But a less flashy, more labor-intensive practice is gaining steam and yielding big ROI: the individuation of messaging to customers. The once-unthinkable challenge of marketing to customers with virtual one-on-one content presentation is now doable, thanks to the growing ubiquity of analytics and the increasing sophistication of social media platforms -- even when customers number in the millions.

Two techniques, leveraged in concert with one another, enable that virtual one-on-one connection: hypertargeting and microsegmentation.

Hypertargeting is the delivery of highly refined content to highly specific sub-groups in a customer population. The more specific the sub-group, the more refined the message. The idea is to craft content for customers in such a way as to make it seem intimate -- a personal communication, which makes the customer feel special.

Microsegmentation is the method by which the sub-groups to which hypertargeting is applied are defined. CRM has gotten better and better at this, as more and more data pours into the process. The original foundation was parsing populations by demographics. It's effective, but general. Next came personal profile data, served up by social media, identifying everyone's favorite this or that. Finally, as analytics have burrowed more deeply into CRM, patterns of behavior have expanded from buying histories to online travel patterns. In short, it's possible to know an individual customer as well as or better than they know themselves (as a customer).