On Thursday Evening I was lucky enough to attend the E-consultancy networking event at Haymarkets upbeat and well known Digital networking location ‘Tiger Tiger night club’.
The evening included a highly insightful presentation surrounding Digital Trends and a recap on 2008 from Ex Littlewoods E-commerce Director, Ian Jindal now Chief Editor of the Internet Retailing Magazine.

Ian presented some key points, including the fact that during the economic downturn those companies that cut their online marketing budgets or stop completely will be the ones that suffer. With their competition still advertising and taking away sales and leads that could have been potential new customers for themselves.

A brief look back at 2008 and the months that have past unveiled some more interesting facts,(being a man for facts I duly jotted these down):

• At the end of 2008, 86% of the UKs population had Access to the Internet
• 69% of these people had Broadband expressing the great opportunities for success in E-commerce
• Over Christmas £4.7billion was spent online, with ASOS, who heavily invested in their online marketing activity being the clear winners with 118% increase in sales from the previous year.
• John Lewis were another company that invested heavily and prospered with traffic to their website being 12 times greater than in 2007
• A final point to all those companies looking to be successful in E-commerce is to encourage your customers to interact and leave product reviews, during 2008 statistics showed that companies with reviews from Customers such as Argos, had a 83.85% higher conversion rate.

The key message from the evening was clear, stopping or cutting your advertising from the online arena which arguably has the greatest reach is the worst decision a Marketing Guru could make during the economic downturn. Those that stand strong and invest more into the digital arena, such as ASOS and John Lewis are the ones that will prosper!