emarketer

A look at best practices

With social media presence rapidly becoming a must for online retailers, Email Data Source and Goodmail Systems studied how often retailers were including social media marketing links in their e-mail campaigns.

Large majorities of the top 100 companies according to Internet Retailer had a profile on Facebook (79%), Twitter (69%) or both (59%). Formerly hyped technologies such as blogs and RSS feeds were much less popular among these online retail leaders—fewer than one in five used either.

But many of those that had a Facebook or Twitter account did not promote it. Just over one-half of social media participants included links in their e-mail campaigns. Further, less than 30% mentioned their Facebook and Twitter accounts on their company Website prominently.

Online retailers that linked to their social media pages in e-mail campaigns were somewhat more likely to also promote them on their Website. Still, the majority of the Internet Retailer top 100 sites (63%) did not link to a social media presence.

The e-retailers were more likely to include a less social but perhaps more practical feature in their e-mail campaigns: store locators. More than three-quarters of the Web retailers studied that had a physical presence included a locator tool in their marketing e-mails, up from 70% in 2008 and 60% in 2007.

Links to social networking sites may be rising quickly—appearing in 20% of marketing e-mails in July 2009, up from just 2% in February—but the majority of leading online retailers have yet to jump on the bandwagon.