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EMAIL DELIVERS AS much website traffic for Irish e-commerce businesses as every social media network combined, according to a new study.
Research by digital marketing agency Wolfgang Digital found that email, which was first used in the early 1970s, is also the third-biggest driver for online revenue, behind Google search and direct web traffic.
“Advertisers often get caught up chasing the shiny new thing, but email just seems to be really solid,” study author and Wolfgang CEO Alan Coleman told Fora.
The report – which looked at data from Harvey Norman, Lifestyle Sports, Littlewoods Ireland and other websites – found that 6% of overall revenue is generated through email, while Facebook delivers just 2% of revenue.
“If you think about it, when you post something on social media, your reach is quite low,” Coleman said.
“With Facebook, if you’re posting organically – if you’re not paying for it – it could be less than 5% of the people who follow you that will see it. But when you email it, you’re pretty sure everybody is going to at least see the headline in their inbox.”
When repeat customers, or direct traffic, are excluded, email is second only to Google in terms of generating sales.
“If you get Google right and you get email right, that’s about three-quarters of your revenue looked after,” Coleman said.
Mobile
Wolfgang Digital analysed 87 million e-commerce website sessions for the 12-month period ending 31 June.
Facebook dominated in the social media category: it was the only social network to register as a traffic source for websites, accounting for 5% of overall visitors. Other sites like Twitter and Instagram were below 1%.
Unsurprisingly, mobile provided the bulk share of web traffic – 42% – but it underperformed when it came to revenue, generating just over 20% of sales.
That said, Coleman argued that there is a strong indication that consumers use mobile to make a buying decision but carry out the actual purchase on a desktop computer.
Website speed
He also disputed the figures that many marketers use to measure website performances.
“Digital marketers obsess over bounce rate, the number of people leaving your website,” he said.
“People feel an awful sense of rejection when they see a high bounce rate. There’s an assumption there that all bounces are bad. This is a fallacy.”
He said there is “zero correlation between bounce rate and conversion”, the number of customers who click on a webpage and make a purchase.
It is more important for e-commerce businesses to improve their site speed, he argued.
“As websites go faster, people are more likely to buy. For every two tenths of a second you reduce your server response time, your conversion rate goes up 8%.”
The average load time for pages analysed in the report was 6.5 seconds – significantly less than the two-second recommendation from Google.
“Google loves fast websites,” Coleman said. “If you improve your site speed, your Google ranking will start increasing so it will have a multiplying effect on your bottom line.”
Written by Conor McMahon and posted on Fora.ie
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40 years old is a bit misleading. To nerds sending a mail in a lab? Think i got my first mail in 1995
Yeah and it was well after that that it became adopted widely enough to be of any use for marketing. Plus, let’s not forget that email marketing only works in tandem with functional online stores, which didnt really exist until the late 1990s (eg Amazon’s IPO was in 1997, and it didn’t make a profit until 2001).
Pats full of Sh#t
*That’s
I’m innocent I tells ya… I’m flabbergasted… Never in all my years. Millions of letters of support.
Find facebook too restrictive. Its great if your just a big brand wanting image and logo, but if your message wants to get your USP’s across and a phone number, then facebook needs to broaden its protocols. Its obviously designed to suit facebook, and yet there’s more freedom with a street billboard. Perhaps fit the nerd at facebook read Ogilvy’s ‘Confessions of advertising man’ he would discover learn how the industry works . . Emails, brilliant. they fall into the format of the worlds most oldest format of advertising; the editorial style.
Surely those figures are skewed, considering email newsletters are something you have already showed an interest in,bought something from in the past, or was recommended by a friend, so therefore you would be more likely to buy from?
How do you get someone on your email list? Facebook Adverts and Adwords, so social is important. Doesn’t sound like he tested Facebook ads with their great targeting. Email probably is the most effective, but it’s isn’t free, you need a good CRM to do email properly,
You just need a list. Why do you think so many stores are asking for email address when you buy products
If it’s just a list and not relevant to you when you receive the email, then you will just deleted it. Newsletters via email are now tailored to you based on your needs and trends/buying habits. Under Armor for example used to just send out generic emails offers. Now they can customize and change them as they have a lot of data on you. Good read: https://news.sap.com/how-under-armours-digital-transformation-will-improve-your-health/
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