Upholding its commitment to helping members to become more profitable and provide the retail world with better research information on trends and best practices in direct marketing strategies, The DMA has partnered with DoubleClick and launched a new survey initiative to create benchmarks for leveraging multichannel marketing opportunities.
This joint research project is geared to track multichannel ad spending, revenue results, direct response advertising performance, testing and reporting, and overall direct marketing strategies.
The study will also cover "cross-channel" integration of customer and prospecting databases, management of merchandising, customer service practices, operations infrastructures, e-mail techniques, and bottom-line financial profit-and-loss data, which is the information critical to meeting and exceeding desired profitability levels.
To access the survey, click www3.intellisurvey.com/run/dmam5
*While it's appreciated to hear from everyone, this survey will only be applicable if the participating company uses paper catalogs, Web site/E-catalogs, retail store, or non-outlet wholesale stores to generate orders.
To cover this ambitious scope of information gathering, the survey questionnaire combines the best of the "E-commerce" and The DMA's long-running "State of the Catalogue" surveys into one comprehensive report. The DMA has put together extensive reports on the catalogue industry for 12 years, and conducted research on the emergence of e-commerce (Internet and e-mail) for eight years.
To see the comprehensive summary you'll be entitled to for participating, please click the following URL to view a summary of results to last year's Catalog and E-Commerce Surveys. www3.intellisurvey.com/misc/dmamulti/dma_catecommerce_extract.pdf
The DMA is now combining these reports because in the last two years, the lines between the two areas have become duplicative, perhaps more so now than ever with a heavy emphasis being placed on integrating catalogue, retail, and interactive.
Ultimately, The DMA set out to craft a survey that would gather best practice trends to help members:
*Rework budgeting scenarios in the multichannel environment -- how best to allocate ad dollars for print and e-advertising efforts.
*Rework strategies for multichannel merchandising, customer service, marketing, strategic planning.
*Rework tracking procedures to best determine areas of highest ROI.
* Provide insight on integration of systems across channels, i.e. are product lines, customer service, inventory and fulfilment operations integrated or separate across channels?
* Best practices in Web search engine optimization strategies, shopping cart abandonment fixes, e-mail strategies, obstacles, and solutions.
* Privacy issues across channels.
Anyone interested in completing the survey can do so online at www3.intellisurvey.com/run/dmam5
Participants will receive a detailed electronic Power Point presentation of the overall survey results. All individual information will be held in strict confidence. The data will only be reported on an aggregate basis
