Brands share real examples of how AI is transforming messaging—and unlocking 1:1 personalized experiences at scale. 

More digital touchpoints are available to marketers than ever before, meaning consumers are receiving a lot of brand communications. 62% of consumers hear from brands digitally six or more times per day. But 9 in 10 say that at least half of this content is irrelevant.

The consequence of this? Our 2025 Consumer Trends Report shows that 81% of consumers ignore irrelevant messages and 71% feel frustrated by them. Worse: 1 in 4 say generic messages make them less likely to purchase.

In an era of unprecedented access to customers through multiple channels, brands are struggling to make meaningful connections.

But leading marketers are flipping this script, leveraging AI to send more relevant messages and build stronger customer relationships as a result.

Attentive SVP of Customer Success and Support Kate Walsh spoke with three marketing leaders to discuss how AI helps create connections that matter. 

The conversation included:

• Jordyn Workman, E-commerce Marketing Manager of Australian surf and streetwear brand Ghanda Clothing
• Krista Dalton, SVP of E-commerce & CMO of Western boot brand Tecovas
• Jason Donapel, Co-Founder and COO of email & SMS marketing agency The Email Experience

They shared how they’re evolving their SMS and email strategies in Attentive using the power of AI to create high-value, 1:1 customer engagements.

Their modern approach to customer relationships breaks away from “one-size-fits-all” campaigns to make the most out of customer data, creating unique customer journeys and tailoring interactions to each subscriber at scale.

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1. Creating a compounding personalization effect

Many brands still rely on simple, fill-in-the-blank behavioral flows that send the same messaging to every customer. But a new wave of personalization is on the rise to deliver more tailored experiences to customers.

Building comprehensive customer profiles

Tailoring experiences for each subscriber relies on collecting and activating customer data to build increasingly accurate customer profiles that enable better personalization over time.

Donapel, co-founder of The Email Experience, frames this as building compounding value:

The marketing messages you send a few weeks from now will be significantly more valuable than the ones you send today.

– Jason Donapel, Co-Founder and COO at The Email Experience

As you collect more data with each customer interaction, you can target them more precisely—and each message you send has a higher ROI. This more tailored experience is a welcome improvement for shoppers who have grown weary of generic communications.

Donapel elaborates that this compounding effect starts as soon as a customer hits a landing page. That landing page already tells you something about what the customer is looking for, what their values are, or what problems they might be trying to solve.

For example, a supplements company can customize messaging from the very first interaction:

"A landing page for a calcium supplement is different than a landing page for a weight loss supplement," Donapel says. "Right away I can start personalizing with the Attentive pop-up."

One way brands will soon be able to personalize pop-ups for site visitors is with Attentive’s AI Grow. Instead of featuring an identical sign-up unit for everyone, AI Grow will be able to adjust your welcome offer so it’s more relevant for each shopper’s browsing history. So a pop-up could feature a product they’ve shown interest in and could show how much they’ll save with your incentive.

In your sign-up unit, you can pick up another piece of data about the subscriber, too. In the case of the supplement brand, perhaps what their health concerns are. Then you can personalize the first welcome message they receive. "These little pieces of insight prepare you to send a better message #1," Donapel explains.

Using AI to overcome personalization scaling challenges

It's understandable why brands rely on cookie-cutter flows. If your store has hundreds or thousands of SKUs, you'll hit a scaling problem if you try to split out your flows to create personalized messaging around each product and for different shopper segments.

Workman, Ghanda Clothing's E-commerce Marketing Manager highlights how this challenge impacts the brand. As Ghanda Clothing expands beyond their Australian roots to international markets like the US, they need to take into consideration not only time zone and seasonal differences, but cultural differences, too.

"It's really important for us to stay authentic and aspirational to our Australian surf coast culture while not alienating a global or American audience," says Workman.

This is where marketers can benefit significantly from using AI. Tools like Attentive AI™ let marketers create 1:1 personalized messages at scale for the first time—taking everything you know about your customers to deliver experiences that resonate with them.

Then, a brand like Ghanda Clothing can communicate with shoppers about the apparel they're likely interested in based on their location, preferences, and lifestyle—and send messages that suit the customer's cultural expectations.

Brands using Attentive AI™ have seen real results:

• 20x ROI lift for cart abandonment journeys
• 200% more revenue with triggered messages sent with AI Journeys
• 20% increase in multi-channel campaign revenue using Audiences AI for optimized segmentation

AI enables marketers to aggregate multiple data points at the same time—like geographic location, seasonal context, individual preferences, browsing behavior, and purchase history. From there, AI can activate this data, crafting engaging messages for each customer that take all these factors into consideration.

Bottom line: When customer data is paired with AI, it creates the foundation for increasingly sophisticated personalization. Each interaction adds to the customer profile, making every subsequent message more relevant, targeted, and effective.

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2. Consolidating email and SMS for a unified customer journey

When brands manage their email and SMS channels separately, customer experiences can become disconnected. Messages may contradict each other or be repetitive after a customer has already acted on a campaign delivered on another channel.

This siloed approach is inefficient from an operational perspective, but also risks frustrating subscribers. So the panel agrees that combining SMS and email into the same, high-performance platform is essential for well-orchestrated customer relationships.

Why a single SMS and email platform matters to marketing teams

For Ghanda Clothing, consolidating email and SMS into one platform was a significant step forward. "Having that all within the one platform has been immeasurable to us," says Workman. "It takes a lot of stress away from my team."

