Marketers face new test: Many channels, little time

In India’s marketing jungle, digital isn’t the ‘if’—it’s the ‘how many’ and ‘how well’. Every brand worth its salt knows it must live on Instagram, thrive on WhatsApp, and flirt with YouTube. But survival now depends on whether it can juggle them all without losing its soul.

Few illustrate this better than The Souled Store. What began in 2013 as a quirky hub for pop culture tees has morphed into a full-fledged lifestyle label with its own voice. From collabs with actor Babil Khan to celebrating the anniversaries of SpongeBob, X-Men ’97, and Naruto Shippuden, the brand thrives on a heady mix of nostalgia and newness.

Its campaigns stitch together character-driven storytelling, vibrant visuals, and cultural callbacks that strike chords across generations. By blending authenticity with scale, The Souled Store isn’t just selling merchandise—it’s selling belonging in a digital-first India where attention is the rarest currency.

For ecommerce platforms like Myntra and Amazon, too, marketing isn’t a single runway—it’s a full-fledged fashion week playing out across every channel that their consumers touch. The digital wardrobe doesn’t stop at social: strong SEO ensures Myntra is hard to miss when shoppers start searching. And when its flagship End of Reason Sale (EORS) rolls around, the brand doesn’t just advertise—it orchestrates.

 

 

 

 

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Then there are the quick-commerce platforms like Blinkit and Zepto. They feed users a steady diet of interactive hooks—quizzes, polls, and live shopping sessions—that keep them scrolling and shopping. They also respectively stitch together celebrity-led campaigns and influencer shoutouts on Instagram and YouTube with personalised nudges via email and push notifications.

The promise and pitfalls of multi-channel

Integrated, multi-channel blitzes build hype well before carts fill up, ensuring excitement spills from WhatsApp forwards to trending hashtags. Prithi Momaya, who runs an upscale bakery store in Mumbai, feels that in India’s cluttered digital bazaar, strategies like these underscore a larger truth: success isn’t just about being everywhere, but about tailoring each platform into a seamless, on-brand shopping experience.

“I rely a lot on WhatsApp Business and Instagram to drive get visibility and business. However, despite investing in such multichannel tools, deploying journeys that are integrated, contextual and personalised can be quite a complex affair,” she noted.

This gap between investment and execution is where the new battle for consumer loyalty is being fought, irrespective of the company’s scale and size. Akshat Raina, a Bengaluru-based marketing consultant pointed out that almost all marketing departments have bought tools that enable multi-channel communication. “But, on closer look, when they start scrutinising how many multi-channel, personalised or contextual journeys were created for customer interactions, they realise that it is a low percentage of the total,” he added.

Sunder Madakshira, chief marketing officer, Sinch India argued that marketers need a tech-first, insight-led mindset. That means moving beyond siloed execution to journeys that blend creativity, data and compliance in one seamless layer.

The challenges are hardly surprising. Many CMOs wrestle with fragmented data systems, siloed functions, and too many disconnected execution partners. According to Gartner, 31% of CMOs cited connecting data from different sources as a significant barrier. Another 81% rely on data to monitor performance descriptively, but only 39% have tools for prescriptive analytics.

“The barrier isn’t tech, it’s execution complexity,” said Madakshira. Sinch, he added, works with CMOs to co-create journey blueprints tied to business KPIs, launch measurable pilots, and cut time-to-market with pre-built templates for common use cases like onboarding, renewals and payment reminders.

To address these pain points, Sinch launched Sinch Hub in India in June 2025—a centralised platform that consolidates messaging across SMS, WhatsApp, Rich Communication Services (RCS), email, voice and push notifications into a single interface. The platform includes compliance-first features such as consent management, frequency controls and DNC filters, a direct nod to India’s tightening data and messaging regulations.

Madakshira positioned Sinch Hub as a tool designed to reconcile the three competing pressures facing Indian marketers: personalisation, scale and compliance. “Marketers can create, send, and optimise campaigns with complete transparency, audit trails, and integrated policy compliance, without sacrificing scale or personalisation,” he said.

The tool has already delivered measurable results in sectors like banking and fintech. According to Madakshira, one leading Indian bank registered a 30% rise in customer engagement and a 12% lift in conversions after adopting Sinch’s orchestration solutions. A fintech player, meanwhile, recorded a 13% increase in conversions and a five-fold jump in customer interactions.

