Marketers aren’t short on ways to engage — they’re suffering from a lack of perspective. The number of marketing channels at their fingertips is rapidly flourishing as customers’ communication preferences evolve — and with that has come a lot of complexity for an under-equipped marketing team to handle. Without clarity, most struggle to select the ideal channel for the right moment, creating fragmented journeys that erode trust and leave revenue on the table.

Email, SMS and push notifications have long been the default tools of engagement. But as inboxes, lock screens and messaging apps get noisier, the old playbook of siloed channel strategies will break down. Brands can no longer afford to treat them as separate levers rather than parts of a single system.

The stakes for inaction are high. Here’s one hard-to-ignore SMS marketing statistic: Text opt-ins have surged 35% in recent years, with 84% of consumers now welcoming messages from brands¹. Email, often declared “dead” by skeptics, continues to climb, with open rates edging up from 22.9% to 25.1% year over year². The market for push notification services, once a niche tactic, is projected to balloon to $43.6 billion by 2035³. These channels are far from a plateau — and they need to be in conversation with each other to connect with customers.

This guide explores how to move beyond the traditional, channel-first approach and apply a journey-first mindset to multi-channel marketing. Done right, marketing leaders can harness email, SMS and push notifications to build multifaceted journeys that feel less like campaigns and more like dialogue. Mastering this interplay is the foundation of today’s customer experience — and your ticket to higher conversions, greater loyalty and retention.

Journey-first channel orchestration: Email, SMS and push in context

In the shift from channel-first to journey-first planning, email, SMS and push notifications should make up the core of a connected customer journey. Think of each touchpoint as part of continuous, personalized symphony — by hitting the right notes at each section, you inspire your audience to engage on a deeper level.

Each channel serves a different role in the funnel:

There’s no one size fits all approach

This is just a starting point. You still need a holistic, data-driven perspective to make a judgmental call on whether a given channel is ideal. Such insights will help your business map high-value actions and determine which channel best supports each stage.

Let’s move beyond context and unpack how you can kickstart and optimize your own customer journey.

Strategic channel selection and optimization — choosing the right channel for the right moment

Now that you have a basic sense of which channels are typically most effective at each funnel stage, it’s important to consider several other variables before locking in your marketing channel strategy.

Consider these initial factors as you begin to plot out customer journeys across your audience segments:

• Urgency: How time-sensitive is the message? SMS and push are best for immediacy; email is for rich, non-urgent content.
• Value exchange: Has the user opted in and what do they expect from that channel? For instance, SMS is personal and should be used carefully, so as not to incur legal and regulatory penalties regarding consent, or spark overwhelm from sending too many messages or poorly timed texts. The latter can also be an issue for push.
• Depth: What are you trying to convey? Complex messaging or engaging, informative storytelling requires a bigger canvas, like email. Remember: SMS and push notifications have strict character limits.
• Cost: SMS is more expensive, so reserve it for high-value, high-intent messages. SMS and push have higher costs.

Once you have decided on a channel for every phase of the journey, you can move on to finding the ideal time to engage your customers, and how to build campaigns swiftly.

When to connect — and how to scale

Customers face information overload every day — you don’t want to be another stressor. Leverage marketing automation tools, event-based triggers and coordinated messaging to ensure your brand only reaches out when appropriate, instead of serving coffee ads to a suburban office worker on a late weekday night. Some rules of thumb include:

• Trigger messaging based on high-value conversions, like a first purchase, to ensure customers keep returning
• Consider the waking and working hours of your audience, and engage within them
• Your customers have unique schedules, so prepare to test and optimize

With the right channels and timing in place for your first customer journey, you’ve unlocked a quick way to build out other campaigns as well. Consider this a template that can be adapted for other audience segments, with different channels slotting into various situations. For example, your typical push notification strategy may involve deploying notifications to save abandoned carts for an app user segment; however, you may rely on email to do the same for loyalty members who rarely engage on mobile.

The importance of attribution

Congrats, you’re live. Now it’s important to continuously optimize your customer journey as data insights flow in. To do so, your marketing arm not only has to understand which channel clinched the final conversion, but how each channel contributed along the way. All too often, businesses overlook early milestones like onboarding completion (such as identity verification in banking), production adoption and activation events, choosing to only measure purchases or upgrades.

Enter multi-touch attribution — a way to assess the influence of each touchpoint along the customer journey and optimize for the best channel over time.

Let’s picture a scenario in which a Fintech wants to boost applications for its recently launched premium “Metal” card. The customer journey begins with an email touting the card’s many benefits, followed by a push notification promising instant cashback, and concludes with an in-app upgrade flow. The customer completes an application, marking a conversion for the business.

