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.

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.

As the update release approached, it was predicted that the changes would significantly diminish the value of open-based engagement metrics for email marketers and impact their day-to-day strategy, including how brands use "remails" (i.e., automatically resending unopened emails), identify engaged users for cross-channel retargeting and deliverability list cleaning, and report on open-based metrics like click-to-open rate.

Now that we’ve passed the one-year mark since the update’s release, what has the impact been? After analyzing 15 billion marketing emails sent by Omnisend since iOS 15 was released and 20 billion sent before the update, dating back to 2019, we have a much clearer understanding of the true impact iOS 15 has had on e-commerce brands’ email marketing programs.

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.

To maximize sales and profits, brands need to ensure all marketing channels work together as efficiently as possible, with data from one channel feeding another. This is where opt-in channels become valuable for retailers. Email and SMS marketing are two opt-in channels that tend to have fewer cost fluctuations and are driven by first-party data, making targeting more accurate and their effectiveness more evident.

However, as the economy and consumer shopping habits change, how are consumers responding to these channels and what can brands learn from it?

A new email and SMS marketing report analyzed more than 8 billion e-commerce marketing emails, 43 million SMS messages, and 73 million web push messages sent by Omnisend customers in the first half (H1) of 2022. The results provide a clear direction for how brands can adapt their marketing and increase sales.

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.

Unlike paid channels like search and social, which mostly rely on third-party data, an opt-in channel like email marketing is less susceptible to sudden cost increases and uses first-party data. This helps explain why it has historically generated a more consistent and predictable ROI for brands.

It’s this combination of opt-in marketing and first-party data that companies need to take full advantage of during this year’s holiday season if they wish to maximize profits. SMS marketing fits this description perfectly and the timing couldn’t be better.

A recently released Mastercard SpendingPulse report showed a year-over-year (YoY) retail sales increase of 7.2 percent in April. However, within this figure, we see that in-store sales increased 10 percent while e-commerce declined by nearly 2 percent.

Amazon.com, Wayfair, and Target all reported slowdowns in their e-commerce business in Q1. Amazon saw online sales decline by 3 percent, and Wayfair reported fewer active customers. While Target’s digital comps were up 3.2 percent, that was down from the pandemic-driven 50.2 percent increase in 2021.

If the slowdown of e-commerce wasn’t enough, customer acquisition and retargeting costs continue to increase. Business Insider reported YoY ad cost increases for Google, Meta (Facebook), TikTok, and Amazon sponsored products.

While retail is still strong overall, inflation’s impact on consumer spending combined with the return to in-store shopping means e-commerce businesses are left fighting for a bigger piece of a smaller, crowded, and uncertain pie. Throw rising acquisition and retargeting costs into this mix, and you have yourself a not-so-favorable recipe.

Luckily for e-commerce brands, there are ways they can adapt their marketing efforts to these market conditions to increase customer retention, reduce paid media costs, and increase profit.

Retailers are constantly looking to improve the customer shopping experience. For e-commerce brands, it may mean implementing live chat, improving site speed, using 3D product images, and offering free returns. However, the shopping journey isn’t isolated to technical website details and store policies; it also applies to marketing.

With email marketing, brands tend to look at it exclusively as a direct sales channel — especially when it comes to automated emails. And for good reason. A recent Omnisend report shows that in 2021, behavior-based automated emails generated 29.6 percent of all email marketing orders with only 2.2 percent of sends.

But focusing automated emails only on sales and not on how they can improve the customer experience is a mistake most brands make. In today’s environment, brands need to do both simultaneously. Here are three ways e-commerce brands can use marketing automation to improve the shopping experience and increase sales:

Consumer expectations and shopping habits are constantly evolving. How brands adapt to the constant evolution, from logistics and staffing to marketing strategy and tactics, ultimately determines whether they stay relevant in consumers’ eyes and their business continues to grow.

We’re witnessing another evolution in purchasing behavior, ushering in a new breed of consumers — the "buy it now" consumer. What exactly is the "buy it now’" consumer, what propelled their emergence, and what do brands need to know about them in 2022?

Picture this: Your company's email campaigns have an average open rate of around 15%. Then one day it suddenly skyrockets to 40%.

Maybe it's just a fluke, you think... until it happens again. And again.

Anyone with marketing chops will know it's not a cause for celebration. Something is just not right.

For companies that send emails, that scenario may play out as early as mid-September. But it won't require much detective work to solve: Apple's forthcoming iOS 15 privacy update will soon render open rates irrelevant, and marketers need to start adapting now.