Authored by our friends at Power Digital
.webp)
Marketing budgets are the first ones to feel the heat when the economy slows down. It can be tempting to cut back, play it safe, and wait for the worst to tide you over. While it can be scary, the best move right now is to get strategically aggressive when everyone else is pulling back:
The benefits of scaling marketing when others aren’t:
+ Media buying becomes more efficient
+ Consumer engagement increases
+ What works during hardship excels during better times
+ Fill the funnel now with future customers
Keep up the pressure, fight for market share and stay top of mind for their customers (even if they’re not buying right now); because all of that latent impact from marketing WILL yield results in the future.
Email marketing may not feel like the most exciting channel in your toolbox but it can be extremely valuable in the coming year. This is particularly true for many brands that haven’t maximized the return on their email program.
Here’s how to assess the state of your email marketing and how to optimize it:
Hypothesis + Data
Is email driving incremental revenue? Is it a crucial part of your business? Do you know your customers’ repeat purchase rate? Does email influence that? Establish a hypothesis that you want to test (e.g. “my email is very incremental”).
Segmentation
Segment your email list into predictive cohorts. There are audience intelligence tools out there that can help you do this. Or you can simply build a list of “all customers who bought XYZ widget in the last 7 days.” Split that segment into two equal groups, a Test and Control.
Test Send
Send an upsell email to the test group, but NOT to the control group. If you want a really “clean” test, you can hold out ALL emails (even automations and refills) to the control group.
Measure
Monitor both groups over the next 30 days. What is the total revenue driven by the test group? The control group? Do these numbers differ significantly?
Analyze + Calculate
Let’s say that the test group drove $10k of total business revenue of repeat purchases (not all of which was “attributed” to revenue, some might’ve come back directly or through paid). And the control group drove $5k of total business revenue in that same period. That means the test email drove $5k of incremental revenue ($10k test - $5k control = $5k lift).
In this example the hypothesis was validated: email is very incremental. These findings might encourage the brand to actually send MORE emails and invest more actively in its lifecycle program.
eMarketer predicts users to spend an average of 37.1 minutes on TikTok next year, so make sure you’re geared up to capture and monetize that attention. Take an integrated approach to build your TikTok strategy:
If you’re not on the platform already, you’ll be leaving money on the table in 2023. Power Digital’s proprietary technology nova found that on average, Power Digital clients see a 4x higher revenue return on TikTok compared to advertising on Meta. For certain categories, like fashion and beauty, that figure was 5-6x higher.
What makes for a successful TikTok marketing strategy?
Paid social has been quite the rollercoaster in 2022. iOS14 brought about a loss of signal that was terrifying. Ad accounts that used to see strong performance suddenly experienced a drop in results. While still in Beta with select agency partners (like Power Digital), Meta’s product rollout, Advantage + Shopping is the platform’s response to the post-IOS14 world. Advantage+ Shopping is a sparkling new algorithm and campaign type that combines Meta best practices post-iOS14 in a single, clean campaign structure.
While still early, the Growth Marketing Firm Power Digital is seeing an average of 26% lower CPAs and 58% higher ROAS vs. BAU across the board with its clients.
Don’t forget about creative
Lastly, brands spending on paid social should prioritize compelling storytelling brought to life through high-quality creative. The paid social experts at Power Digital would go as far as to say that great creative is far more important than ad-buying strategies. As stated earlier, consumer engagement will go up when others pull back on spending. Your best bet is to serve creative that builds brand recognition and incremental revenue.