Make your dialogue count

Cameron Hulett, senior vice president of publisher Solutions at Acceleration, argues that integrating email and web analytics platforms is one way to tackle the current tough financial conditions.

Thursday, 2 July 2009

At a time when marketing budgets are under more scrutiny ever before, it’s always good to know that your existing assets can make more money for your company. For many, this comes from a relatively untapped resource; integrated digital marketing data.

Marketers already know how to use existing data to measure each channel individually, and understand that a more complete analysis means looking across different cross channels. However, a distrust of consolidation and integration means that there is a widespread fear among marketers that is preventing this from happening.

However, recent advances in the technologies and tools available mean we should update our perception of data integration. The significant technical challenges to combing the underlying data from multiple channel systems have been overcome, and there are new sophisticated tools that extend the capabilities of digital marketing technologies.

In fact, from our experience, the two most powerful activities that can be achieved by doing this is the creation of almost individually-targeted customer segments that aren’t focused on demographic or age alone, and making your dialogue count by delivering much more relevant, automated communications.

One of the areas that has provided the most impressive payback from doing this has come from integrating email and web analytics platforms, and re-marketing based on observations made from web behaviour.

These types of programmes can be enormously profitable, but require deep customer insight, accurate segmentation, a solid communication strategy and ongoing measurement to be successful.

Re-marketing is an extremely efficient way to focus your marketing efforts on speaking with existing active customers instead of spending budget you don’t have on creating new relationships. It makes perfect sense as your existing customers are already in a relationship with you and do welcome the attention.

There are two main marketing objectives you can fulfill by utilising integration in this way:

Deliver integrated campaign reporting

Pulling email delivery and response data into your web analytics campaigns reports allows a side-by-side comparison of your email campaigns with other marketing channels (paid search, organic search, display advertising, affiliate programs etc), creating a true cross-channel overview. You will not only be able to see impressions and response rates for individual campaigns or channels, but also what actions were taken and which products were purchased, allowing you to understand the market from the outside in. If you understand how a market behaves, you can focus on and encourage the profitable behaviours.

Create segmented re-marketing programmes

Trigger messages to launch email campaigns based on site activity, promote high value products, re-activate inactive users and build targeted content areas for customer segments. This allows you to make your dialogue count and provide relevant automated communications, delivered in your customer’s preferred format that make the most of LifeCycle programmes.

By using web analytics date, you can pinpoint the fall-out of a specific desired behaviour. Let’s say for example, an abandoned shopping cart represents a purchase (desired behaviour) that began but was never completed (fall-out). You can then examine the timing and characteristics of the completed behaviour, the insight from which will reveal the typical cycle time of purchase and the web visit patterns that correlate with positive, completed orders. Your re-marketing programme can be timed and crafted to address these conditions.

If possible, set up a control group that represents your customer segments, including the ‘Big Spenders’. With the control group performance available for comparison, you will be able to continually measure the incremental value of your re-marketing programme.

Often a relevant, timely follow-up message to the abandoned shopping cart visitors will generate a five to ten per cent response rate, and can increase the revenue of a campaign by 25 per cent. However, there's no perfect strategy in online marketing. Different channels work for different products and customers. The best answer is usually test, test and test even more. You'll meet short-term goals while ensuring online marketing efforts remain successful over the long term.

Re-marketing strategies are truly fun to work with because they do work and it does feel good to stand in front of the firing squad and be able to show real results.

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