Do you ever wish your marketing emails drove more of your total website traffic? If so, I have great news on how you can finally achieve this goal: start working for a dating website.

Here’s a statistical anomaly that will make your head spin: websites in the “Lifestyle” category receive twice as much web traffic from email as “Entertainment” or “Travel” industries. I discovered this while poking around in the Hitwise application to see which industries rely most heavily on email to drive traffic to their websites. Apparently, the “Lifestyle” industry is head and shoulders above the rest (see the pink line, below) when it comes to email driving traffic (probably due to high clickthrough performance). And not just by a little bit, either.

I was a bit surprised by this, mainly because when I think of the “Lifestyle” category, I immediately think of beauty/health and fashion websites. Having seen the success of a few retailers and bloggers in the fashion/beauty/health industries firsthand, I could understand how the category would perform really well given how active their audiences are. But nearly 1.6X better than the nearest competitor? That seemed fishy to me.

A closer look at the composition of the “Lifestyle” category quickly reveals why email is such a huge factor in driving its web traffic: people will click through if it means they may get a date out of it.

Ah yes, the power of compatibility. When you throw dating sites into the mix, these numbers make a lot more sense.

I used to jokingly say to my friends that the Internet was not created for the purpose of linking computers in the U.S. Department of Defense, but rather for the creation and distribution of jokes forwarded to us via email. I may have to revise that theory now – the Internet was clearly made for dating!

Tags: dating, hitwise, statistical anomaly

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