Just about a year ago, I had the chance to publish my book on mutlichannel marketing metrics [1]. The aim was to create a "how to" book that would enable analytics oriented marketers to integrate online and offline data.
Why bother?
Because customers interact with our companies across online and offline channels. They may see our ads on TV, do their research on the web site, yet purchase in our store.
Therefore, both the person tasked with putting an ROI value on the TV ad as well as the direct marketer benefit from knowing how to integrate insights across online and offline.
But now it is a year later.
And the good question that I want to check on is whether more companies have turned the idea of online-offline integration into reality.
In the past 12 months, I have had the chance to tour through Europe and US to speak with many marketers from online and more traditional sides of the house.
Here is what I am finding as to how far companies have come.
- Online - offline integration has not yet become mainstream
- But there are more and more examples of companies implementing something and those who do have great business results to show for
- It isn’t always about online and offline channel integration though. Instead it is plenty lucrative enough for online marketers to integrate their click data from web analytics with their online customer data (e.g. customer type, value,etc.). There are now a numerous companies that have taken this step.
The reader would like some examples now, I realize. Allow me to save the examples for the next blog post so that this one doesn't get too long.
Before then I should point out some things though that haven’t changed in the past year, as far as I can tell.
What are still the most frequently asked question?
The questions that I get now are still the same ones that I got a year earlier. Namely, typically:the following:
- Most site visitors are anonymous, so is the thought of mapping site visitors to customers unrealistic?
- Some 20% of Internet users delete their cookies regularly making tracking across multiple visits a limited success. Is this a red flag?
- Are privacy considerations a red flag for integrating data?
- Some marketers wonder why they should look at their customers' click data closely now given that they haven’t yet used other data sources that are available to them to the fullest potential.
Lots to be said there. More than fits in this post. So let me dig deeper in future posts.
Which industries seem to be doing the best job at online offline integration?
The leaders today seem to be in the area of highly considered purchases such as automotive, group travel, telco, real estate, B2B high-tech, etc. Common to these industries is that
- Before the WWW, buyers used to get all their advice from a live sales person whereas today most initial research occurs online in a DIY fashion.
- The buying process often crosses online and offline channels, e.g. just like the example at the beginning of this post.
Oh and there is another great sign of change coming.
All direct marketing conferences (e.g. DMA, CMA, NCDM) contain lots of sessions on web analytics now (and of course social marketing too). Likewise, web analytics conferences have featured speakers from more traditional marketing disciplines.
At most companies there is still a big canyon between the online and offline groups. But we are beginning to take a peek across the divide and check each other out.
More to follow ...