Sonal Bilawala, Head of Customer Engagement & Lead Development at The Globe and Mail, believes the best marketing starts with understanding the customer. By combining lifecycle thinking, automation, and personalization, she focuses on creating connected experiences that deliver value at every stage of the journey.
In this Q&A, Sonal shares why customer-centricity is her greatest marketing strength, how her team approaches omnichannel personalization, the efficiency hack she relies on most, and the advice she'd give marketers looking to make data-driven personalization more approachable.
What is your greatest marketing superpower?
A core strength lies in anticipating and deeply understanding the customer mindset, grounded in where customers are in their lifecycle and journey. By consistently anticipating customer needs, our programs are designed around ever-changing motivations and decision drivers, enabling more relevant engagement and stronger outcomes at every stage.
My focus is always on translating product features into contextual customer value, recognizing that value shifts as customers move from awareness to adoption. Aligning messaging, experience, and timing to these moments ensures marketing not only resonates but also accelerates pipeline, improves conversion, and drives measurable revenue impact.
Ultimately, this reflects a broader belief that customer-centricity isn't just a strength—it's a foundational principle for building effective campaigns and sustainable, growth-oriented organizations.
How do you make sure customers get a smooth, personalized experience across email, mobile, in-store, and beyond, so every touchpoint feels connected?
Delivering a seamless, personalized experience starts with understanding the customer lifecycle and consistently putting yourself in the customer's shoes. By mapping key moments and identifying friction points, it becomes easier to anticipate needs and create connected experiences across every touchpoint.
With strong data and cross-team alignment, interactions can meet customers where they are and reflect their preferences, so each touchpoint builds on the last. This is strengthened by an organization that prioritizes personalization and invests in the technology to support it at scale.
At its core, it's about consistency in value and experience, combined with a mindset of continuous learning and optimization. When customers clearly see the benefit, it drives better engagement, conversion, and long-term loyalty.
What's your greatest efficiency hack for working smarter, not harder?
For me, it's always been automation—starting with a "blue sky" view of what's possible, then using technology, platforms, and partners to deliver at scale. It's about removing manual effort and enabling teams to focus on higher-impact work.
A big part of that is pushing tools and vendors beyond their default capabilities because you don't get more unless you ask for it. That's where real efficiency comes from: doing less manually while achieving more meaningful outcomes.
What advice would you give to marketers looking to get started with real-time, data-driven personalization?
Start small and focus on one element, whether it's a specific product, channel, or moment in the customer journey. The temptation is often to build a fully personalized end-to-end experience right away, but that can quickly become complex and difficult to scale.
In my experience, starting with a single attribute or use case helps build momentum. It allows teams to test, learn, and understand which data points actually drive impact and which don't. Those early learnings create a strong foundation to expand personalization more effectively over time.
What campaign are you most excited to work on this year?
I'm most excited about a test campaign focused on driving real-time impact on user visits. We're using some of our latest tools, including Movable Ink, to better segment users, deliver personalized experiences, and move them up the engagement curve, encouraging more frequent, habitual usage.
The focus is on spotting when engagement starts to drop and stepping in with the right message at the right moment. What makes it exciting is the ability to test, learn, and optimize in real time to drive more consistent visits and long-term value.
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