The overall customer engagement picture for retail and e-commerce brands is strong, with the brands in the industry being 19 per cent more likely to anticipate a rise in their marketing budget over the next year compared to other verticals, according to the Braze 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review.

Braze is a US-based customer engagement platform used by businesses for multichannel marketing.

Bright spots to double down on are data-driven personalisation; frequent and effective collaboration; and moving beyond vanity metrics.

Thirty-six per cent of retailers were rated ace for segmentation maturity and 22 per cent were rated ace for message personalisation, the second-highest score among industries for both competencies.

Plus, 36 per cent of surveyed retailers can segment users in real time as new data is collected, supporting messaging at the speed of the purchase journey.

Forty-eight per cent of retail and e-commerce brands sync across teams at least weekly, the highest of any industry.

Seventy-eight per cent of surveyed retailers have moved beyond vanity metrics to assess the monetisation and retention impact of their customer engagement programmes, Braze said in document titled ‘Mastering customer engagement: The key to retail and e-commerce success’.

Actionable solutions to drive growth are owning the full shopping journey; working smarter instead of harder; and giving more time to creativity.

Only 37 per cent of retailers use (or plan to use) inapp/in-browser messages; that's tied for the second-lowest rate of any industry, highlighting a key gap in in-product channel capabilities.

Half of retail and e-commerce brands use either a single primary channel or a mix of different siloed point solutions to reach users, making it hard for them to serve up unified brand experiences.

Forty-eight per cent of retailers listed demonstrating the return-on-investment impact of creativity as an obstacle, the highest of any industry, Braze found.

Retailers are also more likely than any other industry (64 per cent) to leverage modeling like predictive purchases to support campaign performance and the most likely (55 per cent) to take advantage of business intelligence platforms to perform advanced analytics on customer engagement outcomes. If any industry is positioned to optimise its marketing efforts, it is this one, Braze added.