The volume of marketing messages across email, SMS, in-app and push channels surged by 111% this year, due to brands “striving to make meaningful connections” in an increasingly crowded digital landscape, according to research from customer engagement platform Customer.IO.

The report ‘2024 State of Messaging’ looks at the evolving world of marketing messaging over 24 months, with survey responses from more than 500 marketers.

According to the report, there was a 31% year-over-year increase in email send volume on Black Friday and a 46% increase on Cyber Monday.

Customer.IO also established that multi-channel campaigns outperformed single-channel campaigns by 60%.

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The report also showed that personalisation remains an important element of messaging marketing, with 42% of brands surveyed planning to increase personalisation over the next two years.

According to the report, 31% of respondents already use AI in their messaging strategies, and 42% plan to adopt or expand its use over the next two years.

The ‘2024 State of Messaging’ report showed that 93% of brands send consumers daily emails, which amounts to 1.9x the number of emails sent in 2023.

It also highlighted that brands tend to send out the most emails at the start of the work week and the fewest on Sundays.

More than four out of ten (45%) of brands say segmentation is the most effective way to improve email engagement, with 34% using dynamic content to increase interaction.

According to the report, the use of in-app messaging has also increased with 23% of respondents highlighting it as the most effective non-email channel. The use of in-app messaging was most prevalent in the retail, fintech, and SaaS industries.