Marketing automation isn’t personal. We knew that when we started Drip in 2013. Automation can make your marketing appear personal. It can help make it feel more human, but algorithms using machine learning, big data, and artificial intelligence, will end up feeling exactly like that… Artificial. In today’s Amazon-ified, data scraping world, yourcustomers begrudgingly accept trade-offs between selection, price, convenience, and “personalization” They will give away some data to get back other benefits. And that’s ok, until it isn’t… Without careful attention to detail and context, big data-driven personalization can feel more like the stalking of Big Brother than the future of retail. And to your customers—who are increasingly savvy about tracking (and therefore increasingly wary)—that means Big has become a bother—not a boon.