2026 Is Coming: What Marketers Need to Leave Behind (And What to Build Next)

2026 is approaching quickly, and with it comes a decisive shift in how marketers build relationships with their customers.

At Movable Ink, after analyzing billions of customer interactions across email, mobile, web, and beyond, one pattern is unmistakable: the most successful brands treat personalization not as isolated events but as a connected, intelligent system. With AI accelerating expectations and channel boundaries disappearing, marketers must rethink what to leave behind in 2025, and what to embrace in 2026.

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What to Sunset (and Why It’s Holding You Back)

First on the chopping block: channel-first execution. When data, creative, and decisioning sit in separate corners, every touchpoint feels like it’s telling a different story. That’s why “omnichannel” so often disappoints. The signals are there, they just can’t get where they need to go fast enough.

Movable Ink changes that by:

1. Taking in data from any source.‍

2. Understanding what it means for each customer.

3. And instantly generating the personalized content that supports that decision.

Studio and Da Vinci work together to remove the handoffs and guesswork, so every message, no matter the channel, feels like a continuation of the same relationship.

Right behind that? Good old batch-and-blast. Consumers are fully done with inbox noise that ignores who they are, what they care about, or where they are in their journey. Da Vinci  leverages AI to pick the right content for every person in the moment. No more manual rules. No more guessing. Just precise choices that put the relationship first.

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And then there’s the production treadmill—the manual creation of every asset, for every segment, for every campaign, across every channel. All that effort for a handful of static assets that get used once and forgotten slows everything to a crawl. When a campaign takes weeks to ship, the moment has already passed.

Studio changes the pace entirely. Content assembly becomes an automated, data-powered rhythm, taking up minutes instead of days. Suddenly there’s room to test more, create more, and deliver more value, without running the team into the ground.

‍What to Start (And How Movable Ink Makes It Possible)

2026 is the year omnichannel stops being “a project.” It becomes the baseline. Instead of planning email here and mobile there, marketers should build around the customer’s actual flow. Studio powers creative across channels; Da Vinci keeps the decisions consistent everywhere. One story, many touchpoints, zero rebuilds.

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It’s also time to treat AI like a true creative partner, not a prediction machine. Rule-based personalization looks backward. Da Vinci looks ahead. It brings together the signals that shape what someone needs in the moment:

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✔️ Product data

✔️ Customer behaviors

✔️ Predictive signals

✔️ Real-time activity

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This isn’t “rules with lipstick.” It’s autonomous marketing, and it frees your team to focus on strategy while Da Vinci handles the heavy lifting.

And finally, let people build. Using Studio means that teams don’t have to wait in design or engineering lines to get personalized creative out the door. Create infinite variations. Launch confidently. Ship more. Stress less.

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What to Scale (Where the Revenue Lives)

The classics still matter. Browse and cart abandonment, loyalty updates, price drops, back-in-stock alerts—they’re the backbone of CRM. When you power them with Studio’s dynamic content and Da Vinci’s decisioning, they grow from “set it and hope” strategies into strong, always-on revenue streams.

Data velocity is another place to turn up the dial. Winning brands aren’t hoarding the most data; they’re moving the quickest. Movable Ink lets you feed new data in and instantly see it reflected everywhere downstream. Faster personalization means faster learning and results.

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The Future of CRM is Personal

The marketers who will thrive in 2026 are the ones willing to let go of the old habits, embrace intelligent systems, and build on what’s already proven. Movable Ink connects data, creative, and decisioning in a way that makes personalization feel natural everywhere—instantly and at full force.

Relationships matter. Context matters. And next year, the brands that get personal (really personal) are the ones who will win.