Annual Trends Survey 2012

Traditional marketing channels are the name of the game for Retail Online Integration readers, with most increasing their focus on email and search marketing in 2012, at least according to this year’s Annual Trends Survey. They’ll also rely on social media, affiliate and video marketing more this year to increase consumer engagement and ultimately grow sales.

For this year’s survey, which as in years past focused on cross-channel marketing and promotional integration, we polled all of the Retail Online Integration and ROI Report subscribers in January. A total of 219 readers responded.

All About Our Readers
In terms of primary business classification, the majority of our readers identify themselves as online merchants (28 percent), followed by brick-and-mortar retailers (24 percent) and “other” (22 percent), which primarily included retail service providers and consultants.

Much like the findings from last year’s survey, Retail Online Integration readers fall into two main types of retail executives: CEOs and high-level marketing professionals. In fact, 41 percent of the respondents are company CEOs and 29 percent are in some type of marketing position. The annual revenues for our respondents’ companies generally fall into the “less than $1 million” and “$1 million to $4.9 million” range, with 39 percent in the former category, 18 percent in the latter.

Affiliate and Video Marketing Grab a Larger Piece of the Pie
Cross-channel retailers’ marketing budgets will, in large part, look pretty much the same this year as they did in 2011. Spending on integral components such as e-commerce websites and retail stores will fall in line with what was spent on those channels last year. That said, there’s some shifting of money that will occur in 2012.

Affiliates will be happy to hear that 24 percent of our respondents will be spending between 20 percent to 39 percent of their marketing budget on the channel in 2012, an 8 percent increase in affiliate spending compared to last year.

Using video to engage, inform and interact with consumers is one of the hottest trends in the retail industry. Retailers planned spending on video reflects this: 17 percent of respondents said they’ll spend between 20 percent to 39 percent of their marketing budget on video this year, an 11 percent increase compared to 2011.