Throughout the holiday season, email is always a key driver of traffic to retail websites used to communicate products and promotions both online and in-stores. The daily downstream traffic from web-based email to the Retail 500 throughout the holiday season shows an interesting pattern where clear peaks emerge, highlighting the most important (and cluttered) days for email: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas.

As evidenced from the downstream traffic from email on December 25, consumers are still visiting retail websites immediately following a visit to web-based email to check out post holiday sales. To help understand who are the retail visitors most influenced by the post-holiday emails, we created a custom mini panel based upon visitors that first visited a web-based email site, then visited one of the websites in the Retail 500 on December 25 and 26, 2010. Once identified, we are able to understand additional insights such as the websites visited by the mini panel, search terms used, and demographics.
For example, with age, the highest share of visits was 27% from those between the ages of 35 to 44 and 22% from those 45 to 54. Both of these segments over-indexed when compared to the online population overall in terms of likelihood to visit a retailer from email.

When segmented by Mosaic Groups, Affluent Suburbia, Upscale America and Aspiring Contemporaries represented 50% of all visits for the email mini panel. In comparison, this same audience makes up 40% of visits to the Retail 500, suggesting a more affluent group of post holiday shoppers within the email mini panel (quite an attractive target). While each of the groups tend to be more affluent, there are subtle differences – both Affluent Suburbia and Upscale America are comprised of segments with children in the households (likely among those aged 35 -44) while the Aspiring Contemporaries (nearly 11% of visits) tend to be younger and single.

The top websites (excluding retailers and web-based email) visited by the email mini panel also highlight some interesting differences where this group under-indexes against the online population for websites like Facebook and Google on Dec. 25th & 26th, but is far more likely to visit Yahoo! properties and the Apple Startpage (the default page for the Safari browser).