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.

In all of this, one thing remains consistent year after year: opt-in channels continue to punch beyond their weight in terms of engagement and ROI. The trends from the past several years continued throughout 2023 and shed light on what we should expect to see from brands in 2024. Those trends include the following:

1. Email will continue its staying power.

While news headlines focus on the challenges of increasing e-commerce sales on social media sites, with their fluctuations in daily users, email keeps quietly engaging customers and generating sales. According to a recently released report, e-commerce brands sent 33 percent more promotional email campaigns and generated 17 percent more orders in 2023 than the year before.

The performance of marketing emails continues to be positive for retailers. Open and click rates for campaign emails increased year-over-year (YoY), meaning more people see and engage with the emails in their inbox.

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.

Looking at Omnisend’s recently released BFCM marketing report, which analyzed over 2.5 billion marketing emails, 29 million SMS, and 30 million web push messages sent by Omnisend merchants in November, five holiday shopping insights stuck out to me:

1. Companies Were Prepared for an Early Start

We anticipated an early start to the holiday shopping season — and we got it. Shoppers spent $76.8 billion online in October, up 5.9 percent year-over-year (YoY). Brands were well prepared with their marketing.

In October, brands sent 39.9 percent more emails and increased orders by 16.5 percent YoY. But while the send increase was consistent throughout the month, orders saw a heavier uptick in the second half. The week of Oct. 22 saw email orders increase by nearly 26 percent and 27.7 percent the following week.

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.

Here are four nuanced tips to help you prepare your email and SMS marketing for the long, drawn-out holiday shopping season:

1. Don’t wait until November.

Holiday sales, as they have for years, start early. Target began its “Circle Week” on Oct. 1, and Amazon.com's Prime Big Deals Days start on Oct. 10. Consider this second date to be the unofficial official start of the holiday shopping season.

Marketing should start no later than mid-October, and by Nov. 1 brands should be significantly ramping up their marketing. Last year, according to Adobe, Friday, Nov. 11 was the last time daily online sales dropped below $3 billion until Dec. 16 ($2.8 billion). That corresponding day this year is Nov. 12. This is when the full-court press should go into effect.

Because holiday deals begin earlier, the reliance on standalone days like Black Friday take a back seat to extended periods like Black Friday Week. These sales should begin on Nov. 18 or 19.

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.

Here are four notable takeaways for brands to pay attention to.

More Sends, More Engagement, More Orders

Brands sent 32.8 percent more scheduled emails, 99.2 percent more automated emails, and 47.9 percent more SMS messages year-over-year (YoY).

Increased consumer engagement allows brands to continue finding sales success with these channels. The click-to-conversion rate for email increased nearly 5 percent over the same period last year and orders are up 8.3 percent. Automated email orders increased by 132 percent, and SMS orders increased by nearly 17 percent year-over-year.

Looking for a marketing edge?

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

Omnisend’s recently released yearly email and SMS marketing benchmark report analyzed more than 17 billion marketing emails and 107 million SMS sent by brands in 2022. It showed how deeply consumers used email and SMS as part of their shopping and product discovery journey as well as provided clues as to what makes the messages appealing to consumers.

Here are the primary email and SMS marketing highlights from the report and ways brands can apply these consumer shopping trends to gain an edge in 2023.

Overall Email Marketing Trends

Email marketing continues to be a core component of e-commerce brands’ online marketing strategies. Continuing its year-over-year (YoY) trend, brands sent 42 percent more email messages in 2022 than the year before, resulting in a 12 percent increase in email-related orders.

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.

Throughout the year, the cost and performance on channels such as paid social and paid search fluctuated, raising questions and concerns about holiday marketing spend on the channels. And if consumers just shopped less in general, how else might brands generate the sales they needed?

As it played out, Black Friday and Cyber Monday e-commerce sales were up slightly from the previous year's unusual dip. Accounting for inflation, however, indicates the increase in sales was due to the cost of goods rather than an increase in shopping. Cost effectively securing early holiday sales was important, and when it mattered most, brands seemed to shift back and rely more on established and consistently performing opt-in channels like email and SMS — and it worked.