This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Read the full article here.

Remember when the height of personalized marketing was no more sophisticated than a mail merge? “Hello, [First Name]” was enough to claim you were embracing the new wave of personalized marketing. While it might have been the cutting edge at the time, it then gave way to drip email campaigns and other sequenced single-channel events.

Even a few years ago, highly pre-planned marketing automation sequences or customer journey orchestration was state of the art. Imagining and plotting complex multi-channel sequences with branching and dynamic variables allowed marketers to create a multi-faceted customer experience, despite that rather laborious task of managing integrations and potential conflicts, as well as factoring all the potential variables when creating content.

In a way, marketing started a lot like video games. Think of Pong or even Pac-Man as the first iterations. They were not easy to win, and, much like personalized emails or even highly-orchestrated marketing campaigns, there was only so much variation from one player to the next.

Much like two-dimensional games like Super Mario Brothers gave way to the open worlds of modern video gaming, so has “if this, then that” marketing given way to reaching customers in an open world of omnichannel customer experience.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Read the full article here.