Re-skilling for the multichannel era

The growing complexity of customer communication is forcing agencies and marketing teams to re-skill rapidly. Data literacy and AI prompt engineering are no longer optional; nor is familiarity with compliance.

 

 

 

 

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Raina noted that the age of AI-powered answer engines is rewriting the rules of digital discovery. Tools like Google’s AI Overview, ChatGPT and Claude now intercept queries before they hit a website, serving up sleek, synthesised responses on the results page itself. For brands banking on SEO, that’s a tectonic shift.

He cited a study of 300,000 keywords that shows AI overviews drive a 34.5% drop in average CTR for top-ranking pages. “This means that fewer clicks translate into fewer chances to convert,” he added. “In this new reality, marketers must win in the scroll-stopping microsecond—delivering value and trust instantly, before the consumer ever clicks through.”

“Today’s marketing teams must combine creativity with data literacy,” said Madakshira. He listed journey analytics, conversion funnel mapping, AI copy iteration, channel attribution and compliance understanding as non-negotiable skills.

Agencies, too, are shifting roles. No longer mere execution partners, they are increasingly expected to act as martech integrators who can stitch together technology, storytelling and performance into a single continuum.

RCS vs WhatsApp: Shifting dynamics

The economics of messaging are also changing. WhatsApp remains dominant. But its rising costs and Meta’s new session-based pricing model have pushed companies like Momaya, as well as marketers, to explore alternatives. RCS is emerging as a credible contender, particularly for high-volume industries like BFSI, utilities and logistics.

“Brands employing RCS with rich media record 3x greater engagement rates than those using SMS,” said Madakshira. He added that some insurance players using RCS for premium reminders and policy updates saw 20–25% higher click-throughs compared with SMS-only campaigns.

The ecosystem shift could accelerate as Apple integrates RCS into iOS18, giving brands a cross-platform alternative to WhatsApp for the first time. Madakshira described it as a “gamechanger” that enables marketers to imagine rich media messaging across both Android and iOS “without relying solely on OTT apps.”

Still, the question remains: can RCS displace WhatsApp in India? Given WhatsApp’s massive user base and entrenched daily usage, analysts suggest RCS may not replace it outright but could split market share, especially where cost efficiency and compliance are paramount.

Beyond channels, the content itself is evolving. AI-driven formats such as personalised video and interactive CTAs are rapidly gaining traction, particularly in retail and fintech. “We’ve seen 2.5–3x improvements in CTR and lead conversion when personalised offers are delivered via video on WhatsApp, compared to static creatives,” said Madakshira. Interactive CTAs, he added, are helping reduce bounce rates and accelerate decision-making in B2B funnels.

This focus on personalisation dovetails with consumer expectations. Raina noted that customers increasingly want brand interactions to feel like two-way conversations rather than transactional pings. “The demand for contextual, consistent storytelling across platforms is pushing marketers to embrace AI tools that map journeys dynamically, serving content that is both relevant and compliant,” he claimed.

Compliance: no longer an afterthought

The growing scrutiny on data privacy—fuelled by frameworks like India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP) and global regulations like GDPR—means compliance is now central to customer communication.

Madakshira pointed to Sinch Hub’s compliance-first architecture features like DLT integration for SMS, GDPR/DPDP-aligned consent management, and real-time campaign logging as critical safeguards. Far from being a hindrance, he argued, compliance can boost ROI. “We have seen brands increase ROI by 20–25% by improving opt-in health, content quality, and channel sequencing, all within a compliant framework,” he added.

The rise of multichannel orchestration in India signals more than just a tactical shift. It represents a deeper cultural change in how marketing is conceived and executed—one where scale, personalisation and regulation are not competing priorities but interdependent ones.

The future of brand communication may not rest on one platform—be it WhatsApp, RCS or email—but on marketers’ ability to seamlessly connect them while maintaining trust and transparency.

As Raina put it, “A brand’s aim isn’t to simply reach out when convenient; it should foster an ongoing, mutual exchange that feels like dialogue, not a broadcast.” For Indian marketers, that balance—between reach, relevance and regulation—may prove to be the hardest message to get across.