Direct Marketers Earning Profits Online, Survey Says

Nearly 70 percent of direct marketers reported online profits this year, compared to only 49 percent in 1999, according to a Thursday report from the Direct Marketing Association.

The finding was based on research conducted for a recent DMA report entitled “State of the Interactive eCommerce Marketing Industry.”

The research profiles how more than 400 companies involved in direct and interactive marketing are making a profit on the Internet — and how high that profit is.

“Web marketers today are placing greater emphasis on increasing the bottom line,” said H. Robert Wientzen, president and chief executive officer of The DMA, “and they’re turning to direct marketing techniques to make it happen.”

The DMA highlighted several other statistics from the its survey:

• An overwhelming percentage (86 percent) of respondents expect interactive media will increase revenue over the next three years.
• On average, companies spend more on online site development than for promotion of their Web site (a median of $60,000 for development vs. $50,000 for promotion).
• Web site marketers cite search engine positioning (66 percent) and emails to customers and site visitors (54 percent) as the top online promotion methods used to drive traffic to their Web sites.
• The majority of respondents identified, the survey showed, viewed catalogs as the most effective and highly used traditional direct marketing technique to drive Web traffic.