Posted on 5 March 2008 by Jack No Comments

Cross channel marketing best practices

Picture this scenario. One of your customers, Joe Bloggs, downloads a brochure from your site that contains information about a new widget. You know it’s Joe because he has previously registered to receive e-newsletters and can be identified via his cookie.

Next time you send Joe an e-newsletter, a case study on the widget features as the top article. After reading the case study, he clicks through to the site and commits to purchase.

This is all possible, right now, with you hardly having to lift a finger.

As long as you’ve got the right web analytics tool in place, an automated system can do it for you.

And the ability to do even more is right around the corner.

Start small, and watch it grow

Unless you’ve got unlimited resources and budget, you have to start small. Using web analytics to guide your cross channel marketing activities is something you’d build up over time – and it’s important to lay the right foundations.

To do this, you need a web analytics solution that includes an integrated database. This allows you to store individual web behaviour against a user ID, and match the behavioural data to customer details for registered customers.

This type of stored behavioural data allows you to make relevant offers to prospects within the website, and across multiple channels.

Analytics can also assist in identifying trigger events, or to develop propensity scores.

Even more exciting, you can start implementing dynamic responses to customer behaviours. You can target prospects who haven’t been identified with dynamic offers within the site (same session), depending on what products they have looked at.

With the right solution, it’s also possible to track paid search, online advertising and email campaigns within the web analytics user interface, and thereby monitor prospects from these campaigns through the conversion funnel.

Furthermore, out of the box and custom solutions can integrate with campaign execution platforms such as bid management, email campaign management and online advertising.

It means you can:

• Measure the full impact of campaigns on your website
• Compare performance of different campaigns in terms of response rates and cost per acquisition
• Capture online behaviour to build customer profiles.

The next logical step is to merge online behavioural and transactional data, with offline profiling data for a more in-depth view of registered online customers. Then add offline campaign information (e.g. DM/TM) to measure if these campaigns had an impact on individual web behaviour.

At the final point, web analytics will be integrated across corporate marketing campaigns, so you can:

• Integrate DM with online by using offer codes, special DM-only landing pages or PURL (personalised URLs) which also utilise pre-populated, short forms for increased conversion
• Serve customised content in DM and email marketing based on web behaviour, events, interests and customer profile.

As you can see, the opportunities are endless.

Cross channel integration

Using web analytics for cross-channel integration will increase your cross and up-sell capabilities, and streamline your marketing function.

These possibilities are just around the corner, and many companies in the US are already acting on them. In Australia, our clients are starting to talk about it, and it’s time to lay the foundations now so you don’t get left behind.

Getting it right requires an investment in resources – people, hardware and software. But once you start leveraging cross channel marketing to its full potential, you’ll wonder how you ever got away with sending out the same newsletter with the same content to all your customers in the past.

Learn more about Bienalto’s web analytics and marketing services.