Want to sell stuff online? Email’s still your best bet by a long way

You hear it all the time: if you’re trying to sell stuff online and you’re not on social media, you’re completely behind the times. If you don’t catch up, you could end up failing. But as it turns out, email is still a far more effective weapon in the online retailer’s arsenal.

A new study by Custora suggests that while organic search is still how retailers bring in the largest number of customers, the rate of customers acquired via email has quadrupled over the last four years to seven percent.

By contrast, banner ads account for less than half a percent of new clients, while Facebook accounts for just 0.17% and Twitter less that 0.01%.

The study also found that companies were far more likely to retain customers through email than through social networking. According to metric called Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) — which refers to the future profit a company expects to earn from a customer throughout his or her relationship with the business — email is 12% higher than average, while Twitter is 23% below average.

That does not however necessarily mean that you should throw your Twitter marketing strategy out the window.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say Twitter is inherently a bad way to do (online marketing), but we haven’t seen a lot of good Twitter strategies right now,” says Aaron Goodman, Custora’s lead data scientist. He says Twitter marketing campaigns right now tend to rely on the chancy likelihood that someone will run across a deal when they dip into their feed. Even if they do see it, within seconds it disappears.

Email also has natural advantages over social media, in that it can be targeted at individuals rather than groups of people. Despite the fact that email can, at times, seem like a Sisyphean task, your inbox is still generally easier to sort through than the noisy broadcast that is social media.

It’s worth bearing in mind however that email has been with us for a lot longer, meaning that people in the marketing game have had a lot longer to refine how they sell stuff to you on it. Social media will, inevitably catch up to a degree but advertising will always be slightly ill-at-ease on platforms inherently designed for connecting large groups of people (many of whom probably believe that they have not consented to receive marketing messages in the same way as they have on email).