It’s that time of year again! While you may still be enjoying the last days of summer, the 2026 budget planning season is officially here.

But this year, the budget cycle might feel a little different as the stakes are higher than ever. Thanks to increasing macro-economic pressures, consumers are being very selective in how and where they spend their money, putting added pressure on retailers to deliver customer experiences that truly resonate and stand out from competitors. This shift will continue to impact retailers’ sales, margins, and ROI resulting in budgets being squeezed and teams being asked to do more with less.

To maximize 2026 customer experience funding, it’s imperative to focus on data-driven insights, strategic resource allocation, adaptation to changing market conditions, and strengthening capabilities to navigate the volatile landscape and achieve profitable growth.

Set the Stage for 2026 Budget Success

Before diving into core budget priorities, here are a few tips to help set a strong foundation and get the most out of your 2026 planning.

Define a Clear Customer Strategy
A well-defined Customer Strategy is the foundation that aligns teams around customer needs, drives loyalty, and should reflect how you’ll attract, grow, and retain your most valuable customers. A strong strategy helps prioritize initiatives that deepen customer relationships and elevate brand value —making it essential to plan with purpose and clarity.

Confirm Company Priorities
Review your company’s 2026 goals and how they apply to your business unit. If formal goals aren’t yet finalized, confirm that the company’s strategic focus areas remain unchanged. Also, assess any unfinished 2025 goals to determine if they should be carried forward. This information is key to defining your initiatives, activities, and resource planning for the year ahead.

Analyze YTD Performance Data:
Complete an honest analysis of your customer engagement, marketing, and loyalty efforts to pinpoint what worked well and what didn’t. Partner with the Business Insights team to review YTD 2025 performance data at both campaign and overall customer levels. Use these findings to refine strategies for the rest of the year and set the stage for a success in 2026.

Research Market Dynamics:
Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening outside your brand. Conduct a market and competitive assessment including industry trends, competitor programs, consumer attitudes and expectations, and economic forecasts. This assessment will inform necessary adjustments to your customer strategy and provide insights to build out strategies and tactics, cost estimates, and forecasted results.

 

Funding the Priorities that Drive Customer Engagement Success

Securing budget for 2026 is about more than getting dollars approved—it’s about aligning the right people, processes, technology, data, and third-party support with the priorities that matter most. Your budget should be structured to support and prioritize these core drivers of customer strategy and experience that ensure you’re delivering against sales, retention, and ROI goals:

Harness Data-Driven Customer Insights
The best approach to establishing a crystal-clear view of your customers—what they want, how they shop, and what they’re worth – is to analyze all their engagement signals, not just their transactional data. Consider investing in robust data collection strategies and tools to gain a deeper, more timely understanding of customer behavior and preferences. This includes augmenting customer feedback with insights from consumer intelligence platforms, first-party digital behavioral data, and primary customer research. Investing in these tools allows you to not only react to trends, but also proactively shape them to ensure every future customer strategy and experience investment delivers measurable results.

To identify the right data and insights tools for the budget request, bring together appropriate data source owners, end-user stakeholders, decision makers, and the Customer Strategy owner. With everyone in alignment, build a baseline inventory of current data tools, identify gaps, and clearly define when, where, and how the new toolset will be used.

Eliminate Friction in the Customer Journey
With the evolvement of technology and shift in customer behavior over the last five years, retailers have focused on expanding features and touchpoints to engage consumers. However, in doing so, many have lost sight of the overall customer journey —unintentionally adding complexity and creating barriers to purchase. Today’s customers are expecting seamless experiences across all channels. But when customers feel the friction points – and their favorite brands fail to meet their expectations or make purchasing difficult – they may respond by turning to competitors.

In 2026, protect your revenue by ensuring a seamless and intuitive path to purchase. Plan to conduct a deep-dive audit of your marketing ecosystem and customer journey to uncover pain points that might be taking sales off the table. Work with internal teams and third-party partners to implement strategic adjustments that simplify and improve your customers’ experience.

Optimize Your Marketing Playbook & Engagement Tools
Take a data-informed view of your customer engagement and marketing effectiveness to pinpoint which areas of your marketing playbook and tech stack need to be addressed in 2026. Conduct an analysis to determine if you have the right action plans and are using the best techniques to drive sales in the most efficient, profitable way.

When developing your budget request, estimate the resources and funding needed to optimize each core component of your marketing and customer strategy. Since these initiatives directly impact sales and customer lifetime value (LTV), highlighting the projected incremental impact will be crucial to gain budget approval. Focus on optimizing these key areas:

• Brand Strategy: Ensure the brand positioning, storytelling, and product alignment are building brand equity, fostering emotional connections, and communicating your value proposition
• Loyalty Program: Optimize the program’s structure, benefits, and marketing cadence and touchpoints to ensure it’s driving desired behavior and still resonating with customers
• Proprietary Credit Card: Evaluate how your credit card contributes to incremental sales and tender share. Assess its cost of acceptance, bank partnership terms, and integration with your loyalty program to avoid confusion or cannibalization.
• CRM and MarTech Capabilities: Audit your tech stack to ensure you’re maximizing value. Compare customer journey and experience needs with system capabilities, identify gaps, and outline the tools or features required to execute your engagement strategy effectively.

Incorporate Continuous Testing & Learning to Drive Innovation
In a time where “innovation” is on everyone’s minds, it can be difficult to filter through all the new technology and strategies that are being brought to the table to determine what your company should focus on next. But remaining standstill is not an option – if you don’t move forward with any new ways to engage with customers, you will lose out to competitors. Allocating a portion of the budget to allow for a formal learning agenda and testing roadmap ensures new ideas are focused, data-backed, and aligned to business objectives. This will help turn these “concept curiosities” into structured test plans that guide next-best-actions, ultimately improving marketing performance and customer engagement, and ROI.

Funding test-and-learn initiatives shows leadership that innovation isn’t just aspirational – it’s disciplined, cost-effective, and designed to uncover the next growth driver. These funds allow for rapid experimentation and testing in response to competitor activity, emerging trends, and shifting consumer preferences.

 

Don’t Go It Alone!

Securing the right funding and aligning around the right drivers is only part of the journey. Turning plans into measurable outcomes requires not only the right strategy, expertise, and execution, but also a trusted third-party partner to help bring it all to life.

Capra’s customer strategy and experience experts are here to help you set the stage for success— from shaping your 2026 priorities to executing the initiatives that will drive sales, retention, and ROI. Through our end-to-end approach, our services enable retailers to create intuitive, prescriptive, and connected engagement and purchase paths, while maximizing customer value, advocacy, and loyalty. When it comes to evaluating your tech stack, we do the heavy lifting to create and execute vendor RFPs to ensure our partners are getting the best services at the most advantageous terms.

Connect with us to discuss how we can help you with budget planning to design and activate your key initiatives for next year and make 2026 your most impactful year yet.

Let’s talk Customer Strategy!