A new report available today from Hitwise reveals that 11% of all upstream traffic to the top 500 retail websites during the 2008 Holiday season came from email.

The clickstream data shows that the triumvirate of search (30%), other Retail 500 websites (15%), and email represented more than 50% of all upstream holiday web visits to the nation’s top e-commerce sites. So what can we take away from this information? For starters, it means that SEO continues to be a big deal for leading retailers worldwide, and rightfully so. Secondly, this data indicates to me that when people know which product (i.e. a Nintendo Wii) or category of products (a video game system) they are looking for, their first destination will be the search engine. From there, they will be taken to a retailer’s e-commerce site, which may inspire them to compare offers with other e-commerce sites.

But what if the customer doesn’t know what he/she is looking for?

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