Re:Engage
Email Marketing:
Can one marketer really manage 7 channels?
As platforms like Omnichannel AssistantTM automate channel mechanics, the most valuable marketers will be those who think holistically across the entire customer journey.
By Hillary Bliss, Head of AI Solutions
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For years, being a dedicated channel specialist made perfect sense. As new digital channels emerged — email, social media, in-app notifications, etc. — companies needed experts who understood the nuances of each one.
That era is ending. The channels aren’t going away, but marketing talent requirements are shifting dramatically. The skills that made someone valuable five years ago are becoming less relevant, while entirely new capabilities are emerging.
Cracks in the old model: deep channel expertise
Traditional marketing org charts have been built around channel specialization. You have email teams, social media teams, paid media teams and SMS teams, each with their own tools, metrics and workflows.
This structure made sense when channels operated independently. An email specialist needed to understand SMTP protocols, CAN-SPAM compliance, A/B testing methodologies and the intricacies of ESP platforms. A paid social specialist needed expertise in ad auction dynamics, audience targeting, and creative specifications for multiple platforms.
Because people couldn’t be excellent at everything, organizations hired specialists and coordinated between them.
But this model created problems. Campaign messaging fragmented as different specialists interpreted briefs differently. Launch timelines stretched as teams waited for dependencies. Strategic thinking got lost in the weeds of channel-specific execution.
More fundamentally, it misaligned with how customers experience brands. A customer doesn’t think “now I’m in the email channel” or “now I’m in the social channel.” They experience your brand holistically across all touchpoints. And when those touchpoints tell different stories because different specialists created them independently, the brand suffers.
What’s changing: platforms handle the mechanics
The reason channel specialization is becoming less valuable is that modern platforms are absorbing the mechanical complexity that previously required human expertise.
Consider what an email specialist does, for example. A significant portion of their time goes to understanding technical requirements like character limits, image dimensions, mobile rendering, and spam filter triggers. Similarly, social specialists focus on image specs and algorithm updates, and paid media experts track auction dynamics and bidding strategies.
But AI-powered platforms like our new Omnichannel AssistantTM handle these mechanics automatically. Omnichannel Assistant does all this for you:
- Centralizes content creation across 7 channels and 13 formats
- Uses a single brief to instantly generate audience-specific variations across email, paid social, organic social, SMS, in-app notifications, web, and paid media
- Adapts content for each channel based on pre-built specifications and performance data
When the platform handles the technical execution, human value comes from strategic thinking.
The emerging role: multi-channel strategist
The valuable marketing role going forward looks less like a channel specialist and more like a multi-channel strategist or orchestrator.
These types of marketers think in terms of customer journeys rather than channel silos. They understand how different touchpoints work together to move customers through awareness, consideration, and conversion:
Audience understanding over technical knowledge. They spend more time understanding customer needs, preferences, and behaviors across channels than they do learning platform-specific technicalities.
Message strategy over execution. They develop compelling core messages that resonate with target audiences, then let platforms handle adaptation to specific channel formats.
Performance analysis over campaign production. When content production accelerates through automation, the bottleneck shifts to understanding what’s working and why. These marketers excel at interpreting data across channels and translating insights into strategy adjustments.
System orchestration over manual execution. They’re comfortable working with AI-powered platforms, understanding how to brief systems effectively, and knowing when to intervene versus when to let automation run.
What this means for teams
Organizations that recognize this shift early will have significant advantages. They can build teams around the skills that matter in a multi-channel, platform-enabled environment:
Hire for strategic thinking over tactical execution. Look for candidates who understand customer psychology and can translate data into insights.
Develop existing team members toward multi-channel capabilities. Your channel specialists need to know how their platforms fit into the broader customer experience.
Reorganize around customer journeys rather than channels. Structure teams around customer segments or lifecycle stages instead of communication channels.
Invest in platforms that enable this evolution. Tools like Omnichannel Assistant make the role shift possible by handling channel mechanics and freeing marketers to focus on strategy.
The teams that adapt will create more cohesive customer experiences, launch campaigns faster, and deploy their talent more effectively. The teams that cling to channel silos will find themselves increasingly unable to compete.
How to adapt now
We’re already in the middle of this transition. Most organizations still have channel-siloed structures and identify primarily with a specific channel. Most job descriptions still emphasize channel-specific expertise.
But change is accelerating. The platforms enabling multi-channel orchestration are maturing. The competitive advantages of cohesive, multi-channel strategies are becoming clearer. The talent market is beginning to recognize and reward different skills.
The marketers who thrive will be those who develop capabilities that complement platform automation rather than compete with it.
Platforms like Omnichannel Assistant are accelerating this transition by making multi-channel execution practical for individuals and small teams. When one person can orchestrate content across seven channels as easily as they used to manage one, the rationale for deep channel specialization weakens considerably.
To see this new functionality in action and explore ways it can help your marketing team work smarter and more efficiently, request a demo today.