Traditionally, attribution models credit only the final in-app action, masking the role of earlier touchpoints. By applying multi-touch attribution, the company uncovers a layered impact down to the number: the email drove awareness and boosted reactivation; push notifications added urgency with a higher click-through rate; and the in-app experience sealed the conversion. Together, these interactions form a high-performing sequence that can be swiftly scaled.

Putting it into action: A Nordic restaurant chain unlocks hidden value

Since you have a sense of what factors come into play when selecting the best channel and point to engage across the different types of digital interactions, let’s unpack how one quick-service restaurant (QSR) brand orchestrated the customer journey from end to end to produce high-impact results.

With the help of Mastercard Dynamic Yield, the business began by mapping every touch point — from app install and first purchase to loyalty enrollment, repeat order and lapse reactivation. From there, members of the team imagined a typical guest progressing through these stages, identifying friction points that could lead to a drop-off. For instance, picture a customer plugging in order details and personal information but forgetting to join a loyalty program on the way out.

Then came persona development — an audience segmentation process rooted in data insights and real-time content. With five personas in tow, the brand was able to develop distinct triggers, goals and messaging strategies tailored to lifecycle stage and purchase frequency.

Zooming out, this meant leveraging email and push for initial onboarding, order frequency-based nudges and personalized meal recommendations for improved engagement, loyalty reminders and localized offers to drive retention as well as additional journeys triggered after 30 days of inactivity.

After rolling out these changes, the marketing team was able move from a traditional, campaign-based communications to a fully automated, data-insight-driven CRM lifecycle.  The outcome speaks for itself: A double-digit uplift in repeat order rate, a reduction in manual campaign work using marketing automation tools, and a significant increase in loyalty program sign-ups.

The future of multi-channel marketing: AI + personalization = performance

AI and personalization aren’t marketing bluster. We have all come to recognize how they have helped many industries quietly revolutionize how they connect with customers and meet their rising expectations. The same holds true for multichannel journey orchestration: Today’s combination of AI and personalization is empowering brands to deliver smart, engaging messaging — both proactively and rapidly — across their campaigns in ways heretofore unseen.

The results are already flowing in. Contextual push campaigns driven by these technologies outperform generic ones by over three times, with a 14.4% open rate vs 4.19% according to Batch₄. And recent research suggests 70% of marketers already anticipate half of their email operations will be AI-driven by 2026₅. That’s because of the host of capabilities they promise to unleash.

Emerging AI- and personalization-driven capabilities for channel selection include:

1. Predicting the next best move: Agentic AI — autonomous AI agents that can take informed action without human intervention — will help marketers make data-driven decisions about channel selection and timing, moving them away from guesswork. 
2. Streamlining repetitive tasks: Personalization-based CJO tools allow marketers to leverage out-of-the-box templates for easy journey orchestration. AI can also help with content creation (subject line generation, for instance). and summarization, such as condensing long-form email copy into short-form variants for other channels.
3. Real-time audience segmentation: Action data insights in real time to tailor messaging across your customer base for each journey stage — not just manually.
4. Re-engaging the right way: AI/ML can detect pattern shifts in spending, auto-triggering personalized reactivation journeys, moving the focus from brand-driven timing to user-driven relevance.
5. Managing frequency and scale: Dynamically auto-adjust send times, frequency, channels or even content based on engagement.

Ultimately, these capabilities have the power to shift marketing from a reactive to a proactive approach — one in which the customer will have greater control over their experience, and personalized content can be delivered before the user even acts.

A journey-first, insight-driven and AI-enabled approach to marketing is imperative

In today’s fast-evolving marketing landscape, brands that master email, SMS and push as core channels of an omnichannel strategy unlock powerful opportunities. By orchestrating the right channel for each stage of the customer journey, marketers can deliver seamless, relevant experiences that drive engagement and loyalty.

The imperative is clear: Those who innovate and connect every touchpoint will lead in customer engagement, smart personalization and workflow optimization. Now is the time to set the pace for the future of the customer journey, rather than play catch-up.

Sources

<sub>Mastercard is not affiliated with the research cited in these sources.
1. 2025 Texting and SMS Marketing Statistics. SimpleTexting, 2025. https://simpletexting.com/blog/2025-texting-and-sms-marketing-statistics/
2. White, Richard. Email, SMS & Push Marketing for Ecommerce in 2024. Omnisend, 2024. https://www.omnisend.com/blog/email-sms-push-marketing-ecommerce-2024/
3. Push Notification Service Market. Future Market Insights, Oct. 2025. https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/push-notification-service-market
4. The Great Push Notifications & Mobile Engagement Benchmark 2025. Batch, 2025. https://batch.com/ressources/etudes/benchmark-notifications-push-crm-mobile
5. Pastore, Mike. AI Is Making a Major Impact of Email Marketing Teams, Report Finds. MarTech, June 2025. https://martech.org/ai-is-making-a-major-impact-of-email-marketing-teams-report-finds/</sub>