The Publicare eCommerce Study 2015

Key results in email marketing

More than 20% of online shops do not offer a freely accessible newsletter subscription. Almost three quarters of all online shops do not incentivize their newsletter subscription.

Of the 1001 online shops examined, 795 (79.4%) offer an open newsletter subscription on their website — this means that the newsletter can also be subscribed to without an existing customer account. 74.7% of companies provide their newsletter subscription via a form or form link on the homepage. However, not all online shops place their newsletter subscriptions so prominently — for 47 companies, we had to find the subscription form through a website or Google search. Only 25.9% of all shops examined incentivize their newsletter subscriptions with vouchers or similar offers.

Less than three quarters of all online shops with freely accessible newsletter registrations actually send newsletters.

We were able to successfully subscribe to 98.8% of shops with an open newsletter offer. However, far from all online shops that offer newsletters actually send them out: Only 73.3% of the shops with which we were able to successfully subscribe had at least one newsletter delivered to our inbox within a period of three months.

If you consider that our investigation period extends over the Advent season and thus the period of lucrative Christmas shopping, it appears all the more astonishing that no newsletter was received for more than a quarter of shops with freely accessible newsletter offers. Valuable subscriber data is thus idle — even though email marketing According to the latest eCommerce Benchmark Study by marketingsherpa is one of the best performing channels for generating high-quality traffic. Based on the population of 1001 online shops, the figures are even lower: Only 57.7% of all shops examined actively used the newsletter marketing tool during the study period to address contacts without a customer account.

The double opt-in dominates the registration process in almost 90% of cases. Only 10.7% of shops use other variants.

The result of our investigation of opt-in processes is astonishing: Almost 90% of shop operators with whom we were able to successfully subscribe to a newsletter use the double opt-in procedure for the newsletter registration process. Only 7% of shops use a single opt-in process and only 3.7% choose the confirmed opt-in process as the subscription standard for their newsletter. Although the double opt-in procedure is not required by law in Germany, this most conclusive alternative seems to dominate the newsletter world in eCommerce — and this even though it has a serious disadvantage: The double opt-in process loses a not insignificant part of the subscription potential, as, according to statements from shop operators, 15% — 50% of subscribers do not complete their registration by clicking on the activation link in the double opt-in email (see See also our blog post Anxiety eat list on).

Almost 80% of shops rely on a professional shipping system. Around 20% use their own newsletter delivery tool.

For the newsletters delivered, we examined which delivery systems were used in each case. We found that 79.9% of shops use professional shipping platforms for their newsletter marketing, while 20.1% of shop operators use their own shipping system.

Facebook marketing

Over 87% of shops have a Facebook presence. Together, these shops collected over 67 million likes.

Our analysis shows that the majority of online shops use Facebook marketing opportunities. Of the 1001 shops examined, 87.3% have a Facebook presence. Together, they received over 67 million likes. The number of likes per shop varies greatly: The most popular shop on Facebook has already collected more than 15 million likes — the smallest has only received one so far.

Almost 80% of shops without newsletters rely on Facebook.

Although email newsletters are one of the most profitable marketing tools for personally addressing known contacts, winning, retaining or reactivating them as customers, social media marketing is more popular with some shop operators. We were able to determine that of the 425 online shops that either do not offer a newsletter subscription or did not send out a newsletter, a whopping majority of 79.5% are active in the area of social media and have their own Facebook presence. In our opinion, they have some catching up to do when it comes to personal and individualized contact with prospects and customers via the e-mail newsletter marketing tool.

Shop seals and reviews

Almost 10% of Trusted Shops also use the EHI seal.

Of the 1001 online shops selected for our eCommerce study, 85.5% have a Trusted Shops seal and 24.4% have an EHI seal — these high rates are the result of our shop selection, as using a Trusted Shop or EHI seal according to the Alexa ranking of the website was decisive for the selection. On the other hand, the intersection is interesting: 99 shops from our survey set display both seals on their website — this corresponds to a rate of just under 10%.

Almost a quarter of Trusted Shops do not use the Trusted Shops rating function. 14.6% rely on ekomi instead.

Of the 856 online shops with a Trusted Shops seal, 78.9% use the integrated review function. 8.8% of them also enable eKomi reviews — while 5.8% refrain from using Trusted Shops reviews and rely entirely on eKomi reviews. At least 15.3% of shops with the Trusted Shops seal use neither one nor the other — and thus completely dispense with the tried and tested tool of social proof. Of the 145 shops that only carry the EHI seal, only 30.3% were rated via ekomi. 69.7% of the shops did not have this rating function.

When it comes to the number of customer reviews, ekomi is clearly ahead of Trusted Shops.

All 675 shops with Trusted Shops reviews were rated by a total of 2,317,858 customers. The number of reviews per shop varies between 144,700 and 0 reviews. All 169 shops with eKomi reviews were rated by a total of 2,931,847 customers. The number of reviews per shop fluctuates between 359,934 reviews and 1 review. This clearly shows that the shops with the eKomi system were rated by significantly more customers than the shops with the Trusted Shops rating system. 169 shops with an eKomi rating received a total of over 600,000 more customer reviews than the 675 shops with Trusted Shops reviews.

Three quarters of shops without newsletters use Trusted Shops or eKomi reviews.

We were able to determine: 75.1% of all online shops that either do not offer a newsletter subscription or did not send a newsletter despite a subscription option, can be rated via Trusted Shops or ekomi. This shows once again that there is still some catching up to do in the area of email marketing. While shop operators invest a lot of effort in attracting and retaining customers via rating systems and social media channels, they often ignore the possibilities of newsletter marketing — even though this is one of the best performing channels for generating traffic.

In our infographic, you will find a detailed overview of all relevant facts and figures.

Alle Ergebnisse der E-Mail-Studie 2015

Infografik

methodology

For this study, Publicare listed the 1001 online shops from Germany with the highest Alexa ranking for Germany, which at the same time investigates either Trusted Shops Seal or that l led.

The German Alexa ranking was used as a selection criterion to enable a size-based selection of sites. The use of a Trusted Shop or EHI seal served as an indicator of the relevance of an online shop to the business model of the respective company. We are aware that the reverse is not true and that, as a result, even larger shops without a seal have been excluded from our analysis.

At the time of selection, the Alexa ranking range considered comprised places 40 to 24,000. Our research shows that we included around a third of all German online shops with Alexa ranking places of between 40 and 24,000 based on their Trusted Shops or EHI seal in our evaluation. In other words, approximately every third online shop in the investigated size segment currently uses the Trusted Shops or EHI seal of approval.

For the evaluation of newsletter marketing, only subscription offers for newsletters, which were freely available on the homepage or a subpage of the online shop for non-customers, were taken into account. Newsletter subscriptions that were offered during the checkout process in the shop or only with an existing customer account were not included in this evaluation.

The statements about newsletter delivery are based on an observation period of three months, in the period between October 2014 and January 2015. Online shops from which no newsletter was delivered to our inbox during this period were rated as “without delivery” within the “Delivery” category.