“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 rather than vehicles that feed into other marketing efforts. Significantly more are using sites to take orders, while the number that generate leads for follow-up efforts offline has actually declined. Not surprisingly, this was more prevalent among consumer-focused marketers – only 11% said they produced leads that would be followed by telephone.
Sixty-four percent of business-to-business marketers, who 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 making sales through their sites, it’s the mixed-focus companies – those that sell to both businesses and consumers – that realize the greatest percentage of their business online. On average, more than 11% of sales by mixed-focus companies are completed on the Web, compared with just over 4% for consumer firms and about 2.5% for B-to-B marketers.
One element that hasn’t changed since last year is the profitability of sales made on the Web. Last year, 15% of respondents said their Internet sales were more profitable than those from other media, and another 15% indicated such transactions were just as profitable. This year, only 12% said online sales were more profitable, while 23% said they were equally so. This could reflect increased spending on site maintenance and upgrades. If there’s reluctance among B-to-Bers to embrace the Web, it may be due to skepticism about how lucrative online business can be. Among the three categories, they were least likely to indicate that Web site leads yielded greater business than others – 8%, compared with 14% for consumer marketers and just over 15% for mixed-focus respondents.
Half of the respondents said they posted a privacy policy on their Web site, but within each segment, compliance varied. As adherence to the Direct Marketing Association’s Privacy Promise program is mandatory for all consumer firms wishing to be members, nearly 75% of organizations in this segment posted such a policy. At the other end of the scale, just one-third of the B-to-B marketers had privacy policies. Mixed-focus firms fell somewhere in the middle – exactly half said their sites had these policies.
Consumer companies were also most likely to rent e-mail lists for prospecting. A quarter of those doing electronic marketing rent them, compared with 9% of all mixed-focus firms and just under 5% of B-to-B companies.
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