It's no secret that the pandemic has radically altered the ways in which consumers shop, forcing brands to rethink how they can deliver a superior customer experience when sales are largely shifting to e-commerce. Increased online shopping also gives brands more data for personalized experiences. This data allows them to finetune the online experience to accommodate consumers' preferences, as well as analyze consumer feedback to identify any concerns that may necessitate attention.
And acordigly to PwC’s 2020 Global Consumer Insights Survey found that 86% of surveyed consumers intend to continue shopping online and by phone even once social distancing measures are removed.
This mix of rising of online shopping and rise of data collected are pushing pressure on at least 3 direction
1. Even almost everybody are having more data, in a funny way, by 2025, is expected that 80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due the lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both, according to Gartner, Inc. This is probably the moment when all marketers should analize what type of personalization is working, generating ROI, and what is not. This also indicate there is needed to have in place a testing procedure and a more secure environment in GDPR context.
2. Also related with data, a big impact is generated by new Apple - Mail Privacy Protection which will limit the ability to accurately determine: whether or when an email has been opened and where a contact is located when they open it. So, as open rate will become less relevant to evaluate a campaign, the focus of the communication should be focused more on relevance and interaction. As a result this will have a big impact in the way email marketing is thinking, and will require to change how you measure success in your email campaigns, to collect location info directly from your contacts, to update your active Customer Journeys or any Automations, to use different criteria when you resend a campaign. This will encourage (or force, depending on how you look at it) you to further refine our audience targeting criteria, list segmentation, messages, quality of content in your emails, and usability of those emails. The more you optimize these factors for your audience, the more likely you are to see higher CTR, higher conversions, higher revenue per subscriber, and so on.
3. As it seems, we should give more attention to engagement, the design become more important. In this context you should give a lot of attention to dark mode display, witch already has a lot of impact the way we create an email - according to a recent study, 81.9% of people use dark mode on their phones. If you succed to create templates that are correctly dispplaed on dark mode, you could have a higher impact.
All this trends mark the idea that the technology (alone) is not the answer. Is not enough to have a better tool if your brand does not have the human touch, empathy, and not interact with the customer, technology will not help.