Affino Intelligence Briefing - June 2021 Tougher to Engage Audiences

Message Campaigns

Email volumes remain significantly up on this time 2020. In practice email volumes have been consistently higher this year than comparable months last year, with the exception of April (reflected in the start of May data point) where there was a significant dip compared to last year.

When reviewing the data we’re seeing that email along with all the engagement indicators are not following the trends set during the early stage of the pandemic, and it may in practice be another couple of years before we understand what a ’normal’ seasonal pattern is going to be for all these indicators.

Behind the scenes, we have started to look at the average monthly change in email volumes for the individual brands and the monthly swings are dramatic to say the least with an average swing of 26% in email volumes each months. January and March each had approximately 60% increases in email volumes compared to the previous month.

Email Open Rates are averaging at 22.17% and the CTOR rate is averaging 13.39%.

The CTOR (Click to Open Rate) had a peak in January and then a significant dip in February, and has then remained stable. We are looking forward to seeing more messages using the new Message Template Builder (MTB) which should result in better looking and more engaging emails over the coming months.

The Email Open Rate was strongest in February through to April and has since then seen a significant drop from 24.61% to 20.60%. Whilst the email send volume has remained fairly consitent for those months (with the exception of the dip).

There was a peak email bounce rate in April / May which was 300% up on other months this year, but we can see that this is directly correlated with big changes in the message target groups, with some significant contact sets being imported into Affino, and the inevitable churn that happens with such lists.

The number of emails per contact per month remains astonishingly low, with only 2.4 emails per person per month. This no doubt does much to avoid email fatigue, but given that many brands on Affino are news and insight brands, we would expect that many emails each week rather than per month for a lot of the brands and that is not the case.

We will be making some significant updates in Affino over the coming releases whereby we start logging all emails sent out, including all the ecommerce and automated system messages. We will look to add these to the monthly figures to see how they affect the overall numbers and how they are influencing the campaign open rates.

Effort

In line with the lower engagement rates we are seeing overall, it is noticeable that brands are getting less engagement with a similar level of effort in 2021. This means the pandemic bump has faded and as a result growing engagement with the audience has gotten that much tougher.

It is possible that we will set a new baseline for these series as the pandemic had a huge impact on some brands - which is fading as we start to move to the new normal.

One takeaway for the Affino team, based on these findings and our conversations with brand leaders, is that there is a great deal of opportunity to drive forward content and engagement strategies using Affino’s enhanced insight capabilities, and its ability to present the most engaging and best converting content automatically to the audience. We will look to run workshops and provide more guidance on how best to leverage these tools to get he best return on effort (ROE).

Audience

Audience growth has slowed down in the first six months of 2021. This appears to be down to brand GDPR compliance with big clearouts of legacy contacts from CRMs in the April / May period, which has then been reversed significantly in May / June.

It is clear though that the trend line for this year is considerably flatter than last year, something which we would like to see reverse itself quickly over the coming months.

Content

Looking at the content growth for 2021, it feels very much as though content is being created like clockwork these days. With almost exactly the same volume of content being produced in aggregate each month of the year, with far less variation than we saw last year. It will be interesting to see if that tails off during the summer months or remains as rock steady as it is.

Conclusion

It is hard not to conclude that things are tough out there for audience engagement teams. No doubt things will settle down over the coming months as we return to the new normality. In the meantime teams need to use all the tools at their displosal to help drive engagement forward. Not least the automated ones (including the great new ones in the latest Affino Breakthrough release).

There is more to it than the raw traffic and engagement stats, and we know that for many brands 2021 is turning into a very positive commercial experiene, some are up 100% on sales targets for the year at this point.

It is also still early days for these data series, some are only six months old and it is too early to extrapolate meaningfully at this point - how current performance compares to a typical year, but it is useful to have this data to better understand the relative performance within the market today.

Inspite of the tough environment, the vast majority of brands remain well ahead in terms of traffic, engagement and audience size when compared to January 2021, which will put them in a good position as markets reopen fully in the coming months.