Rethinking retail experiences: Inside Macy’s customer-first marketing strategy

For more than 160 years, Macy’s has remained one of America’s most iconic retailers — not because it resists change, but because it continually reimagines what it means to put the customer first. In a recent episode of the Marketer’s Alchemy podcast our guest shares how his team is transforming the brand’s approach to data-driven marketing through deeper listening, targeted personalization and a relentless commitment to authentic customer experience.

What’s inside this episode

Macy’s evolution provides a blueprint for modern marketers: When data becomes democratized, customer insights become actionable and customer loyalty becomes sustainable.

Rewiring the organization around the customer

Macy’s bold transformation strategy, aptly named Bold New Chapter, centers on one principle: customer obsession. Bennett explained that in prior years, decision-making could be influenced by last year’s playbook, the P&L or vendor considerations. Today, the structure has changed.

Macy’s is rebuilding its processes around customer needs, not internal habits.

“When you focus on your customer, and when you put them at the center of your decision making, you drive an improved experience — and that leads to true loyalty and retention. That is what fuels sustainable, profitable growth for our business,” shared Bennett.

To support this shift, Macy’s established a customer function focused on three simple but powerful questions:

• How do we listen to our customers?
• How do we act on what we hear?
• How do we enable that through technology?

This framework has since become the backbone of Macy’s approach to personalization and omnichannel consistency.

Democratizing customer insights across the business

Listening is the first (and arguably most important) step in building meaningful customer experiences. Macy’s does this at scale through primary research, analytics, NPS surveys and constant digital feedback loops. Yet the real unlock has been democratizing that data across the organization.

One major breakthrough came when Macy’s began embedding customer insights roles directly within merchant teams. By placing experts in the “flow of the business,” insights became immediate, iterative and far more actionable. This change accelerated how quickly the business could respond to customer needs, and it strengthened alignment between merchandising and marketing.

This level of cross-functional enablement is exactly the kind of modern orchestration today’s data-driven brands strive for: one where insights inform and transform decisions.

From one-way messaging to conversational personalization

Macy’s has long recognized that customers don’t want marketing that simply knows their name; they want marketing that knows their needs. Bennett joked, “I’ve never had a customer who comes in and asks me for personalization. They may ask for more contextual and relevant interactions from the brand.”

With this mindset, Macy’s shifted away from calendar-driven batch sends toward more conversational sequences built around customer journeys. Whether completing a room after a home purchase or nurturing a long-term beauty customer after a gift-with-purchase, the brand now prioritizes:

• Context: Where the customer is, what they’re doing, what they need
• Relevance: What the brand knows about them and how much to surface

Macy’s rigorously tests these interactions (timing, content, audience) and iterates until the experiences feel right and perform well. It’s a powerful blend of art and science, and it’s redefining what customer-first marketing looks like at scale.

Building the right tech to support the right experience

In an era of rapidly expanding martech stacks, Macy’s is intentional about the technology it adopts. Instead of chasing every emerging tool, the team stays laser-focused on the experience they want to create and invests only in tech that enables it.

A great example: Macy’s recently developed the ability to pause irrelevant emails when a more meaningful interaction (like a post-purchase “complete the room” message) is triggered. It’s a simple shift with strategic impact: reducing noise, increasing relevance, and improving customer satisfaction.

Bennett stresses that tech should be modern, flexible and grounded in ROI, not novelty.

Testing, learning and personalizing value

One of Macy’s biggest wins in recent years is its personalized offers program, which gives each customer value where they value it most. Since launching in 2023, the program has delivered more than half a billion tailored offers and now reaches over 30 million customers.

The program has produced strong results across sales, profit, and customer lifetime value, a metric Bennett says is not always the easiest to pin down, but the most important for long-term growth.

This commitment to personalization, paired with disciplined testing (like understanding when to scale back paid retargeting), is helping Macy’s sharpen its marketing mix with precision.

The magic formula: Conversation leads to conversion

When asked to summarize his advice to marketers, Bennett offered a line as simple as it is powerful:

“Conversation leads to conversion.”

It’s a mantra used across Macy’s stores, but it resonates just as strongly across digital and marketing channels. Customers respond to brands that feel human; and in a world full of noise, meaningful interaction is a competitive advantage.

Macy’s journey reinforces a core belief shared by leading data-driven marketers: Modern marketing succeeds at the intersection of intelligence and empathy. Data provides clarity, but it’s the narrative around that data that creates connection. Macy’s has shown what’s possible when teams aren’t just empowered with insights, but equipped to act on them creatively, collaboratively and consistently.

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