By Marcus Rossato

For years, marketers have layered one channel on top of another – email, SMS, push notifications, or social – hoping to keep pace with the modern customer. But as the customer journey becomes more dynamic and fragmented, that patchwork approach is starting to unravel.

Today’s shoppers move between platforms constantly: email in the morning, websites over lunch and TikTok in the evening. Increasingly, marketplaces and AI tools like ChatGPT are shaping what people discover along the way. They browse, compare, switch devices, pause, then return to buy – sometimes within minutes, sometimes after days. In fact, 77 percent of consumers shop across at least three different channels, and more than 20 percent use five or more.

Yet, nearly 40 percent say brand messaging still feels disconnected. Because of information overload, they’re becoming less receptive to brand messages. For example, according to Klaviyo’s latest research, 54 percent of consumers now ignore brand messages in at least one channel, often holding out for better offers elsewhere. That behaviour is even more pronounced among younger shoppers, with 67 percent of Gen Z tuning out one channel while waiting for a deal to land on another.

The cracks in the stack

The problem isn’t marketers, it’s the tools. Email sits on one platform, SMS on another, while attribution lives in a spreadsheet and customer data is sprinkled throughout. And campaign builders? It’s more of a message scheduler than a campaign engine.

Marketers have been dealing with an uphill battle for years of having to do more with less. More channels, more content, more personalisation – using tools that weren’t designed to work together. But this Frankenstein approach creates unnecessary complexity, slows decision-making and undermines the customer experience. For some once-iconic retailers, it’s contributed to their decline.

Just as smartphones changed how consumers engage by creating one seamless, always-on interface, marketing now needs to evolve in kind. Disconnected systems and siloed data scattered across devices, platforms and walled gardens are no longer fast or flexible enough to keep up.

It’s time for a smarter approach, one where data predicts what customers will do next and their channel affinity, so brands can engage them at exactly the right moment, every time.

The smarter path forward

The future of marketing won’t be won by brands shouting the loudest or sending the most messages. It will be defined by those that show up in the right moment, on the right channel, with the right message – not once, but consistently. That requires orchestration and automation, not guesswork or duplication. It requires systems that move at the speed of the customer and those which feature built-in tools for real-time orchestration, personalisation and cross-channel campaign management.

In a world where customers move fast and across countless channels, clunky tech stacks aren’t just inefficient, they’re holding brands back. Platforms like WhatsApp are rewriting the rules, helping those who move first to engage personally, precisely and promptly. Success isn’t about being everywhere; it’s about showing up where it counts, with intelligence and agility.

Change in marketing is constant and consistent, and your data needs to keep up. The brands that thrive will be those that break down silos, connect their systems and meet customers exactly when and where it matters most.

Those who master this pace won’t just keep up, they’ll set the rhythm of tomorrow’s marketplace.

Marcus Rossato is the senior director of marketing at Klaviyo.