The State of Retailing Online 2008: Marketing

This report reflects the 11th annual fielding of the State of Retailing Online study, a Shop.org survey conducted by Forrester Research. The objective of the study is to collect a series of benchmarks from online retailers that primarily transact in the business-to-consumer space. This is the first of a three part series of reports based on those findings and highlights marketing priorities, spend, allocation, and areas of marketing focus. Among the key marketing takeaways of the 2008 survey are that in 2007, customer acquisition continued to dominate online retailer marketing spend, with paid search and email marketing hailing as the most popular marketing vehicles for online retailers. For offline marketing spend, online retailers focused on catalogs and direct mail. In 2008, online retailers plan to focus less on shipping promotions and are eager to experiment with Social Computing initiatives.