Businesses must evaluate their online marketing tactics in order to attract new customers and improve profitability, says Marcel Holsheimer, vice president of marketing, EMEA at Unica
Web analytics can give valuable insight into how your customers are interacting with your brand, and can shed light onto whether your company’s website is fulfilling its desired objectives.
A web behavioural data mart (a type of data repository) is a great way to organise information collected from individual customers online, which can then be utilised for both online and offline marketing programmes.
1. Analyse your site
Decide what your key indicators will be (for reaching, acquiring or converting visitors) and gather data on your basic web performance. Keep an eye out for trends or traffic patterns, and be web-savvy. At the end of the day, you’re looking for insight into how individual customers interact with your brand, not impersonal figures that tell you how many page impressions there have been.
Your analysis software should be able to answer questions such as: ‘How many customers using the site for self-service were really able to avoid a call to the customer service line within 48 hours?’ To answer this, you need to access all the data at the most basic level, and your software should to be able to recombine this information to give you the answer.
When looking for analysis software, ensure that it collects the data separately from reporting and analysis. This will enable you to use the collected data for different reports as many times as you want. The most useful software allows you to reassess your business historically from existing information, and to utilise this behavioural data for future marketing campaigns, which extend your customer base and improve your bottom line.
2. Optimise your site and ads
Plan the content of each page on your website carefully. It should reflect a specific focus that is immediately obvious to your customer or prospect. If visitors have been redirected by a search engine, then the content on your site should match with the search term they were originally looking for.
Decide which pages/ads on your website are under-performing and either update or remove these. This will improve the structure, content and conversion rate on your website.
Having a built-in web behavioural data mart can help you to understand the usage patterns of your customers. This web analytics tool can streamline data, and provide a quick overview of trends, success indicators, and visitor behaviour, which can then be used to create personalised email campaigns.
3. Segment targeting
Once you’ve found the best content for the full cross-section of visitors to your site, you can use web analytics to further increase conversion rates by targeting individual customer segments with tailored content specific to their needs. Web analytics tools can offer precisely targeted promotions to the most promising visitor segments on your site, and create personalised email campaigns.
All of your customers possess different characteristics, and they can be catered for more easily when grouped into smaller market segments. A web behaviourial data mart really comes into force here, enabling you to convert prospects into customers by evaluating individual visitors’ tastes and needs and detecting potential defectors.
4. Tailor web interactions
Companies are more effective when they engage their customers in ongoing, personalised dialogues, targeted at the needs of individual experiences. To make these dialogues happen, you should build profiles of the behaviour of each individual on your site.
Web behavioural data marts construct a customer profile for each individual, linking web behaviour to existing customer data. This profile is then used
to personalise marketing activities,
for example:
- Real-time marketing software determines the best offer (banner, content) to be displayed on the webpage for a visitor.
- Email campaigns are driven by web activity e.g. a remarketing email is sent if a visitor abandons their shopping cart.
5. Interactive marketing
Your customer may move across several channels in their buying decision. To successfully engage them, you need to excel at cross-channel marketing, communicating through all channels.
Co-ordinate a complete, cross-channel marketing dialogue that integrates personalised online and offline communications. You can’t force a marketing channel on a customer – you need to work in line with their preferred channel. This will build customer loyalty and increase ROI for your business.
