CRM Talks #42 with Antony Lea

Welcome to the next episode of the new season of CRM Talks. We are excited to introduce our next speaker, Antony Lea, Global CRM Director at G&C Marketing Ltd (previously Betfair, Notonthehighstreet, Treatwell, Deliveroo, Zepz & Viator).

In this interview, Antony shares a modern approach to personalization driven by behavioral and contextual data, supported by real-world examples from his work. He also highlights the underrated value of tools like content blocks and dynamic modules. These are the very mechanics that enable meaningful personalization. Looking ahead, Antony emphasizes that AI will undoubtedly play an active role in CRM, but it won’t replace human expertise—sharp minds will always stand behind the machines.

One outdated belief I’d happily leave behind is the idea that personalization just means adding someone’s first name to an email. That kind of surface-level tactic might have passed five or ten years ago, but today’s definition of personalization is far more advanced and far more valuable.

These days, true personalization means using rich behavioral and contextual data: browsing history, product usage, recency/frequency/monetary metrics, lifetime value, preferences, and more—then combining all of that to deliver meaningful, relevant experiences across every touchpoint.

At Treatwell, that meant understanding the difference between someone’s weekday treatments near work vs. their weekend preferences closer to home, and recommending the right salons for each. At Deliveroo, it was about decoding cuisine preferences, order habits, price sensitivity, and preferred order times, to surface the most relevant restaurants—not just the most popular ones.

And at Not On The High Street, we dug deep into the site and email browsing behavior. For example, if a customer just bought a personalized doormat with their dog’s name on it, it’s not helpful to show them more doormats. It’s about predicting what comes next in that customer’s unique journey and personalizing the next step accordingly.

Old-school personalization was about saying, “Hi Adrian from Wokingham, it’s been 5 days since you browsed.” Modern personalization is about getting the right product or content in front of the right customer, at exactly the right moment—with intelligence, not just placeholders.

Whether you're trying to get customers to buy more entries into a multi-million-pound house prize draw or retain them for a new weight-loss product, smart personalization is what drives lasting engagement—and, ultimately, success.

One of the most underrated CRM tactics right now is the smart use of content blocks and dynamic modules. So many companies are focused on short-term tactical comms, reactive sends, quick wins, and chasing end-of-month targets that they overlook the long-term value these tools can bring in both performance and efficiency.

In a lot of the businesses I’ve joined, I’ve seen teams using maybe 20–30% of their CRM system’s capabilities. That’s a huge missed opportunity. Dynamic modules allow you to create adaptable, scalable frameworks that reduce production efforts while significantly increasing personalization.

I always recommend employing a MarTech specialist on your CRM team who knows your CRM platform inside out—to help build out a strong, flexible foundation. Once those frameworks are in place, it actually frees up your team to be more creative and strategic, because they’re not reinventing the wheel every time they send a campaign.

It’s a brilliant balance of structure and freedom, and I think it’s where some of the best CRM teams are heading.

Well, if you believe everything you read or hear, it’ll be completely run by SkyNet and all of us humans will be replaced by AI. I think the reality will be slightly less dramatic (I say, hoping these words don’t come back to haunt me).

Undoubtedly, AI—and Agentic AI in particular—is here to stay and will absolutely improve how we drive performance, scale experimentation, and optimize customer journeys. But I genuinely believe that smart, curious, and dedicated CRM marketers will remain central to success.

My experience shows that while AI can offer surface-level knowledge across many areas, you still need specialists who understand the nuances—the underlying data, the customer psychology, and the brand voice—to make CRM truly impactful.

So yes, we’ll all be using AI. Yes, CRM platforms will be increasingly intelligent and autonomous. But the systems will still need sharp minds behind them—people who know when to trust the machine, and when to challenge it.

In short, the future of CRM will be tech-enabled but human-led. Either that, or we’ll all be working for our computer overlords…in which case, I hope they at least let us manage the email campaigns. Seems only fair, given how many we’ve written for them.