The lines between online and offline direct marketing are blurring.
Some 64% of companies use cross-selling techniques by targeting online customers offline and vice versa, according to the DMA's State of the E-Commerce Industry Report 2001-2002.
Marketers are using a combination of offline and online techniques to drive traffic to their Web sites. The most frequently used methods to drive online traffic are: direct mail (58%), e-mail marketing (56%), print ads (43%) and search engine optimization (41%).
When targeting customers using an online method, 77% of respondents said the Web site was their vehicle of choice, followed by online promotions, such as banner ads (44%) and online affiliates (30%).
Other findings included:
*Some 56% of catalogs and 50% of printed promotions are the most effective cross-selling tools for luring online customers to an offline channel.
*The channels that drove the most net sales were direct mail (27.8%); catalogs (27.3%); and Web sites (24%).
For consumer marketers, catalogs contributed 43.6% of direct response net sales, followed by Web sites (27.5%) and direct mail (23.8%).
Business-to-business marketers said that the most net sales came from telephone marketing (25.9%), Web sites (24%) and direct mail (22.2%).
The report was conducted by the DMA with the Association for Interactive marketing (AIM) during the fourth quarter of 2001. Nearly 700 companies contributed to the report.
