Brave new world for retail

While many retail businesses have mastered the art of multichannel direct marketing, many are still apprentices when it comes to cross-channel integration, according to (via MediaPost) a report by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), writes MarketingCharts.

"Because many, if not most, retailers have now moved beyond brick and mortar and have added other channels — catalogs, websites, TV, and radio — for both sales and promotions, this report analyzes direct marketing practices in each individual channel and investigates channel integration," said Eugenia Steingold, Ph.D., DMA, senior research manager and the report's chief author.

Among the key findings of the report, titled Channel Integration and Benchmarks in the Retail Industry:

• The absence of a brick-and-mortar store is becoming prevalent among retailers - 41 percent of survey respondents don't have a physical store.
• The website is the most consistently used direct marketing channel, followed by email and direct mail.
• Mobile is the direct marketing channel retailers are least likely to use.
• Among the retailer respondents, 66 percent gather customer information from direct mail, and 65 percent gather it from the internet.

MarketingCharts provides a few more tidbits of data from the report.