Web marketing has come a long way, baby. When Catalog Age conducted its first Electronic Marketing Survey, in June 1997, only 45% of respondents with Websites offered secure socket connections for credit-card payments. Nearly half of the catalogers that captured customer information online didn’t bother to use it. And only 60% of respondents even had an online catalog to complement their print book.
Five years and one dot-com boom-and-bust later, 90% of the catalogers with Websites who responded to this year’s Electronic Marketing Survey provided secure socket connections, and just 8% let the data they gather from online customer registrations collect cyberdust. What’s more, nearly 90% of respondents had a Web catalog to complement their print book.
Then again, that means nearly 11% of respondents did not have an online presence. E-marketing, it seems, still has a ways to go.