email symbol on row of colourful envelopes

Old School Email Outperforms Social Media in Delivering Mobile Commerce Sales

July 15, 2024         By: Michael Foster

If your commerce strategy focuses on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, you’ve certainly got all the buzzwords. But do you have the sales?

Chances are, the answer is no, if a new report by Custora is to be believed. Custora is an analytics platform that helps online retailers find customers and optimize their attempts to get high value traffic across platforms, including email and social media. So they don’t have much of a vested interest in the question that they set out to ask: which outperforms for driving sales, email or social media?

To answer this question, Custora analyzed $10 billion in online sales from over 100 U.S. based retailers. Among its conclusions, the most interesting is that email was a more important driver for traffic that converts than social media.

A total of 26.7% of sales on smartphones, 23.1% of sales on tablets, and 20.9% on desktops were attributed to email in 2013.

Despite the popularity of social media on mobile devices—or “social mobile” as some call it—the fact is that plain old email is moving the needle much more than anything else.

In fact, social media has done a horrible job of driving sales. According to Custora, 0.6% of sales on smartphones, 0.3% on tablets, and 0.3% on desktops last year came from social media sources.

Custora also found that direct traffic to retailers’ sites was more common on mobile devices than on desktop devices—in other words, people were more likely to go to a site organically on a mobile device than on a desktop. Since advertising is notoriously difficult on mobile devices, this result is not too surprising.

The full report is available on Custora’s website.