StrongView and its parent company Selligent, today announced the results of its annual holiday marketing survey. The “Selligent & StrongView 2015 Holiday Email Marketing Trends Survey” polled 295 email marketers and found that the vast majority plan to focus primarily on promotional messaging and basic tactics during the 2015 winter holiday season. Sixty-three percent of marketers selected promotion of sales and discounts as their top program for the holidays; 80% listed it as one as one of their top three programs.
“Marketers are falling into the trap of shouting to their customers to be heard over the noise of the frenzied holiday season,” said Andre Lejeune, CEO of Selligent. “They are missing the opportunity to use the holidays to build relationships with customers by being more relevant than their competitors. Marketers that align their holiday email activities with their longer term strategic goals will get the most bang for their buck.”
Cyber Monday has become so competitive and noisy that marketers have largely abandoned other email best practices in favor of promotions. Both cross-sell and product recommendations earned distant second and third places with less than 10% of marketers selecting either program as a primary focus. Surprisingly, given the retail focus of holiday marketing, only a fraction of marketers listed core programs like cart abandonment (23%) and post purchase (26%) as one of their top three areas of focus during the holidays.
You can take a look at infographic visually displaying all the key results here.
Nely Bonar
12/18/2015