When trying to run an efficient program, having both channels operate from a single platform eliminates redundant work, simplifies campaign management, and ensures you're able to prioritize your marketing spend accurately.

The benefits extend beyond efficiency. Combining messaging channels into one platform gives you a comprehensive view of how customers engage across channels, creating visibility that helps:

• Identify which messages resonate on each channel
• Understand individual subscriber channel preferences
• Avoid sending redundant messages to customers who've already converted
• Create cohesive experiences that build on previous interactions

Donapel emphasizes the value of viewing the customer journey holistically and the benefits he gets from using the Attentive Journey builder: "I feel like Attentive allows me to plan journeys and experiences, and then deployment just happens."

This perspective represents a significant shift in how marketers think about channels. Instead of creating separate strategies for SMS and email, Donapel focuses on the overall customer experience. It's not pitting email and SMS against each other.

Rather, this approach leverages each channel's unique strengths at the appropriate time in the customer journey. The result is a more natural flow that matches how customers engage with brands across multiple touchpoints.

Using AI to enhance cross-channel experiences

Consolidated channels means AI becomes significantly more powerful by being able to evaluate the customer journey in real time instead of separate platforms making isolated decisions for each channel.

Connecting this back to compounding personalization, each interaction contributes valuable data that informs the next touchpoint on each channel. So AI develops an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what works for each customer and delivers that on each channel.

This value extends to the entire customer relationship. Dalton notes, "Tecovas is exploring how to scale customer relationships and evolve from transactional interactions to meaningful, experiential communications."

She sees AI analytics as critical to this evolution.

Mass analytics that enable an infinite amount of personalization is where this entire industry is headed in the next year. That's happening rapidly, and we need to be ready for it.

– Krista Dalton, SVP of E-commerce & CMO at Tecovas

With tools like Attentive AI™, cross-channel orchestration can be supported with advanced capabilities like:

• Identifying more site visitors across devices and browsing sessions, ensuring more accurate profiles for both email and SMS targeting
• Optimizing segments for better performance by identifying high-intent subscribers and excluding low-intent ones, improving campaign performance on both channels
• Determining the ideal send time for each individual subscriber to maximize engagement, increasing open and click rates

These work better when AI has a 360-degree view of customer engagement in real time—enabling a holistic approach that's not possible when channels are operating independently. And it's why Workman says it's been a priority for her to consolidate email and SMS for Ghanda Clothing.

Bottom line: Unifying your email and SMS strategies creates a foundation for more cohesive customer experiences. When powered by AI, this unified approach enables sophisticated orchestration that delivers the right message on each channel—all without taxing your team's limited resources.

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3. Respecting the privilege of unlimited access to subscribers

Dalton emphasizes that marketing through channels like SMS gives brands a significant responsibility. "They're inviting you into their phone. It's people's primary conduit to talk to friends, family, loved ones," she says. "It's an honor, and we have to respect that."

She sees this as a privilege that brands must earn and maintain through thoughtful, valuable communications.

The Tecovas team closely monitors unsubscribe rates alongside revenue metrics. "Unsubscribe rates are becoming just as important as open rates for some brands. It's a good gut check on whether you're showing up in a helpful way or just adding to the noise." Dalton explains.

This customer-first approach means knowing when to hold back messages to prioritize the longevity of a customer relationship. Workman echoes this sentiment from Ghanda Clothing's perspective: 

It's up to us to make sure we're sending people down the right path.

– Jordyn Workman, E-commerce Marketing Manager at Ghanda Clothing

Getting the balance right is the difference between creating a high-value customer relationship and losing a subscriber altogether.

But you don't want to limit your messaging just to appease a small portion of your customers. So this comes back to 1:1 personalization: sending each customer the type of messages they're most likely to engage with.

AI can help brands respect boundaries and personalize thoughtfully

Dalton describes a scenario where AI might recognize when a customer hasn't engaged with messages for several days: "They didn't open your text, they didn't open your email three days in a row—that is similar to the behavior of 80 people who did the same before and unsubscribed. So skip them."

This type of predictive analytics allows marketers to be more strategic about when to communicate—and when to give customers space. 

Rather than bombarding unresponsive subscribers with more messages, AI helps brands understand what types of content each subscriber engages with the most and recognize which customers to skip on certain communications—preserving trust and potentially saving relationships that might otherwise end in unsubscribes.

That’s what Attentive’s Audiences AI excels at: optimizing segments to add shoppers who are likely to engage and convert from your message and removing those who aren’t.

Bottom line: The most sophisticated use of AI isn't just creating more personalized messages—it's knowing when and how to engage based on a deep understanding of the customer relationship. Leading marketers are using AI to become more strategic about their messaging, not just more efficient in creating it.

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Level up personalized SMS and email by building meaningful customer relationships that last

Innovative marketing tech is now at our fingertips, and leading marketers are using it to reestablish the standards for customer engagement. In a noisy and distraction-laden landscape, AI tools help brands to better meet their customers’ specific wants and needs and stay competitive. 

The panel’s conclusion? Basic personalization isn’t going to cut it anymore. Irrelevant experiences cause customers to tune out so it’s essential to make every message count.

By activating your customer data with AI, you can create a compounding effect where every message is more relevant, and performs better, than the last—particularly if you combine them in the same platform—while respecting when and how customers want to hear from you.

Want to find out how AI-driven SMS and email can transform your customer relationships? Learn more and get a demo.