The summer sales are now in full swing and UK Internet users are continuing to look for a bargain. Searches for both the singular and plural terms (’sale’ and ’sales’) shot up to their highest level during June 2008 since the Christmas/New Year sales period.

Given this obvious online appetite for sales, it is perhaps surprising that retailers are not engaging in more active email campaigns to promote their end-of-season bargains. The amount of traffic that websites in the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category received from sites in the Computers and Internet - Email Services category actually decreased slightly during the week ending 31/5/08, from 5% to 4.7%. However, email campaigns have worked for some of the big online retailers - Play.com, John Lewis, and Matalan - who all received a considerable boost in traffic from sites in the Email Services category during May.

Looking at the top three webmail providers in the UK - Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! UK Mail and Gmail, - it’s interesting to note that one provider in particular seems to be most effective at delivering traffic to retailers. Yahoo! UK Mail consistently sends more of its traffic to sites in the Shopping and Classifieds category than either Gmail or Windows Live Mail. During June 2008, 13% of Yahoo! UK Mail’s downstream traffic went to retail websites, noticeably more than sent to retail websites by both Gmail (10.3%) and Hotmail (9.2%).

“Hitwise United Kingdom - hitwise.co.uk“