New release: How to manage the shift from offline to online

Unprecedented. Game-changing. Like nothing we have ever experienced before. All of these things can be said about 2020. But we’d like to talk about them in a way that might be different than your current associations of them and the year. As much as 2020 has been a curve ball, it’s also been a year of online growth in ways the industry hasn’t seen since the dotboom. In preparation for our latest release, we compared year-on-year information from Dotdigital and found that open rates are up. Up by a lot! On average, they are up by 80%, but for some industries such as fashion retailers, technology hardware providers, health services, electronics, and even energy suppliers, open rates have sky-rocketed over 100, 200, and in some cases even 300%.

But that’s not even the full story. Because click-through rates are up too, by an average of 93%. What we can gleam from this is that people are even engaging with online campaigns more than they did last year – a lot more!

But why is this? 2020 and all the unique challenges it brought also kept people more in their homes around the world. But people are resourceful and adaptable. They quickly substituted the normalcy of their old lives with virtual connection. From getting grandma Wi-Fi and an iPad to Zooming into remote meetings, online has become the norm, none more so than online shopping. It therefore makes sense that customers are engaging more than ever with the marketing campaigns in their inboxes.

But with that, 2020 has introduced a brand new problem for marketers. And in fact, it’s two-fold. The first is how to keep this engagement up. And the second, is how to compete. You see, clicks and opens aren’t the only thing that are up. So are sends. We’ve seen brands step up to the increase in online engagement and they are sending more than ever. The problem is, as a marketer, you aren’t the only one sending more – most likely, so are your competitors. As a result, customers are finding it harder and harder to differentiate between brands. To keep engaging and winning, marketers are going to have to find some ways to create out-of-the-box campaigns. Lucky for you, we have just the solution.