Merkle’s Customer Engagement Report brings you cross-industry analysis of marketing statistics and trends, in addition to articles and case studies, to help you make better business decisions.
The Q2 2020 issue dives into the principles of agile marketing and find out how recent privacy regulations (CCPA) are having a positive impact on customer engagement. Below are some key insights from the report:
1. 85% of marketers plan to increase agile usage in the next two years
Marketers double down on their enthusiasm for agile in sharing their plans to increase usage in the next twenty-four months, with 85 percent of respondents planning on ramping up usage. Additionally, when viewing the data by industry, we see high levels of formalized transformation planning across financial, health, and high-tech, while the travel, media, and entertainment segment shows the lowest levels of agile planning.
2. Lack of expertise seen as primary barrier to agile marketing adoption
Agile adoption is clearly growing in both marketing functions and otherwise. Marketers are generally more focused on the benefits of agile and are planning on increasing adoption in the near term. Respondents indicate a lack of expertise as their primary barrier to adoption of agile marketing. Additionally, marketers are somewhat concerned that agile marketing could disrupt their business or lack executive support to implement the new processes.
3. Marketers employ outside help to address compliance concerns
Marketers had to reorganize, build new processes, and gain capabilities in order to meet the requirements of the new regulations. To understand how this impacted their businesses, we asked marketers to tell us which policy components are most concerning to them. Forty percent of respondents indicated concern with keeping accurate inventory of customer data.
4. Email and digital media channels most impacted by privacy regulations
As discussed above, marketers are seeing a positive impact from recent privacy regulations. As with previous Customer Engagement Reports, we felt it is important to look through a channel lens in giving context to our findings. Here we see email (19 percent) and digital media (18 percent) most often took the top rank (most impacted), while point-of-sale (16 percent) was most often the lowest ranked (least impacted). These findings do not come as a surprise, as previous reports indicate email as the most leveraged channel in terms of personalization to date.
Want to learn more? Check out our Q2 2020 Customer Engagement Report for even more insights, articles delving into these topics, and case studies on Agile marketing in action. Download your copy here.
