The Bulletin March 2021

How well do you know how your click-through rates compare with everyone else’s? Well, this month we bring the average in Australia for all the important data when it comes to your email marketing campaigns. March has also seen more data published for online retail which has unsurprisingly increased, with Myer’s e-commerce bolstered by their beauty category. It could also be getting harder to track and target your audience as Google decides not to replace the cookie when it gets blocked by Chrome later in the year. Finally, the first-ever tweet has been sold for an incredible price. Place your bets before you scroll!

Campaign Monitor has released its benchmark report for email marketing. We think that it’s always good to have reports like this to use as a guide when reviewing your email marketing campaigns and how successful they are compared to the average data. Want to know more? Here’s an overview of overall global email marketing statistics for 2020 so that you can compare them with your own:

• Average open rate: 18.0%
• Average click-through rate: 2.6%
• Average click-to-open rate: 14.1%
• Average unsubscribe rate: 0.1%

The movement to increase the control people have over their own data is increasing at a rapid rate as people are becoming more aware of how their personal data is being used and shared. We wrote earlier this month about the changes Apple are making with a new pop-up that will allow a user to block the sharing of their data with other parties and the impact it will have on advertising. Now Google has also confirmed that once Chrome blocks the use of third-party cookies, Google will not build alternative ways to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will they use them in their ad products, meaning it will be harder to target and track users through Cookie data. So, what should we be doing differently? Well, it would make sense to focus more on growing your email lists, traffic to your website through search ads and increasing your fans on social media to grow your database organically. The future landscape of digital marketing will need to be navigated differently with investment into data science and analytical tools whilst also committing to and understanding first-party data.

Surprise! Thanks to more restrictions in Victoria and parts of Western Australia in February, the transition to eCommerce is here to stay when it comes to shopping, with an increase of 54% in that month. People are shopping online more frequently, yet total retail sales have still slipped slightly despite strong online retail growth, making the move to online for brands that can even more important. There are still going to be some challenging times ahead as retail is continually being shaped by the pandemic, but it’s looking positive for the world of eCommerce.

Beauty saw an impressive rise in sales in the past 12 months, with Myer taking the crown in eCommerce. Their online sales jumped to 71% ($287.6 million), making up 21% of their total sales in the first six months of the financial year – which is double what it was a year ago. This could be thanks to Myer ONE, their loyalty program, with one million customers signing up to take advantage of the $10 reward cards.

It seems like every social media platform is jumping on being able to shop through the apps, and YouTube is the latest one to embrace hosting eCommerce on their platform. They plan on testing out product recommendations so that people can discover and purchase products that have been featured in YouTube videos. The feature will eventually (it’s still in the testing stages) allow users to see an icon at the top of the screen with more information about the product that’s included in the video underneath. This will then drive traffic to the brand’s product pages and allow the users to make their purchase. If it eventually gets rolled out, do you think you’ll be giving it a go?

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet, which reads “just setting up my twttr”, has been sold for an incredible $2.9 million (that’s $4 million in AUD). It was bought as an NFT (a nonfungible token, which is essentially another cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin) by a Malaysia-based businessman. This doesn’t mean that the buyer, Sina Estavi, owns the content and in fact, he has no ownership at all, his name is just now technically connected to the “artwork” (or in this case, tweet). Do you think this could be the start of more tweets or online media being sold? With the exponential rise of all things digital well under way, we don’t see why not!