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In a surprising finding, one marketer has determined that the majority of sales resulting from her e-mail campaigns are not of products featured in the messages.

Rather, consumers are clicking through the e-mails and shopping for other things.

“Our customers use e-mail as a doorway to go shopping on our Web sites,” said Lisa Papageras, manager of e-commerce for Universal Screen Arts, Inc., a business-to-consumer multichannel retailer whose titles include Signals, Art & Artifact, What on Earth, and Wireless. “What I usually find is that our featured items account for a small percentage of the sales that the campaign brought in. Most of the sales are coming from other products within the Web site.”

Papageras tracks e-mail-driven sales by including a unique code in every URL that goes out. The highest percentage of clickers on a given campaign often come through the clearance button, she said.

Papageras said she’s seen campaigns where featured products account for as little as 8% of a campaign’s sales and some where they accounted for 30%.

“The majority of the sales are coming from the customer’s choice after they enter the Web site,” she said. “It’s the contact with the customer that makes the difference, not necessarily that you contacted them with a particular product.

“You do have to feature good, strong products because that’s who you are as a brand, and you have to be timely,” she said.

However, Papageras added, she has become less of a stickler about the products featured in outbound e-mail campaigns than she was when the company began its e-mail efforts early this decade.

She said merchants often rip their hair out over exactly what products to include in e-mail campaigns, and her experience indicates that agonizing over what individual products to include may be mostly wasted energy.

“In the beginning of this game, I was more adamant about making sure the right products are included, but now I’m a little more laid back about it. I’m not going to be extremely hung up over whether [for a Halloween promotion, for example] we choose a skeleton or a jack-o-lantern. Let’s put it that way,” she said.  “What I’ve learned is that you want to have your products supporting your message thematically and aesthetically … It has to make a little bit of sense to get people to go into the site and start shopping around.”

She added the company’s e-mails always have many links through which customers can click to get to the site.

“I’ve got doorways all over my e-mail campaigns—all over the art—that take them to the site without them necessarily having clicked on a product,” she said. “You might have eight different links or 18 different links that go to a particular product, but you might have another 30 links on the creative that just lead to the virtual catalog, or ‘shop here’ or ‘order status.’ If people are limited to just what you have in the campaign, they might not go at all.”

Just as importantly, however, is where they land once they click, she said. For example, those who do click on a particular product go to the product page.

Papageras said she has been putting tracking codes on e-mail URLs since the company began e-mailing its customers in 2000.

“We can track down to the item level,” she said. “All this information goes into our fulfillment software and I can see what orders are being placed against these source codes.”

Papageras declined to specify how large Universal Screen Arts’ e-mail files are, but said they’re in the six-figure range.