Inside the lifecycle playbooks of nearly 1,200 brands across consumer apps, fintech, retail, and online marketplaces.
Marketing has entered a new phase, and it's moving fast. The brands that will lead in 2026 aren't the ones running more campaigns — they're the ones treating engagement as a year-round discipline. This benchmark report unpacks the patterns separating market-leading lifecycle programs from the rest.
Engagement is no longer a function of how many emails you send. It's a function of how many signals you capture — and how fast you act on them. The benchmark draws the line between the brands operating that way and the ones still planning campaigns by quarter.
of consumers expect personalized experiences across every interaction with a brand.
of shoppers say they use AI most or every time they shop. The number expects to keep climbing.
of CMOs cite disconnected data as the single biggest constraint on their growth program.
Sources: Salesforce State of the Connected Customer 2025, Iterable Black Friday Insights 2026, CMO Outlook: Guide to 2026.
120 pages. Four vertical playbooks. The full operating system behind the brands setting the pace — including the agentic patterns that turn lifecycle marketing from a calendar into a system that runs itself.
Get the ReportThe marketers in the top quartile aren't doing more — they're operating on different assumptions. Three shifts separate them from everyone else, and the report unpacks each one with the data behind it.
Black Friday is no longer a weekend. Loyalty is no longer a tier program. The brands gaining share are warming demand year-round, not waiting for peak windows that arrive smaller every year.
The "AI Boss" era is here. The work shifts from manually orchestrating each step to guiding small teams of agents that handle research, execution, and routine optimization — and from telling marketers what to do, to deciding what to delegate.
Bloated stacks accumulated during the SaaS boom are getting unwound. The systems that endure won't be the ones with the most features — they'll be the ones with the fewest seams between data, channels, and decisions.
The report's organized around three roles that share one outcome — pipeline that compounds. Each section reads cleanly on its own, with the patterns, plays, and quiet anti-patterns mapped to the work that role actually owns.
Where lifecycle programs drift from brand strategy, and how leading CMOs realign without slowing down the field. Includes the four conversations Priya Gill ran with peers heading into 2026 planning.
What separates programs that compound from programs that hit the same ceiling each year. Field, ABM, integrated campaigns, paid, webinars — mapped against the operations and analytics layer that actually moves them.
Attribution that holds up when the CFO asks the second question. Definitions, governance, and the data infrastructure choices that make the difference between forecasting that builds credibility and forecasting that erodes it.
The brands powering customer engagement at scale don't share a vertical, a stack, or a stage. They share a discipline. A representative cross-section of the dataset behind the report.
Customer roster representative. Logos shown as wordmarks for portfolio rendering; replace with brand assets at deploy.
120 pages. Four vertical playbooks. The patterns and anti-patterns that separate the brands setting the pace from the ones still hitting the same ceiling each quarter.
Get the Report