You weren’t that interested last week in many of the surveys we covered. But I’ll try again today with a few that I find exceptionally useful. First comes from RSR Research and takes a close look at customer engagement strategies and technologies for retailers. It provides lots of details and especially interesting comparison between responses of successful and not-so-successful companies. Spoiler alert: winners for on customer engagement; laggards focus on financial metrics.

But really effective marketing is cross-channel anyway, right? A survey from cross-channel personalization vendor Braze (formerly AppBoy), found that mobile app customers who received only email messages showed a 45% increase in engagement (vs customers sent no messages), but customers who received email, push and in-app messages showed a 543% increase. (Okay, this item doesn’t really relate to the previous two. I do the best I can.)

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.