without your knowledge or authorization—but instead of pulling the plug, consider ways you can support and join in the fun. Matheiu compared it to the time he worked at Coca-Cola in the early days of Facebook, when the company discovered a group about the brand made by fans. “We asked how to make it bigger instead of shutting it down,” he says.

Cuddy also shared the process of seeking fan input in developing ComplexLand, a virtualization of the iconic ComplexCon that we continued to evolve over three annual editions. “Between each version, we talked to the community. We didn’t do typical market research; we talked to people who actually participated,” says Cuddy. In year two, for example, the team added multiplayer experiences based on fan feedback. The most recent iteration implemented NFT creation to solve fans’ need for more ways to express themselves creatively. “We listened to them and applied it, and that starts to build that loyalty when they’re the co-creator.”

Shift your mindset to win in Web3.

Remember, NFTs, blockchain and the like are just technologies—a means to an end, not the end itself. Sit aptly put it this way: “When someone asks what music you listen to, you don’t say MP3s.” 

Likewise, the way brands unlock value in Web3 isn’t to put out projects for the sake of it; it’s about working in partnership with your customers to better serve their needs. Web3 has ignited consumer mindset shifts across trust, products and ownership, and now’s the time to follow suit—because when you do, you’ll gain a stronger, more nuanced relationship with your base.

In this spirit, I've been down a two-year-long rabbit hole in the Web3 space, investigating various digital innovations and closely observing all the steps key trailblazers are taking. While our detailed “Future of Loyalty” report with Reddit, Salesforce and Polygon Labs lays out all the facts and figures, this article represents the condensed culmination of my exploration. To start with the conclusion for a change, I believe digital collectibles as a product and Web3 as a space are highly beneficial for brands to incorporate in their loyalty programs, as they help foster the future of customer loyalty.

Benefits that go both ways. 

Now, let’s take a few steps back. Loyalty programs, which are typically presented to people during the point of purchase, are designed to incentivize customers to shop both more items and more frequently, engage with the brand more often, and share it with more people they know—in a way, it’s all about incentivizing more, more, more. To actually realize these actions, loyalty programs offer rewards that unlock various branded benefits, from discounts to exclusive product deals. From a brand’s perspective, the purpose is to find out more about its customers, while offering a value exchange. 

Brands can use various metrics to measure the effectiveness of their loyalty programs, including customer lifetime value (CLV), average order volume (AOV) and conversion rate (CR). A successful program is able to maintain or increase one or all of these metrics. For example, this means that customers continue to shop from the brand and for longer periods of time. While customers search and purchase products, the brand is able to gather a ton of data on them. More information means more personalization, which, in turn, means more rewards for consumers. In short, the objective is to incentivize actions, interactions and return visits.   

The vast majority of high-performing loyalty programs are digital, accessible through a brand’s app or website. However, that may be about to move into a new direction, as we’re now ushering into the next era of the internet—Web3—and it’s all about culture and community-building.

NFTs: your ticket into a brand’s action.  

More than just a new tech infrastructure, Web3 represents a foundational shift in the ways people organize and engage with one another. Through the arrival of Web3, we’re entering an ownership era where everyone has a chance to own a piece of the action. This ownership partly lies in NFTs or digital collectibles, which can be many things—an artwork that evolves over time as users get involved, a digital object, and more. So, how exactly do NFTs fit into the next generation of loyalty ecosystems? 

While NFTs can take on any digital form, they all act as memberships. Think of them as traditional membership passes that are built on the blockchain, offer exclusive benefits, and serve as access passes into a brand’s Web3 loyalty program. NFTs are the new means of digital value exchange that help consumers unlock ownership over brand experiences. They are the future of loyalty and community in an increasingly tokenized world, where you become a small investor in a brand and its future success once you get your hands on its NFT. By joining a brand’s community and interacting with it, consumers tend to feel proud about the NFT’s value and their personal association with the brand. This, in turn, creates a new form of engagement and commitment.

Supercharging memberships to cement customer loyalty. 

From Gucci to Starbucks, both luxury and everyday brands are looking for ways to launch into the world of Web3 and reach new communities, and the most common route is through NFTs. In partnership with SuperRare and NiftyKit, Vault—Gucci's experimental online platform—launched the Vault Art Space. It’s a place where fans of the brand, art lovers and crypto-natives can bid on, mint and collect exclusive, curated digital artworks. This future-forward move made Gucci the first legacy brand in the world to own and manage its very own digital art marketplace, demonstrating its literacy and legitimacy by using the right body language in the Web3 space as well as its ability to move beyond the hype.

As for Starbucks, the popular American coffee company has just brought a blockchain-based loyalty platform to market titled “the Starbucks Odyssey Beta experience.” This will offer its members the ability to buy and earn digital collectable stamps in the form of NFTs, which create access to new immersive coffee experiences. By integrating NFTs into its industry-leading loyalty program at scale, Starbucks is building an accessible Web3 community. The coffee company’s loyalty program is already a success story, with more than half of all sales coming from its reward members. Besides, it’s a great way for the brand to gather first-party data. Starbucks getting into Web3 is a big deal for the industry, for innovation and for brand spectators—if done right, this loyalty integration will increase its conversion rates and help the brand collect even more user data. 

This goes to show that brands from across the board are building new supercharged memberships as part of loyalty programs. Our recent “Web3 and the Future of Luxury” report, which my fellow Monks wrote and released together with Salesforce, states that “Memberships open people up to a community of others—something that’s missing from traditional loyalty programs, which provide only a relationship between an individual and the brand. And while loyalty programs are designed to reward consumers through continual consumption, memberships give them the opportunity to shape the brand and generate value.” The power of Web3 is that it builds on people’s desire to be part of a tribe by giving them a more significant role after they’ve bought into a brand, thereby cementing their loyalty. 

It’s time to launch your loyalty program into the next era of the internet. 

Though many people only know of NFTs as digital artworks, the Web3 space encompasses so much more than just aesthetics. First up, there’s identity, as you would only purchase a product to enter a space that aligns with your personal interests and values. Next up, it’s about community and connecting with a group of people that have similar passions and interests. The Web3 space is also about cooperation and teaming up with your peers. Finally, there’s also some good ol’ luck involved, as some NFTs are only available to those that had also bought into the brand’s previous NFT projects. Sometimes it’s really just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Then again, this exclusivity is tempting. Overall, these are the guiding principles from a consumer perspective, and highlight what loyalty programs should be able to provide when customers engage with a brand’s NFTs.  

Circling back to my conclusion, I believe NFTs and Web3 are beneficial for brands to incorporate in their loyalty programs. Enhanced customer lifetime value, average order volume and conversion rates are all huge benefits that NFTs and Web3 can bring to a loyalty program. First, they allow customers to get exclusive perks for an upfront cost and continuously uncover deeper layers of the loyalty ecosystem, keeping them engaged with the brand at an ownership level. Second, NFTs offer exclusive access to unique items and benefit those who buy multiple items, which increases what people are willing to pay for an item and how much they will purchase. Third, they enhance conversion rates, as exclusive items and token-gated experiences sell out more often than not when done well. 

These are just three of the primary perks that loyalty programs supported by the next era of the internet can bring. Depending on your business and other KPIs, there may be many other benefits. This goes to show that NFTs and Web3 help foster the future of customer loyalty, as many people are eager to get into projects they believe are cool, innovative, interesting, relevant and set to deliver long-term value. How to get there? Just follow our three-step process: culture, community, and then commerce.