Key Insights: 2021 Strategic pearls on email and content marketing

2020 spun the world and we as people, consumers, and brands learned, unlearned, and adapted. This week we look into the two pillars that helped businesses succeed as we share stats and strategic jewels for 2021.

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Date published
December 25, 2020 Categories

30-second summary:

  • Consumers are becoming more conscious of how they shop, with an increased focus on small, minority-owned, women-owned, and Black-owned businesses.
  • Shopping this year has more sentimental value as shoppers look for a morale boost. Nearly, half, (43%) of consumers used shopping as a means to cheer up family and friends.
  • Mastercard predicted that 77% of Americans will choose to shop local while 75% of consumers intend to prefer shopping from businesses that share their personal values.
  • Email and content marketing have stood as pillars for brands through 2020, these will be a make or break factor for businesses to succeed in 2021.
  • Email marketing has an average ROI that is 4X higher than any other channel with APAC getting the highest open rates and EMEA winning the highest CTR.
  • The top seven industries in terms of open rates and CTR revealed.
  • Top priorities businesses must-have for email marketing 2021.
  • Lead generation, website traffic, and improving brand reputation are the top three priorities using content marketing.
  • 56% of organizations spent between $10,000 to $25,000 on content marketing.
  • Website analytics tools and SEO tools were the top two used technologies for content marketing.
  • 69% of businesses created content for “Top of the funnel” in 2020.
  • A drill-down of content marketing as a strategy and what makes content succeed in terms of strategy, views, shares, and more. Read on to unlock these insights.

We’re nearing the end of 2020 for good, and as we as people, consumers, and brands have learned, unlearned, and adapted to a lot of dynamics, this week we will take you through the pillars for brand success in 2020 – email marketing and content marketing. Their role in the minds of a more conscious consumer, best practices, and stats on what worked and what didn’t. Read on for a 20/20 strategic vision of 2021.

Consumers’ changing shopping attitudes

Consumers have shown exceptional resilience and adaptability to the pandemic and retail. Global payments giant, Mastercard highlighted that consumers are becoming more conscious of how they shop, with an increased focus on small, minority-owned, women-owned, and Black-owned businesses. 

In fact, shopping this year has more sentimental value as shoppers look for a morale boost. Nearly, half, (43%) of consumers used shopping as a means to cheer up family and friends while 40% shopped to get in the holiday spirit.

Mastercard predicted that 77% of Americans will choose to shop local while 75% of consumers intend to prefer shopping from businesses that share their personal values this holiday season. In fact, consumers would rather not receive a gift than accept one which has been purchased from a retailer that doesn’t align with their personal values.

Some key findings from the Mastercard study were:

“While the holidays may look different this year, one thing is clear – Americans are shopping with a different perspective,”

said Linda Kirkpatrick, president, US Issuers at Mastercard

Top cities according to holiday shopping spend

Mastercard Spending Pulse analysis of retail sales in the 20 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, where total retail sales grew 4.1% in October and cities including Atlanta, Houston, and Orlando emerged as leading the retail recovery. 

As consumers become increasingly conscious of their shopping preferences and habits, the importance for brands to have transparency and maintain the same communication and language across all channels will be a high priority. 

Since content and email marketing have stood as pillars for brands through 2020, these will be a make or break factor for businesses to succeed in 2021.

Email marketing: Performance overview 2020 and 2021 strategy

Email marketing has an average ROI that is 4X higher than any other channel. SMB digital marketing, Sendinblue, analyzed the data of 691 companies across 25 industries in 46 countries over one year/through 2020 to release its 2020 email marketing industry report. Here’s the email marketing overview in a snapshot.

Key findings included region specifics and details about the best send times for B2B and B2C businesses:

Top seven industries in terms of CTR

  1. Media/Publishing (9.34%)
  2. Insurance (8.58%)
  3. Household/Garden (7.81%)
  4. Electronics/Hardware (7.68%)
  5. Association (Club/Religions) (7.38%)
  6. Healthcare/Fitness/Food (7.17%)
  7. Fashion/Beauty (7.06%)

Top seven industries in terms of open rate

  1. Marketing/Advertising (38.10%)
  2. Association (Club/Religions) (36.75%)
  3. Insurance (36.25%)
  4. Electronics/Hardware (31.35%)
  5. Gambling/Lottery (30.70%)
  6. Event/Entertainment (27.70%)
  7. Agency/Consulting (26.25%)

Top priorities for email marketing 2021

Content marketing: Performance overview 2020 and 2021 strategy

Recently, SEMrush launched their ‘State of Content Marketing 2020 Global Report’ which analyzed 600 000+ tweets, 1,200,000+ blog posts, and surveyed 1,500+ marketers across the globe. Here are some key findings:

What were the most effective ways to use content marketing in 2020?

These were the top five most-used tactics by digital marketing teams:

  1. SEO
  2. Repurposing content
  3. How to guides/Educational content
  4. Optimizing customer journey
  5. Video/Visual content

Top topics related to content marketing

The top three topics were – Strategy, SEO, and social media. While Tools, trends, AI, and content ideas were the lesser talked about topics.

Tweets that win

Time is the name of the game for Twitter. What kinds of Tweets won the sweet spot on Twitter users’ timelines and devices?

Top Google searches regarding content marketing

Even though Google being down recently made the rounds on social media but we can understand why – Google handles nearly 5.6 billion searches per day! Coming back to content marketing and search queries, these were the top three Google search queries SEMrush recorded:

What kind of content performs best?

In terms of unique pageviews, articles ranging between 3000 to 7000+ words work well. However, articles that saw the highest shareability ranged between two categories – 1501 to 2000 words, and 5001 to 7000+ words.

If you’re looking at winning backlinks, articles within the range of 1201–1500 words championed these criteria.

Headlines that performed the best in terms of unique pageviews, shares, and backlinks were in these formats:

  1. Lists
  2. Guides
  3. Questions
  4. How-to

Headings (H1 tags) that were the best performing ranged between 10-13 words, followed by headings with 14 words.

Content with 6-7 images performed best in winning unique pageviews and shares.

For brands wanting to win with video content in their articles, adding 1-3 videos fell into the healthy threshold for winning backlinks, unique pageviews, and shares.

ClickZ readers’ choice for the week

2020 has been cold and marketers have been hungry for insights all year long. This week, our readers have been roasting their marketing marshmallows on the flame of forecasts for 2021 in terms of retail and digital marketing, with a sprinkle of some delightful thoughts from our interview with marketing leaders – eBay, IBM Watson, FILA, and Salesforce. Bon appetite!

  1. The digital marketing forecast for 2021
  2. Top marketers highlight 5 common themes about the impact of 2020 on business
  3. Five retail and marketing trends for 2021
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