Drawing Prospects to E-Commerce Websites

ABSTRACT As marketing moves into the internet era, new research projects are needed to learn what works best in E-commerce. This study investigates an unexplored area: executing Jutkins9 (1999) suggestion to use traditional advertising media to promote a website. Five different traditional direct mail advertisements were developed and sent out to prospects to determine which type of advertisement, if any, could draw more customers to a commercial website. Each of the five advertisements promoted a distinct website address (URL) so to provide an accurate calculation of website ‘hits’ produced by each of the test advertisements. A postal questionnaire survey was also reported.