Email is accounting for a shrinking share of e-commerce site visits, according to the latest quarterly report from Monetate. During Q3, 2.9% of site visits came from email, down from 4% a year earlier. Email’s traffic share has now declined for 3 consecutive quarters among the subset of e-commerce sites included in the report, down from a peak of 4.5% during Q4 2012. Nevertheless, that email’s peak came during the fourth quarter has some implications for retailers during this holiday season.
It will be interesting to see whether email’s share of visits picks up again during the fourth quarter, when retailers are sending more messages in an effort to lure shoppers. During the fourth quarter of 2012, for example, Experian found that brands sent 26% more emails than they did during the third quarter. (Admittedly, the brands included in that study spanned 7 industries, not just e-commerce. Nevertheless, the data indicated that among those 7 industries, multi-channel retailers had the second-fastest rate of quarter-over-quarter volume growth, at 30%.) Read the rest at MarketingCharts.
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