The Medium is the Message: eCommerce and DIgital Messaging

Digital messaging is a major part of the ecommerce package for businesses as both a standard strategy but also for unique events such as communicating to customers through the pandemic and now again as we’re slowly emerging in a post-Covid era.

That is why ⅓ of marketers are planning on doubling the volume of digital messages by the end of the year, while 53% of them plan on doubling them by 2024.

We are seeing a lot of changes within marketing in how businesses are communicating with customers through new messaging strategies. At the forefront of these changes is the technology that is being used as well as the frequency of communication.

Digital messages are a core staple in engaging current customers and attracting new ones. More than 9-in-10 marketers believe that digital messages are “extremely important” to their marketing strategy.

“The speed at which the programs are growing is still surprising,” said Will Devlin, VP of marketing at MessageGears. “It is another reminder of the importance of truly knowing who your customers are and when and how they want to engage. Smart messaging can launch a company into the stratosphere of the biggest brands, while poor messaging habits can be a company’s death knell.”

How many messages?

Half of the marketers who were surveyed said that in 2020 they sent at the very least 100 million digital messages, representing an increase of 10% from 2019. When it comes to this year, 58% of marketers said that they also plan to send at least 100 million again.

So what’s the payoff of all of these messages? Well, the majority of marketers (60%) stated that at least 60% of their companies’ sales actually come from digital messaging strategies.

And how about the frequency of these messages? Again, the majority (61% of marketers) said they spent at least 20 hours a week on digital marketing last year, meaning there were very few breaks taken in the mail bombing of customers’ inboxes.

Around half of them reported that they sent messages multiple times throughout a working day, and 66% mentioned that the amount of people who are receiving messages has reached at least 10 million people.

The path to personalization

For most marketers, their number one goal is to improve the personalization of their messages using technology and customer data to enhance how they communicate with each of their customers.

One of the limiting factors here is having the right tech solutions to optimize ecommerce strategies. Many common solutions on the shelf are simply not good enough to suit the more complex needs of bigger and broader brands that have a bundle of complex issues that need to be addressed.

Then there are deeper and multiplex tech solutions that are truly optimized for specific features such as personalization. Digital solutions like Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the ecommerce platform that powers many of the world’s most well-known brands, comes with integrated AI that personalizes the recommended products of each customer. 

Commerce Cloud can also get super specific to each customer’s digital experience such as offer discounts and special offers for people who visit the site on their birthday, or are shown region-specific products so that only visitors from Missouri can see Missouri-specific products.

Back to the survey. Paradoxically, despite firing off endless messages the vast majority of marketers (90%) are concerned about the content overload that their customers are receiving.

Message ready

The coming mass messages from businesses are increasingly falling into what we can call digital transformation. Selling things in the post-pandemic world is going to be different. “Pre-Covid,” explained Gee Ranasinha, CEO of Kexino, “the way businesses looked at their balance sheet was one where revenue, by and large, was treated as a given. Sure, businesses wanted to grow market share, audience, and so on. But it was just as important to keep costs down. ‘Efficiency’ was treated as a proxy for ‘effectiveness.'”

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud specialists. Contact us to see how we can work together.