By Ray Jenkin, Board Director, esbconnect

Each year at about this time, commentators pop up to offer all-seeing predictions of what this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday period (November 29 to December 2) is going to bring.

These insights often involve some pretty safe bets: people are going to shop earlier; they might be choosier, because times are tough; digital is stealing further ground from bricks-and-mortar; mobile is growing over desktop. For marketing advice, they’ll show you influencers, cross-channel campaigns, early-bird discounts – the kind of crystal ball-gazing that is unlikely ever to be far off the mark.

But I want to look through another prism – the one that shows retailers and their marketing departments, and the hard test they face in preparing for all this.

Amid the yo-yo conditions of Covid and the subsequent years, no two holiday seasons have been the same, as e-commerce has waxed and waned, and retailers have invested, cut back, pivoted and reset, again and again.

And in the same period, as third-party cookies have thinned out, both targeting and measurement have become more troublesome, even as media costs have risen. Meanwhile, the holiday season has become ever more vital – last year, nearly two-fifths of small retailers (22%) in the UK anticipated that Christmas would account for over half of their year’s takings.

What that all means is that in 2024, the fifth Christmas since the arrival of Covid, many retail and e-commerce businesses are dazed and bewildered from half a decade of whiplash conditions. Resource-light, time-poor, hair frequently on fire, they need solutions to their Q4 challenges and opportunities that are easy to work with and painless to access.

Alongside search and social, email is one of the most valuable data and delivery channels, and the data attributes it offers – more than 440 of them, in our case – can do a great deal to replace the lost data signals that have left marketers struggling for clarity.

But email is also overlooked as an acquisition channel, and accessing scaled publisher databases offers an invaluable way to push promotions and campaigns for a third-party brand. Here are a few ways email can help brands to acquire new customers in a tricky Q4.

1. Filling in the data gaps

While campaigns within major walled-garden platforms only get more expensive, they also generally offer fewer transparent targeting options than they once did. Where an advertiser might once have been able to target its ads by household income, car and home ownership and family status, for instance, those choices may no longer be available as data signals.

Using opted-in email data as an alternative to that lost data signal can restore some of that addressability and granularity. Deploying opted-in email as the identifier, and benefiting from the richness of that data, marketers are once again able to target and create omnichannel journeys to guide consumers down the funnel.

2. Better tracking

In a similar vein, where measurement is concerned, many brands seem to have been caught short in finding a reliable alternative to the cookie. As a result, correct attribution is increasingly difficult. Many of the visitors to a given website – some suggest more than half – are now untrackable, which makes it very difficult for advertising platforms and brands to show the value of their work.

Our attribution tool, based on a scaled, addressable dataset of 17m consumers, solves this problem, using the email address as an extra signal. The on-site connection is made via the tool, and positive attribution is confirmed when an email address that has received a campaign also goes on to complete a desired action on-site.

There are also a number of other secondary benefits of email-driven attribution, including the ability to build lookalike audiences and ensure the continual optimisation of your campaign; the option to provide real-time email suppressions so we only target new customers; and pain-free creative optimisation of campaigns. 

3. Pre-campaign testing

When data disappears, the message and creative quickly come to mean more than they did in cookie-saturated times, when performance was more easily guaranteed. As a marketing channel, email offers advertisers a cost-effective means to test content, promotions and ad formats before running a campaign on more expensive channels.

Creative personalisation also significantly improves the ROI of email campaigns in their own right, and where creative is available as a service layer, it allows brands to turn campaigns around fast, easing a little more pain. Email is also an amazing retention tool, allowing brands to engage consumers and gather data in return for opportunities they value.

Should I worry about privacy, when using email data for acquisition?

Not with consented email data. We live in a privacy-first era, and compliance is getting trickier to achieve. Ensuring that you and your media or tech partners collect explicit consent for both on- and off-site marketing activities is now a standard requirement, yet it is astounding how many marketers do not effectively vet for compliance when seeking new partners for acquisition-led tactics. In contrast, Esbconnect gathers consent from its community to email, measure and identify users in all major digital channels. We go over and above to ensure consumers understand how we use their data through our own privacy platform, and ensure they can manage their own consent easily and clearly.

In other words, the consumer has control over their data, and if they choose to opt out at an email level – a concept the majority of consumers understand – this will also remove their consent from many other tracking IDs, protecting their information.

So when times are hard, teams are under stress and the marketing methods that used to work are either diluted, increasingly expensive or entirely unavailable, look to new ones. Relief is out there, and while it looks different than before, it can get you where you need to go this holiday season.