Our compilation of the latest social media statistics of consumer adoption and usage of social networking platforms
Social networks have transformed marketing and, as this post shows, their popularity is still growing in our latest global social media statistics research summary for 2025.
Research by Global WebIndex that we reference in this article shows that globally,
63.9% of the world's population uses social media. The average daily usage is 2 hours and 21minutes (February 2025).
Since it's the start of the year, we have included the most recent research from the end of the previous year, but will update this compilation of research through 2025. We include the lastest figures for the fast growing social networks such as Threads and Bluesky which has recently announced dramatic growth as many people switch from X / Twitter.
We'll keep this post updated during 2024 as the latest statistics are published drawing on our recommended …
Create a co-ordinated 'always-on' digital marketing strategy for the whole customer lifecycle to boost conversions and retention
It's no secret that engaging your customers is crucial to achieving continued sales, and it's also well known that it is usually far easier and costs less to get repeat business from existing customers than it is to acquire new ones from scratch.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is well established as a process to try to achieve this, but this customer lifecycle 'relationship' begins with the first contact with the customer (when they are still a contact or prospect).
We believe that the best way for a company or brand to build relationships is through a planned always-on marketing approach integrated across each 4 stages of your customers' lifecycles:
Reach
Act
Convert
Engage
This renewed focus by marketers on prospect and customer engagement, conversion, and retention has led to the appearance of a new…
Our compilation of average email open rates and click-through rate data. What's a good open rate for email? Review our recommended statistics sources to benchmark your email campaigns for your industry sector
When I run training workshops on Email marketing, Email marketers often ask "how do our campaigns compare"? They're looking for email statistics to compare subscriber engagement for average email open rate, clickthrough, delivery, unsubscribe and complaints rates, ideally within their sector. That's what we cover in this regularly updated compilation of the best email marketing response statistics for different sectors and countries.
Fortunately, there are several good options to benchmark email response across different sectors. The best stats sources are compilations by email marketing service providers who produce statistics across their clients' campaigns. We have grouped the stats into the top eight questions asked including:
What are the email engagement rates by industry?
What are the email engagement…
Website personalization, product, offer, and content recommendation services to help retailers and other businesses personalize their proposition to nurture prospects toward conversions
The website personalization tools we recommend in this article enable you to segment visitors and then deliver personalized messages of the 'next best product' or 'next best content' within containers on your website as with the classic Amazon personalized recommendations (read their published methodology from this fascinating whitepaper from back in 2003).
I originally wrote this post in 2010 when there were fewer personalization options. I have updated it annually since with recommendations provided via social media - do get in touch if you have a suggestion. The latest update includes the new Google AI Recommendations framework that was introduced in January 2021. A serious new competitor has entered the market to disrupt competition and perhaps reduce fees for retailers.
This is the latest update where…
Use the honeycomb model to help inform your social media strategy
Back in 2011, a group of professors from Canada; Jan Kietzmann, Kristopher Hermkens and Ian McCarthy created the Honeycomb Model to review social media effectiveness, looking at reasons why users engage with social media.
The idea behind the honeycomb model is that of the 7 key building blocks delineated by the model, companies can select the ones most relevant to their business, and focus their attention on the key functionalities.
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We created this simple table to help you evaluate each of the seven blocks, so you can decide which ones, and how many, your organization should focus on.
Social media building blocks:
Identity: Data privacy controls and tools for user self-promotion
Presence: Creating and managing the reality, intimacy and immediacy of the context
Relationships: Managing the structural and flow properties in a network…
Using tables and flow charts to visualize and plan automated email communications
Research shows that behavioral email communication is a powerful technique. Planning and optimizing an automated email campaign strategy empowers marketers and managers to follow-up online customer actions to help increase conversion to sale at a low cost.
Here are some common examples of event-triggered email sequences:
Welcome sequence for a new subscriber or lead to an email list
Welcome sequence for new customer (onboarding)
Reactivation of customers or subscribers who lose engagement
Abandoned shopping cart follow-up emails
Shoppers browse or search on a site but don't buy follow-up
Time to repurchase or replenishment emails
However, the technique is still used by relatively few companies. One barrier to setting up these event-triggered email sequences is the time it takes to specify the sequences if it's a new approach to the company or agency.
A great benefit of event-triggered e-mails is that once set…
A comprehensive checklist for auditing different customer data types in a CRM or Email marketing system
In today’s world of ever-increasing data availability, volume and variety the challenge to know which data is valuable to you is a key step in starting to build a marketing solution. An often-cited response is that ‘all data is important’ and this may be true, but to help decide which elements are critical in the initial stages of building your solution a method to identify at the value of each type of customer data is key.
In this post, I will look at how to audit customer data based on its type and value. The examples will show why it's important to be selective when reviewing customer data in CRM and Email marketing.
Over numerous implementations of Marketing Database solutions, I have seen many types…
Frameworks for managing social media marketing
When I first read Groundswell by Forrester, I really liked their social media management acronym POST. It gave you a simple framework to digest their approach to social, don’t just jump to the technology, look at your People, Objectives, then develop your Strategy and finally implement the Technology.
This inspired me to create my own acronym TALKING, a social media management framework to help shape and champion social media plans. I've used it with many different types of business since and it seems to give rise to good discussions around the main social media strategy and management issues.
7 elements of the TALKING framework to manage your social media marketing
1. Tribes
Define and build your segments and personas.
Linking to Seth Godins reference to people being part of tribes of…
Today, tech marketers and managers advocate for IT and high tech both internally in their businesses and externally to their target markets. We've got the marketing tools and training you need.
Looking to strengthen your technology company's marketing strategy? As marketers, we are all striving to apply data and customer insights to our marketing activities. But in the IT and high tech sector, with competition at an all-time high, this approach is absolutely critical. Our tried and tested tech marketing solutions support IT and high tech marketing professionals to plan, manage, and optimize their marketing strategy, and win more customers.
Why invest in strategic marketing for your tech company?
If you haven't already got an omnichannel marketing strategy in place, now is the time to develop your marketing to compete in the competitive, growing, IT and high tech marketplace.
As McKinsey found in their UK B2B COVID-19 survey, the technology, media…
Your customer's omnichannel digital experience is key to meeting your healthcare marketing goals. Your ability to prioritize determines how fast you'll get there
Naturally, user experience (UX or CX) applies to just about every marketing sector right now. But, where healthcare marketing comes into its own, is the sheer opportunity for data-driven personalization.
Customer-focused healthcare marketing taps into the benefits of digital transformation for manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, healthcare agents, and the patients as end-users.
Firstly, let's consider the digital disruption which puts consumers in a researcher's shoes, and making personal decisions about their healthcare, online:
47% research doctors online
38% research hospital and medical facilities online
77% book medical appointments online
But how can marketers and managers anticipate and satisfy the needs of healthcare consumers demanding products and services on-demand? In this article, we will look into some elements of digital experience, including recommended resources from our Digital Experience…
