Ecommerce Email Sees Diminishing Returns

As Internet retailers prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, understanding how to assess the value of customer segments proves useful.

Monetate's latest Ecommerce Quarterly report lends a virtual hand in this regard, providing several useful benchmark reports on consumer behavior in ecommerce and a breakdown of online shopping behaviors, revealing two important insights to help online merchants ready themselves for the remainder of 2013.

The EQ2 2013 report from Monetate revealed that referral traffic to ecommerce sites from email and conversion rates from email have both decreased since last year. Referral traffic dropped a whopping 37 percent while the conversion rate slipped six percent.

There is some good news for Internet retailers however. Traffic from mobile devices now makes up over 22% of all ecommerce traffic (up from 15.2 percent in Q2 2012). Tablets (12.44 percent) are outpacing smartphones (9.69 percent) when it comes to the types of devices used in the mobile category.