Email Visitor Conversion Rates Tower over PPC and SEO
A recent MediaPost blog posting by Jack Loechner caught my eye. It highlights a new study by search engine marketing firm Engine Ready that sought to uncover which advertising tactic generated higher returns: pay-per-click or search engine optimization. By studying all the different ways visitors arrive at Web sites, the analysis wound up yielding some very interesting results regarding email.
The study, which looked at 20.8 million visits to 26 e-commerce sites from July 2008 through June 2009, shows that paid search visitors are nearly twice as likely to buy as those who arrive from organic search. For those who arrived at an e-commerce site from a PPC ad, the conversion rate was 2.03 percent. The conversion rate for SEO visitors was 1.26 percent.
But, as it turns out, email visitors blew both out of the water. For visitors who came to an e-commerce site by clicking a link in an email, the conversion rate was 6.58 percent—more than three times that of PPC and five times that of SEO. Not only is email a relatively inexpensive channel by comparison, but its conversion rate and ROI is clearly unmatched.
Comments
Thanks for sharing. This info is not surprising at all and only cements that email marketing is the way to go.
Posted by: Michael | September 8, 2009 2:41 PM
I am not suprised that email marketing has such a high conversion rate. I mean email is one of the most widely used forms of communication today. People check their emails at least 10 times a day. Hence there are more likely to respond to an email marketing campaign than say PPC marketing.
Posted by: email marketing | October 12, 2009 6:22 AM