For decades, digital marketers have treated the click as one of the clearest signals of engagement and success.
We optimize creative and build attribution models based on clicks, then use our conclusions to design customer journeys.
More clicks equals more dollars, right?
Wrong.
Today, more than half of internet traffic is automated. Security scanners, privacy infrastructure, crawlers, bots and AI agents can follow links without the human intent marketers have historically associated with that behavior.
And even when a person does click, the click itself isn’t what they want.
A customer doesn’t want to click a link to modify an appointment. They just want to make the change. They don’t want to click to see where their package is. They want to know where it is. They don’t want to click through a promotion. They want to see instantly if there’s something relevant for them.
The click has historically connected the moment we capture a customer’s attention with the place where they can actually accomplish what they came to do.
But every unnecessary transition costs them something: time, attention and, perhaps most of all, intent.
So, let’s call it what it is: the click is a tax.
We’ve been paying it for yearsbut with new surfaces like RCS rapidly increasing in adoption, marketers finally have an opportunity to reduce it.
So instead of asking:
Did someone click my link?
We should ask:
What were they trying to accomplish? And did they accomplish it?
That’s a very different definition of engagement.
RCS collapses distance
Mobile messaging has always been good at creating moments of attention. A message can tell a customer that their flight changed, an item is back in stock, an appointment is approaching, or something relevant has happened.
What messaging has been less capable of doing is helping them act.
The familiar pattern looks something like:
Message → Link → Destination → Navigation → Action
Every arrow adds distance between the customer’s intent and the outcome they want.
RCS collapses that distance.
RCS allows brands to bring context, choices and actions directly into the conversation. Customers can explore options, make selections, respond to questions and move toward an outcome without necessarily leaving the environment where their attention already is.
The breakthrough isn’t that RCS makes messages richer.
It’s that RCS can make the customer journey shorter. Much shorter.
Instead of telling a customer something is available and sending them somewhere else to act, RCS can let them see it and make a selection in the conversation.
The customer’s intent hasn’t changed. The distance required to satisfy it has.
And something else changes, too: because the action happens in the conversation, the signal gets richer.
Traditional messaging gives us signals like delivered, opened and clicked. Interactive messaging with RCS can tell us much more.
Instead of knowing that someone clicked a link to make a reservation, we can know that they selected 7:30 PM and requested outdoor seating. Instead of knowing that someone clicked a product promotion, we can know which options they explored and which one they selected.
That gives us a different view of engagement:
Exposure → Tap → Interaction → Expressed Intent → Outcome
And those steps no longer have to happen across separate surfaces. Discovery, consideration, preference and action can happen within the same experience.
The opportunity isn’t just to move customers through the journey. It’s to question how much journey they needed in the first place.
Intelligent engagement changes the game
But here’s the catch: a shorter journey isn’t automatically a better one.
A carousel of irrelevant products is still friction. Showing an appointment option that is no longer available is still a bad customer experience.
Speed only helps if the experience is relevant.
That means brands need more than a richer messaging experience. They need to know what is useful for that customer in that moment. Preferences, behaviors, history and current context all help determine what to show, and when.
Real-time context matters because what’s relevant can change quickly.
Inventory changes. Availability changes. Orders move. Customers take actions elsewhere. Such is the nature of business: what was relevant yesterday may not be relevant now.
Great personalization, therefore, can’t just understand who the customer is. It also needs to understand what is possible for that customer right now.
Capabilities like Iterable’s Integrations Hub and Journeys Live Data help bring information and activity from across the business into the customer experience, so what a customer sees reflects what is happening in the moment.
And then, of course, the customer does something.
They choose, respond, explore, decline and act. Each interaction reveals something new about what they want—and can inform what happens next.
That makes engagement more adaptive: the customer’s action becomes context for the next decision.
That is the larger opportunity of intelligent engagement: experiences that continuously adapt around customer intent.
From clicks to outcomes
No, websites and apps aren’t going away, nor should they.
Some experiences are complex enough that a dedicated destination is exactly what the customer needs. The opportunity is to stop treating that transition as the goal.
For years, digital engagement has focused on moving customers through funnels. RCS gives us an opportunity to make those funnels shorter, while making each interaction more relevant, immediate and adaptive.
Success isn’t getting the customer to take the next step.
It’s removing the steps they never needed.
Because in the end, the future of customer engagement is about reducing the distance between intent and action.
RCS brings the action closer.