In fact, social media referrals represents just 1.55 percent of all traffic to major e-commerce destinations. And when that tiny trickle of traffic arrived, only .71 percent of it actually results in any kind of sale. Email marketing, by contrast, generates twice as much traffic as social media, and has four times the conversion rate to sales.

Those are not good numbers for social.

Source: Monetate

Conversion rates by traffic-referring sources

The darling of the omnipresent social media gurus on Twitter, social commerce was supposed to totally disrupt e-commerce. And, because people trust other people’s recommendations and spend a lot of time on Facebook where they meet other people and read what they say, social commerce was supposed to be huge, turning social media influence and shares into sales and revenue.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem:

“The challenge for social media — and for its big brother, word of mouth marketing — is that they are inherently additive pieces of the conversion funnel, rather than causative,” Monetate’s new report states.

But Monetate says that the problem isn’t in the social. It’s in how companies are using it.

Loyalty isn’t about clicking on an offer, report contributor Mitch Joel says, it’s about building a relationship. And a relationship goes far beyond “do you want to buy this.” Which means that social is not short term, social is not transactional, and social is not the same as direct response.

In other words: shocker, social media is, well, social.

Taken in that context, social can still be very worthwhile for brands, as marketing firm Syncapse found just a few weeks ago, valuing some Facebook fans at over $1,600. But it’s the relationship that’s valuable, not the episodic communications per se.

And that relationship can be very precious indeed. When an actual sale is made from a social referral, it’s often a large one, with the average Pinterest-referred sale clocking in at over $80, and the average Facebook and Twitter sale at about $70.

Source: Monetate

Average order value by social-referred sale

photo credit: zoomar via photopin cc

Half of retailers can’t aggregate all their data in one place to make detailed reports and conclusions. 45 percent don’t use available data to personalize marketing communications, and another 42 can’t link data together at the individual customer level.

That is perhaps understandable, because 90 percent of the data that’s ever been created has been created in the last two years, and the rate of data growing is increasing quickly.

But it is also a problem, because big data is the key to knowing your customers, and knowing your customers is the key to being able to sell effectively to them. Big data also has its creepy side, as when Target famously used it to figure out that a girl was pregnant before her father knew.

But many retailers are not effectively pulling together tweets, likes and reviews and matching them against customer lists, transactions, loyalty club memberships, and prospects — which means they are using old dumb marketing techniques in a new smart world.

And missing out on sales.

So online marketing optimization company Monetate, which has access to a huge amount of ecommerce information, has put together the following quick guide for retailers using big data:

photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

Well, perhaps it’s not quite time for Christmas music. But for those who want to prepare their websites for the most important shopping events of the year, now is definitely the time to get ready.

Cyber Monday generated more than $1 billion in sales in 2011. Almost half of online shoppers spend more money online in the Thanksgiving weekend than they do the entire rest of the year. And for some retailers, the Hanukkah to Christmas shopping season brings in almost half of the year’s revenue.

So you’d better be prepared to handle millions of shoppers.

But it’s not just about server capacity. It’s also about remarketing programs, free shipping offers, preparing for mobile, conversion rate optimization, shopping cart abandonment reduction, optimizing for search and social traffic, and more.

Monetate, the online marketing optimization company, put together an infographic highlighting some of the key things anyone who sells online should know and do — before the holidays hit.

photo credit: Joriel “Joz” Jimenez via photo pin cc

Those are just a few of the conclusions of e-commerce optimization giant Monetate’s state-of-the-online-sales-union report for the second quarter of 2012.

Browser wars: not what you’d think

“The most interesting part for me is the browser war,” says Monetate’s chief marketing officer, Kurt Heinemann. “What we’re seeing on the e-commerce side of the fence is that mobile and desktop Safari are actually equal to Explorer.”

In fact, from 8PM to 11PM EST, when all portions of the country are out of the office, Safari accounts for 30 percent of traffic. That’s the desktop and mobile versions combined together, Heinemann adds. And it’s the browser traffic at e-commerce sites of Monetate customers such as Best Buy, QVC, Comcast, National Geographic, and many more.

Over the course of an entire day Monetate’s customers, which include 20 percent of the top 500 internet retailers in the U.S., get 3.3 percent of their visits from Android phones, up 85 percent year-over-year, and 5.4 percent of their visits from iPhones, up 117%.

Interestingly, Android users convert almost 30 percent better than iPhone users.

Yes, Mac users do actually buy more

In the wake of the Great Orbitz Pricing Non-scandal of 2012, in which Orbitz was found to be recommending higher-priced hotels to Mac users than to PC users, the hot question has been: do Mac users actually spend more?

Well, yes, says Heinemann.

“Apple users do have a higher order value. I think that’s a demographic thing — Macs tend to be a little higher priced than PCs.”

In fact, Mac users spend an average of $102.83 versus $88.75 for PC users, and just $84.91 for the cheapskate Linux faithful. On the other hand, the difference basically disappears in the smartphone world: iPhone and Android are almost neck-and-neck at $97 and change, with Windows Phone a little lower at $92.45.

It’s in the tablet world that the order value differences reappear, but in this case it’s the Kindle Fire that loses out. Average orders on the Kindle Fire lag behind those on iPad or other Android tablets by about $10.

“Again, I think that’s a demographic thing,” Heineman says. “Kindle is $200, and iPad is $500 … that’s the primary difference.”

Social vs. search: social still sucks (but so does search)

It’s fairly well known that social traffic to e-commerce sites converts at a lower rate than search traffic. Monetate confirms that: social converts at a measly .59 percent rate, while search is about four times better at 2.59 percent.

The real story which is sometimes somewhat obscured in the debate?

Email kills them both, converting at 4.25 percent … almost double search, and eight times better than social.

“That’s the great nugget there,” according to Heinemann. “In the whole social hype cycle people can easily take their eyes off the numbers, the conversion rates and average order values.”

Heinemann warns against putting too many eggs in the social basket, saying that email converts massively, and retailers need to do smart things to build their email database, and then use it well.

One caveat: there’s significantly more traffic from social than there is from email … so even with a lower conversion rate, social can still provide a significant amount of value.

You can download the entire report here.

Image credit: Mirexon/ShutterStock