Online Analytics Marketing

Johan Eliasson
Member

Posted 20-Jan-2005 07:21 AM

Hi everybody,

I am working for a company with its whole business on internet. There are a few million registered members, of which a few hundred thousand are active on the site and the custom software, and a few thousand users online all the time.

Now, the marketing department wants to get to know the customers better, analyse our databases, segment the customer base as well as to perform and follow up marketing actions based on ad-hoc customer segments. The software will be in-house and integrated to custom databases.

The main channels marketing channels included in the scope are

- email marketing
- personalization of web
- marketing messages in software client

Other marketing channels may be included in the future, but not in this scope. Customer support etc is not either included.

As I have seen it, Siebel and other vendors are offering large products including the whole CRM concept. But for this case it seems like most of the vendors are taking a far too big approach. And so seems most of the vendors listed by analytics such as gartner.

Do you have any ideas of any products that are targeted to this specific cause?

Any help would be really appreciated.

Cheers,
Johan

Jim Sterne
Guru
Member

Posted 27-Jan-2005 07:43 AM

Hi Johan -

You have walked into an area called Web Analytics—an area that is my back yard.

To frighten you about the possibilities, start with Terry Lund's list of web analytics vendors:

http://www.terrylund.com/vendorListing.shtml
Currently, there 133 of them, some free and some an the other end of the cost spectrum.

If you're just starting out in this area, I'll refer you to several articles I've written for CRMguru:

CRM Meets Web Analytics, Taking the Measure of E-Mail Marketing, and a look at what others are doing: Another Emetrics Summit Come and Gone

I'll also point you to a very active discussion about the subject at http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/ and a conference in June: http://www.emetrics.org/summit605

That should be more than enough to get your head spinning ;-)

Jim Sterne
Target Marketing www.targeting.com

Emetrics Summit
Web Analytics Conference
www.emetrics.org

Bill Babcock
Member

Posted 27-Jan-2005 08:41 AM

I don't agree that analytics are the complete answer. the reason your marketing department wants these capabilities is so they can increase the relevance of the online experience, because that increases sales. We built a very specialized .NET-based platform to support these capabilities and deliver highly personalized marketing. If you'd like to see a whitepaper on what we believe is required go to
http://www.attractnewbiz.com/peyote.pdf . I apologize in advance for the odd codename for this platform—it was named after my vintage race car and while we have renamed it as the WebProfiler Framework for commercial purposes, the code name has been hard to eradicate.

Bill Babcock
billb@bnj.com
www.bnj.com

Jay Curry
Guru
Member

Posted 27-Jan-2005 09:12 AM

Think about a Voice of the Customer Portal.

Set up a separate Internet channel or section of your current website, invite customers to come in and take a survey on satisfaction, lyalty, vent their view—and ask them whatever marketing—and other departments—want to know.

It is fast, effective, not too expensive.

And you can also get psycho-graphic info with special questionnaires. For more info, contact

Jay Curry
www.jaycurry.com

Posted 01-Feb-2005 01:25 AM

Hi guys,

Thanks for your answers.

It seems like pure web analytics is easy if viewed alone and in theory, plugging in something like WebTrends. The same goes with surveys. And as you both write, they are probably good (necessary?) parts of the CRM.

When it comes to analytics, what I want to achieve is a holistic view of the digital customer and his behaviour, integrating web logs with mail statistics and business data, asking questions like these..

- customers that arrived from a search engine, and has a first purchase of >100USD within a month after signup, which search engines are they coming from?
- Sending two versions of a newsletter to half of a customers each, which newsletter initiates most purchases. (click-throughs)
- which ages are the customers in Canada that generates more than 100$ revenue per month
- which campaign on the front home page generates most complete orders?

So, instead of focusing on the customer care part, I would like to focus on business trends on large segments of customers instead of unique customers. This would give the crm a direct, measurable effect.

And on the marketing side, I would like to segment the customers and send them customized emails. The web framework would integrate to the CRM to ask for what to show for a certain customer.

Do you know of any products helping with all of this, focused on the digital customer, skipping all salesforce and customer-care stuff?

best regards
/Johan

Jim Sterne
Guru
Member

Posted 01-Feb-2005 07:02 AM

The situation calls for a number of tools, systems, and datastreams. As a result, you're not looking for a product, but several different products that have really good output abilities or APIs. Whether you want to add the salesforce stuff or the customer care stuff becomes secondary—what you're looking for are the best tools for measuring:

Promotion response through banner advertising
Promotion response through organic search
Promotion response through pay per click search
Promotion response through email marketing
Clickstream / customer experience metrics
Conversion ratios
Ecommerce results
Shopping cart analysis
And a few others I'm not thinking of at the moment

And then extracting the important bits from those systems, transforming them into normalized datasets, and loading them into an analytics system that's really good at slicing, dicing and baking them up in a pan. At some point, you'll then want to sprinkle some salesforce and customer-care stuff on top for extra flavor.

Oh—and that comment about "pure web analytics is easy if viewed alone and in theory, plugging in something like WebTrends." Not the case. Sorry. OK—maybe in theory ;-)

Jim Sterne
Target Marketing www.targeting.com

Emetrics Summit
Web Analytics Conference
www.emetrics.org