Email Leads to Most Shopping Cart Purchases

At the shopping cart, email represents more than half of the traffic (57 percent), while direct traffic contributes 18 percent and display advertising is a meager 1.7 percent, says SeeWhy. Given those numbers, it is not surprising that 67 percent of conversions came from email and 24 percent direct to the website.

Those findings came from a study of 60,000 completed e-commerce transactions across multiple sites in February 2011. You might wonder why those results are found, given the wide range of existing channels. 

SeeWhy says that customers that are familiar with the brand, having previously purchased or signed up for emails, are the best source of traffic for conversions when you email them. Direct traffic conversions might be explained by the suggestion that customers that enter the site directly already have done all their shopping research, and are about to make a purchase.The other caveat is that attributing a sale to the last channel used can be misleading, as one doesn't know all the preceding contacts a prospect has had with a brand.

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