Custora: Comparison of the effectiveness of e-commerce promotion channels in the past four years

Data source: 86 retailers in the United States, data from nearly 76 million users, across 14 industries;

Key findings:

• The number of users acquired through email marketing has increased fourfold in the past four years;
• Twitter provides users with a customer lifetime value (CLV) that is 23% lower than the average;
• The highest-value customers are more likely to come from exurban areas: Fashion brands have found that many of their key customers come from densely populated coastal provinces (in the United States);

Channel segmentation:

• The fastest growing: Email Marketing (EDM): The amount of email marketing in e-commerce is increasing rapidly. The main reason is that major e-commerce companies have established their own communities (or social channels) to collect users' emails. E-commerce companies convert users into customers by sending emails to them;
• Largest traffic: Organic Search: Organic search is still a reliable source of traffic for e-commerce, accounting for nearly 16% of total traffic. As e-commerce further strengthens product-related information release (including SEO) and invests more in SEM, organic search traffic is growing steadily.

Figure: Changes in traffic volume of each channel in 4 years:

Table: Detailed channel data

Customer Lifetime Value:

• Highest: Organic search. The lifetime value of customers coming from organic search is 54% higher than the average.
• Lowest: Twitter, whose CLV is 23% below average, but it’s worth noting that this is likely because the channel is often used to promote discounts.

Figure: Comparison of customer lifetime value across channels

Table: Comparison of value generated by detailed channels