Here is a collection of retail industry articles I found interesting and some correlating Bluesky posts from the week.

Here is a collection of retail industry articles I found interesting and some correlating Bluesky posts from the week.

Brands are expected to spend $247 billion on social media marketing in 2024 to fight for consumers’ attention. With people spending more than two hours a day on social media, brands would be foolish not to spend their ad dollars on social platforms, right?

According to recent data, brands may have it all wrong. For every dollar businesses spend on social media, they get $5 back. Even though this is considered a good return on investment (ROI), other marketing channels, such as email, perform seven times better.

Email marketing has a ROI of 3600 percent worldwide and 7200 percent in the U.S. This means that businesses get $36 for every dollar they spend on email marketing, or $72 if they are based in the U.S.

For e-commerce brands, it’s not the year of the dragon, it’s the year of the back-in-stock message. Automated back-in-stock message sends have been on a multiyear rise. In 2023, brands sent 4x as many as the year before, generating 3x the number of orders than the year before.

Back-in-stock messages perform exceptionally well compared to their email marketing counterparts. Their 60 percent open rate is higher than any other marketing email. The 19 percent click rate far outpaces the next best automation email, product abandonment, which has a 6.2 percent click rate. And when it comes to conversion rate, it’s not even close: back-in-stock messages see a conversion rate of 5.8 percent, more than double that of welcome messages, the second-best automated email.

Why do back-in-stock messages perform so well?

2023 was another record-setting year for e-commerce sales and the growth is expected to continue in 2024. How companies achieve their growth will depend on how effective they are with engaging their audience via different channels and subsequently maximizing the return on investment of those channels.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us, it’s a good time to assess how different marketing channels performed through another record-setting BFCM shopping period and what this can tell us about consumers’ shopping habits in 2024.

When it comes to maximizing holiday sales from your email and SMS marketing programs, discovering the nuances of the season can help brands squeeze as much eggnog out of … whatever eggnog comes out of. With all of the data out there, uncovering the lesser-known can feel overwhelming to downright impossible.

A recently released email and SMS marketing report shed light on these performance trends and helped answer questions like “Do consumers find SMS intrusive?” and “Are consumers over email?” The report analyzed more than 10.5 billion e-commerce marketing emails and 62 million SMS messages, among other channels, sent by Omnisend customers in the first half of 2023.

Looking for a marketing edge?

Of course you are, but little did you know that the elusive edge may be closer than you realize.

E-commerce brands faced a holiday shopping season filled with uncertainty — uncertainty around when the shopping season would start in earnest, inflation’s impact on consumer spending, and the costs and performance of paid marketing channels. And with good reason.

On Sept. 20, 2021, Apple released its much-anticipated iOS 15 software update. The update included various “privacy protection” features for iPhone users, including "Mail Privacy Protection." This feature prevents companies from seeing whether subscribers opened their emails, and instead reports an open rate of 100 percent for those using the Apple Mail app.

A pullback on consumer spending, high inflation, and an uncertain holiday season. Toss in paid social’s cost and targeting effectiveness being in a state of perpetual fluctuation and retailers find themselves faced with a myriad of challenges in trying to increase sales and maximize return on investment.

Planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) is already top of mind for many e-commerce brands, and includes the usual channels like email marketing, paid search, paid social, and marketplace ads. But as the cost and effectiveness of channels like paid social continue to fluctuate, brands are continuously searching for ways to maximize return on investment in a competitive and crowded space.