Curious about how your team’s email marketing efforts compare to others in the media industry? Each quarter, Omeda releases aggregated, anonymized data from client emails sent from our platform so you can understand how your emails are performing. In Q2 2026, Omeda delivered over 1.96 billion emails on behalf of clients from our platform.

Covered in this report:

Email benchmarks for media industry emails sent in Q2 2026

The customer has evolved. It’s time marketing does too. Today’s consumer isn’t the same as they were three years ago. They don’t just engage with marketing. They dissect it, exploit its patterns, and discard whatever doesn’t serve them. This is the apex consumer. On the other hand, marketing appears more advanced than ever, but it’s operating on a model built for a slower, more predictable game—one consumers have already moved past. 

Nearly half of consumers already receive beauty recommendations from generative AI. At the same time, e-commerce is growing 6x faster than in-store , and global beauty sales continue to expand at a double-digit pace.

A new generation is coming of age in this environment: digitally fluent, highly informed, and redefining how beauty is discovered, evaluated, and experienced. Gen Alpha is blending AI-powered exploration with real-world interaction , setting new expectations for personalization, trust, and engagement across every touchpoint.

Segmentation has long played a role in targeting different consumer groups. Demographics and location data were first, offering a powerful way to target customer segments based on what they’re likely to want.

With new technology, it’s now possible to understand consumers on an even deeper level. Customer habits and actions say a lot about their purchasing behavior, and understanding these factors is vital to optimizing our marketing campaigns.

Retailers are no longer asking whether artificial intelligence belongs in the business. Nearly every organization is experimenting with AI in some form, whether through personalization engines, predictive inventory tools, customer service assistants, or emerging agentic experiences.  The challenge now is understanding how to measure its impact as AI increasingly shapes discovery, decision-making and customer engagement.

Acquiring a new customer has never been cheap. But the past few years have made it significantly more expensive. CPCs are up. Organic reach has narrowed. The performance marketing channels that powered a decade of retail growth are delivering diminishing returns, and retail teams are feeling it in their budgets.

The usual instinct is to look for the next new thing. What’s emerging instead is a format that predates the internet entirely.

For years, digital advertising operated on a simple premise: more visibility drives more growth. Impressions, placements, targeting, reach: the levers were obvious, and everyone pulled them. But consumers have changed.

Today’s shoppers are more skeptical, more privacy-conscious, and more selective about the brands they engage with. They’re quicker to abandon experiences that feel intrusive and increasingly resistant to advertising that interrupts rather than helps. In an era shaped by signal loss, rising acquisition costs, and AI-generated noise, marketers are discovering that attention alone is no longer the most valuable asset in commerce.

Growing a genuine social media following comes down to three things: creating content people actually want to share, engaging with your community like a real person, and showing up consistently enough that algorithms reward you. There are no shortcuts that don’t eventually backfire — but there are strategies that compound over time and attract the kind of followers brands actually care about.

Why engagement rate matters more than follower count (and how brands measure it)