The retail sector has fallen behind the leisure, travel, IT and communications sectors in producing online-and-offline sales promotions research has found.

A study by Manchester marketing agency Delineo covered recent sales campaigns from 50 brands such as British Gas, Vodafone, Jet2 and Pizza Express, exploring the ‘customer journey’ and resulting promotional and purchasing decisions.

The research aims to identify the best and worst practice in on-and-offline marketing communications and assessed customer proposition, search engine utilisation, brand connection on-and-offline and the purchase options being made available to customers.

The scores from each of these areas were combined to create the performance based Customer Journey Index.

T-Mobile, Ramada Jarvis and Premier Inn all showed a strong offline and online marketing communications connection, with scores above 78%, while retail sector brands on average had a score of 56% due to major brands being found to have adopted bad practice with ‘disconnected’ or ‘confusing’ customer journeys.

Ella Worthington, marketing and planning manager for Delineo said that the report highlighted that a ‘significant portion of the £36bn spent on sales promote last year was wasted due to bad practice. 

“Unfortunately many leading brands do not fully appreciate and understand the customer journey across offline and online sales promotion communication.  Agencies or marketing departments failing to successfully integrate digital and traditional marketing strategies are undermining effective marketing communication,” Worthington added.