Key insights: Content and experience tops martech, how brands can smash holiday sales with email marketing, and more

30-second summary:

• Ecommerce businesses are well aware that October 13 and October 14 should be a high priority for their digital marketing strategy.
• Our pulse survey insights show that ‘Content and experience’ piqued senior marketers’ interest in September.
• Email marketing, content marketing, and SEO are the top technologies that senior marketers are most keen on evaluating for purchase.
• More data juice on how email marketing has been exceeding performance in 2020, how marketers can use these insights to smash their holiday shopping sales targets, and more.

We’ve already established the power of Prime Day in our previous key insights article. Ecommerce businesses are well aware that October 13 and October 14 should be a high priority for their digital marketing strategy. What do you need to know and how can we help you best equip your business as the greatest “window” of opportunity and Halloween creep in closer on Oct 31, 2020. This week’s key insights highlight some Pulse Survey September insights, how content and experience is the top martech, email marketing is smashing sales out of the park, and how brands can connect and communicate with customers through the right content and technology.

‘Content and experience’ tops martech: Pulse Survey September insights, why language matters, and the technology connection

Latest insights from our five-month-long ClickZ and Search Engine Watch pulse survey shows that ‘Content and experience’ piqued senior marketers’ interest in September.

Top technologies in ‘Content and experience’

Email marketing, content marketing, and SEO are the top technologies that senior marketers are most keen on evaluating for purchase. Notably, these have been the front runners in this category not just in September but August as well. 

Why language matters and the technology connection

To supplement our findings and derive more juice out of data, we also looked into a recent study by Phrasee, an advanced AI-powered copywriting technology to deconstruct these insights.

COVID-19 and all the current world scenarios have made people more sensitive to how brands communicate with and treat them as consumers. Either written or spoken, language has been a key player in making or breaking business and 96% of marketers agreed to the same. In fact, 64% of these marketers surveyed in Phrasee’s survey felt that language has been the most important in connecting a brand with its consumers.

Common struggles for creating branded content

As per Phrasee’s report, a whopping 82% of marketers struggle with branded content creation. Here’s why:

• Lack of writers on team (36%)
• Lack of budgets to invest in content creation (37%)
• Insufficient amount of time spent on content creation (37%)

Marketers aren’t confident about their current technology stacks

Our Pulse Survey September insights show that nearly 25% of marketers think their current marketing technology stack stands at “Average” while nearly 34% said their marketing stacks are “Below average”.

Further observation of Phrasee’s report shows that continued inclination to the same observation with 42% of marketers not being equipped with the right technology to future-proof their job function. Another 47% want more technology as an active part of their organization.

Emails marketing insights: The silver bullet

Ecommerce marketing automation leader, Omnisend found that email to be the best source for contacting and promoting to consumers. In addition to that 13% of senior marketers opted to choose email marketing in our ‘Content and experience’ technology segment in September. Their insights paired with our Pulse Survey findings continue to add to email marketing’s novelty factor that it has earned over the decades. 

Omnisend analyzed 2.4 billion emails sent for – promotional messages, automated lifecycle emails, and transactional messages. Here’s a drill-down of the “when”, “why”, “how”, and “what” of email marketing that will help you resonate more with your customer base for the oncoming Amazon Prime Day and holiday shopping.

• Open rates for automated emails saw a 76.25% YoY increase (an improvement of 178.6% vs 2019)
• Automated messages generated a 21.24% click rate, (a 15.37% YoY lift over automation in 2019)
• Birthdays, cart abandonment, and welcome emails lead the way showing the highest CTR improvement of 49.6% vs promotional campaigns
• The conversion rate for promotional email campaigns was 5.37% (an 88% YoY lift – hinting it could be a primary purchase channel for consumers, especially, intent-based shopping)
• The conversion rates for automated lifecycle messages sprung to a smashing 22.39% (a 63% lift over 2019 automation and a 335% increase over promotional campaigns)
• Automated messages drove 26% of email marketing conversions while accounting for less than 2% of the email sends

All these increasingly emphasize the crucial role email marketing and automation can play for your ecommerce business this holiday season. Brands who aren’t currently using integrated systems and tapping in on these high potential points are definitely missing high growth opportunities.

ClickZ readers’ choice for the week

Readers this week have been keen on uncovering the best possible ways to improve their social media strategy, how B2B content can help sales deal closures, and customer data platforms (CDPs).

1. Tips to reinvigorate your social marketing strategy for impact & authenticity
2. The B2B content that can help your sales team close
3. This is what a customer data platform (CDP) is designed to do

source https://www.clickz.com/key-insights-content-and-experience-tops-martech-how-brands-can-smash-holiday-sales-with-email-marketing-and-more/263712/