Email-first thinking doesn't travel anymore, and honestly, it never really did.

There was a time when email-first made sense for established markets, while mobile was treated as the workaround for regions where email hadn't fully taken hold. That distinction doesn't really exist anymore. Mobile is the primary access point almost everywhere now, including in Australia. It's just taken longer for the assumption to catch up with the reality.

We once had a client in Indonesia watching email open rates struggle while WhatsApp engagement stayed strong. Years ago, that read as a regional quirk. Today, the same pattern shows up everywhere. Younger members move fluidly across channels, older members stick with what they know, and plenty of brands are still defaulting to email simply because that's what the platform was built for a decade ago, not because it's what members actually want.

There's no universal fix here. What works is having a strategy and technology that covers multiple channels properly, and then simply asking members how they'd prefer to be reached.

No assumption beats a member's own answer.