Sharon Shapiro, Director of Content Marketing & Integrated Planning, Bluecore discusses the significance of newer retail martech strategies for a transformed 2021
2020 somehow felt like one month and ten years all at the same time. For reasons of which we’re all well aware, nearly everything changed in the course of a year.
But as we enter 2021, one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for retailers to benchmark the performance of their email marketing programs. It sounds counterintuitive — why would you benchmark against pre-COVID performance when this year is entirely and completely different? But just hear me out on this one…
10 Years of eCommerce Growth in 5 Months? Thanks 2020
Of all the changes 2020 ushered in, one of the biggest for retailers is 10 years’ worth of eCommerce growth in a matter of months. Basically overnight we went from eCommerce slowly outpacing brick and mortar as the primary shopping channel to widespread store shutdowns that made eCommerce the only option for shopping. And even as stores have reopened, we’ve sustained this enormous uptick in eCommerce behavior.
This situation put significant pressure on digital marketing channels, most notably email, which has long been the workhorse of every retailer’s eCommerce marketing program. Brands were forced to respond quickly, and those who could be the most agile reaped the rewards, with many seeing Black Friday levels of engagement over email and onsite on what would otherwise be considered “random” days in the spring.
Against this backdrop, how can you possibly benchmark performance? It seems like there’s nothing reasonable to which to compare this year’s email engagement data, and certainly data from last year is worthless. But here’s the thing: If you want to structure your email program for effective personalization that breeds long-term loyalty, pre-COVID benchmarks are still valuable for understanding performance.
Instructive Benchmarks for When Personalization Actually Gets Personal
Retailers that aim to build highly personalized email marketing programs that drive retention and lead to deeply loyal relationships with customers should organize their teams around customers rather than channels.
Ultimately, this means focusing on things like:
- How do we convert one-time buyers into two-time buyers?
- How do we effectively save at-risk customers and win back lost customers?
- Which types of customers are the most valuable for our brand?
- What can we do from a marketing perspective to move more customers into this “high value” bucket?
Conversations like these are even more important now than ever, as the situation in 2020 has presented brands with more new customers and more data on how all customers (new and existing) behave in the digital world.
When you take on this kind of mindset, benchmarking against pre-COVID data — even though everything changed in early 2020 — becomes not only possible, but also necessary.
Using Pre-COVID Benchmarks to Understand 2020 Performance and Plan for Growth in 2021
In the recently released 2020 Retail Email Benchmark Report, Bluecore looked at nearly 10 billion emails sent by more than 400 retail brands from March 2019 through February 2020. The time frame was chosen specifically to avoid any unusual activity due to COVID-19, to be an effective and powerful tool for understanding performance in 2020 and planning for growth in 2021. That’s because what these benchmarks actually measure is more relative performance.
The benchmarks can help baseline expectations, for example:
- Performance increases from scaling personalization within emails
- Engagement and loyalty growth from growing cart sizes
- Predicted lifetime value distribution based on factors like purchase history and shopper lifecycle stage
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Shapiro, Director of Content Marketing & Integrated Planning, Bluecore
Sharon Shapiro is the Director of Content Marketing & Integrated Planning, Bluecore. An experienced storyteller, Sharon has spent her career building content marketing programs for B2B SaaS companies. At Bluecore, she collaborates with top retailers and strategists to highlight the latest trends in retail marketing and spotlight industry leaders.