The soul of online retailing in Australia - internetretailing.com.au. Get serious about selling online!

Keeping up with the (marketing) Joneses

By Kevin Mackin, GM, Coremetrics, ANZ

There’s a lot of talk these days about personalised marketing or contextual marketing (there are many names floating about) which demand that your business delivers messages to your customers using the most appealing avenue and at the perfect moment in time. And while no one’s arguing against the need for more tailored marketing tactics, there are many retailers left scratching their head at the end of the day wondering how they’re going to achieve this new marketing mandate.

The idea of collating data on all your customers and extracting useful, actionable information can be a daunting prospect. How are you supposed to get around privacy laws? What do I need to know about my customers? How do I collect information in-store and online, and bring the two bundles of data together? The list of questions can seem endless and for many, the option to disseminate blanket marketing emails, direct mail and catalogue offers continues to be the easiest and most sensible road to take. It also generates some results for the business every now and then so many believe that until they find the time to understand the new marketing philosophies better, they’ll stick with their existing tactics. The problem is though, most of us struggle to find that time to update our knowledge or conduct necessary research, even if it is in an attempt to generate more sales.

So, I’m going to tell it to you straight today. Marketing to your customers and prospects in a personalised, timely and clever way is not as difficult as it seems. With simple tools you can build a vault of amazing information about your online and offline audiences which you can then use to your (HUGE!) advantage.

Moving beyond the basics

In this day and age, free web analytics services aren’t cutting the mustard. You won’t remain competitive or retain customers if all you’re counting are website hits, the number of unique visitors and the average length of time spent on your site. Why is this not enough? Because the stats generated by Google and Yahoo! web analytics packages can’t tell you how your different marketing tactics are working together to bring in sales. For example, let’s say a customer first clicked on your site via an organic search. They went away but later came back by typing in your website address directly. They played around on your site for a bit and then a month later they received an e-newsletter from you advertising a special offer and clicked through to the site from the email. That person then purchased your sale product.

In this example, if all you’re using is a basic web analytics service, you’d assume that the e-newsletter was the sole reason for that sale. But that’s entirely inaccurate. In fact, without the organic search success in the first instance, that prospect might never have responded to your e-newsletter. They probably only did because they’d already conducted a search on that product and been to your site to check out your online store.

Implementing tools that build profiles of your entire relationship with every customer and prospect has been likened to ‘turning the lights on’ in your online store. The above example demonstrates this but here are some other ways that you can use enhanced knowledge and data to your advantage:

1. Ensure that your website is effective

Understanding top landing pages, top exit pages and average length of visit doesn’t tell you if your site visitors’ needs are being met or if their needs have, in fact, changed. Perhaps your layout used to be practical and easy to navigate but over time (and with random page additions) you’ve managed to create a bottleneck somewhere which means fewer customers are making it to their destination.

By creating a birds-eye view of your site where you can watch how, when and who ‘walks’ through your site you can quickly re-jig pages and layout to reflect customer trends and behaviours.

2. Know when to hit ‘send’

Getting to know your customers’ habits should be a constant mission for your business. This is because behavioural trends change over time and they should dictate the scope of every marketing campaign. For example, let’s say you’re about to send out a snazzy email blast about a new service you’re offering. What day and time of the week should you hit the ‘send’ button? You might decide that it’s best on a Friday afternoon because people are relaxed and often online perusing websites, or you might go for Wednesday as the middle of the road. This is all guess-work though, and it shouldn’t be!

Understanding and tracking online behaviour lets you see clearly when your visitors prefer to shop online. Let the spike in traffic dictate when you send out your email campaigns not personal opinion and speculation from the marketing team.

3. How do you stack up?

Your recent advertising campaign may have boosted website hits by 10% in the last month but how does that translate in your industry? Are your competitors growing at a faster rate than you? Are other marketers in your industry facing the same challenges?

While it’s good to see increases in web traffic, it’s even more important to see how your results are comparing to your competition. Being able to benchmark your marketing efforts is a really easy way to see whether your messages are getting cut-through and whether or not you need to increase your efforts to stay competitive.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the benefits of smart marketing practices. But I hope that it makes a good start for getting your head around how you too can increase sales just by gaining a clear, overhead view of all customer and prospect behaviour.

Kevin Mackin, FAIM AMAMI CPM, is passionate about disruptive technologies having pioneered advanced CRM systems in the 80s, headed an internet development team in Silicon Valley in the 90s and kicked off Asia Pacific's online meeting market from 2000. By background, a product marketer - Kevin is currently General Manager Aus/NZ for leading web analytics firm Coremetrics (which just happens to be a technology which is disrupting some traditional marketing norms by bringing accountable measurement to the space).