Cover Story: Annual Trends Survey 2011

While Retail Online Integration readers are increasing their focus on e-commerce and social media marketing this year, mobile marketing/commerce won't be garnering the same attention, at least according to responses to this year's Annual Trends Survey.

For this year's survey, which, as in year's past, focused on cross-channel marketing and promotional integration, cross-channel challenges, and other retail marketing trends, we polled all Retail Online Integration and ROI Report subscribers in January. A total of 396 readers responded.

All About Our Readers
In terms of primary business classification, most readers consider themselves online merchants, with 31 percent of respondents claiming this. The next most popular business classification was brick-and-mortar retailer (24 percent), followed by "other" (20 percent), which primarily included service providers and consultants. Much like last year's findings, we learned that there are two main types of retail executives who read ROI: CEOs and high-level marketing execs. In fact, 48 percent of respondents are company CEOs and 22 percent are in some type of marketing position. Most respondents work at B-to-B/B-to-C hybrid firms (48 percent), followed by B-to-C firms (37 percent) and B-to-B firms (15 percent). The annual revenues for our respondents' companies generally fall into the "less than $1 million" and "$1 million to $4.9 million" range, with 45 percent in the former category, 17 percent in the latter.

E-Commerce Leads the Way
When it comes to the channels in which respondents market, e-commerce websites lead the pack. Eighty-one percent of respondents said they marketed via an e-commerce site last year. Other sales and marketing channels included brick-and-mortar stores (46 percent), print catalogs (40 percent), direct sales force (32 percent) and digital catalogs (26 percent). As for marketing spend across channels, 18 percent of respondents spend 90 percent or more of their marketing budget on e-commerce websites, making it the most popular channel in the "90 percent or more" group. Retail stores aren't far behind in terms of marketing budget spend, with 14 percent of respondents saying they spent 90 percent or more of their budget on the channel. Direct sales forces rounded out the top three, with 10 percent of respondents spending more than 90 percent of their marketing budget on the channel.