Report: Traditional bricks and mortar department stores winning the race for online dominance in the womenswear market

Stickyeyes' Online Retail Report: Womenswear, reveals a myriad of insights, including the keywords driving market visibility, what retailers are doing to achieve maximum market share and how they are using social media to acquire and engage customers.

The research, which was conducted between October 2011 and March 2012, assessed 50 retailers across the top 100 online clothing retail keywords to identify the market leaders and their SEO, PPC and social strategies for achieving market share.

It was found that House of Fraser and Debenhams are dominating an extraordinarily diverse set of players in the market due to a strong offline brand presence and diverse product portfolio as well as increased investment in e-commerce.

In comparison with ‘pure-player’ retailers such as ASOS, department store retailers such as Marks and Spencer and John Lewis have lower volumes in social media, yet still achieve highly effective engagement levels with their consumers.

In this article The Drum presents a few of the key findings from the report as well as a look at what's shaping retail strategies in 2012, including retailers focusing on employing social media to build brand advocacy and integrating search and social media strategies to deliver results.