“More” sums up the attitude of respondents to DIRECT’s annual survey of e-commerce marketing practices. More spending. More media used. More functions.
The total number of respondents claiming a Web presence has increased from 72% in 1998 to 81% in the most recent survey.
By and large, marketers are seeing their Web sites as sales channels unto themselves, as opposed to vehicles that feed into other marketing efforts.
Significantly more are using sites to capture orders, while the number that generate leads on the Net for follow-up efforts offline has actually declined.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was much more prevalent among consumer-focused marketers. Only 11% said they generated leads that would be followed by telephone.
Sixty-four percent of business-to-business marketers, which generally sell higher-ticket items and have a tradition of relying on sales forces, use their sites to create leads for telephone follow-up.
But while more consumer firms offer the possibility of capturing sales through their sites, it’s the mixed-focus companies–those that sell both to businesses and consumers–that realize the greatest percentage of their sales online.
On average, more than 11% of their sales are completed on the Web, compared with just over 4% for consumer companies and about 2.5% for B-to-B marketers.
One element that has not grown since last year is the profitability of sales made on the Web. Last year, 15% of respondents said their Internet-generated sales were more profitable than those from other media, and another 15% indicated such sales were equally profitable.
This year, only 12% of the respondents said their Internet sales were more profitable, while 23% said they were equally profitable, perhaps reflecting an increase in maintenance and upgrade expenditures for Web sites.
The full results appear in the January issue of DIRECT.Com, a new supplement published by DIRECT.
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