Privacy aside, email is still the marketer’s best friend. But email vendor Return Path and Demand Metric found that marketers aren’t taking full advantage: only 68% do personalization, 39% do a/b testing, and 36% optimize for deliverability. Companies that do those things report vastly better results. Lots of good detail in this 51 page report.
Let’s talk about digital transformation because, well, there’s no actual news today. First an IDC study for Avaya that finds most digital transformation initiatives have been “less than ‘extremely successful’” in part because IT and business managers both think they’re in charge. More disturbing, more projects focus on efficiency (62%) than customer experience (54%). Companies that do prioritize customer experience grow faster.
The mother lode of obvious news is the tech reporting team at The New York Times. It’s my dream to work there some day. Here they tell us that Amazon is favoring its own products over those of competitors. And, more obvious still, they report this actually works. Just the right tone of feigned surprise.
Bombora has launched Visitor Insights, a consent-based website tag that tracks the topics a device has consumed. It infers intent, job function, management level, and other information that B2B publishers can use for ad targeting and personalization. This Bombora report shows intent trends by industry: for example, media and advertising users show 70% more interest in Customer Data Platforms than they did last year.