A new report released from Custora has found some interesting facts about what types of customers lead to the highest number of sales for B2C ecommerce brands. For many the old saying, “the money is in the list” is something they live by, but as it turns out, the real money is in organic traffic. Analyzing the average amount a customer spends at a specific place over their lifetime to determine the CLV, or Customer Lifetime Value, Custora has determined that while customers gained through email marketing do have a 12% higher than average CLV, it is still far below organic traffic.
Customers attracted through clicks from normal search engine searches bring in a whopping 54% higher CLV than the average customer for B2C businesses. That is 42% higher than those brought in from email marketing, which is where many marketers focus the bulk of their efforts. Of course, there are other factors such as how you market to your email list, and what type of landing page you have for organic traffic but on the average organic traffic is king.
Another interesting point which can be discovered through this report is that customers living in rural areas have a higher CLV than those living in cities. This is because of the fact that they have fewer brick and mortar stores they can visit so they are turning in greater numbers to online sites for their purchases. As a growing percentage of all rural families are getting connected to the internet this particular market will only continue to grow and become more profitable.
No matter where the customers live, however, the only way to get the highest CLV’s is to have them find the ecommerce site through normal organic search, and that means ranking well with Google and the other search engines. High quality SEO practices, including having excellent content on the site is the only way to rank well over the long term and not have to worry about updates such as Google’s Panda or Penguin changes. More and more marketers are quickly learning that for long term success they need to follow the true white hat strategies which are approved by Google.
You can see the entire report from Custora by clicking HERE.