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.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.