Boosting Customer Engagement and Profitability Using Web Analytics Data

Transcription

1 WHITE PA PE R Boosting Customer Engagement and Profitability Using Web Analytics Data Five Quick-Start Tactics for Marketers

2 BOOSTING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AND PROFITABILITY USING WEB ANALYTICS DATA: Five quick-start tactics for marketers M arketing experts and analysts have long urged marketers to migrate and harness customer data across platforms and across the enterprise. Doing so, they say, brings together a rich mix of declared and inferred customer preferences and affinities, enabling marketers to craft more meaningful and engaging messaging. But the enormity of such a task leaves many marketers at a loss for where to begin. Nevertheless, in a crowded marketplace increasingly demanding relevance, such integration is vital to communicating with customers, improving loyalty, accelerating the conversion process and driving measurable increases in marketing ROI. So where does one begin? Marketers can start by optimizing the integration between their messag ing and Web analytics platforms. This enables a two-way, action-oriented flow of information that enables you to more efficiently target and trigger campaigns based on Web-site clickstream data the details of how visi tors interact with a Web site. While marketers agree that more relevant communications are needed to spur ROI to new levels, most still don t use Web-site clickstream data to target campaigns. Why? Lack of resources and the difficulty of integrating between their messaging and Web analytics applications are most often cited. However, a wave of newly formed partnerships between service providers and Web-site measurement firms, and an ability to start small, means there s never been a better time than now. Start small Integration can be as daunting or simple as you make it. The sheer amount of data that can be collected, exchanged and leveraged is enough to give even stoic marketers a bad case of analysis paralysis. Some manage to move forward only to become mired in a bog of over-engineer ing that hinders any ability to actually launch a campaign. customers. Each of the Five Ws represents a simple question begin ning with the letter W: Who, What, When, Where and Why. The principle of the maxim is that each question should elicit a factual answer necessary to achieve a complete picture. Using Web analytics data to answer these questions should enable you to better understand your customers needs and more effectively market to them. 1. Who hasn t completed a transaction? Target based on: Shopping Cart Abandonment A customer visiting your Web site begins then abandons an application form, or places an item in a shopping cart, but leaves without completing the purchase process. After a specified period of days, send a reminder message encouraging your customer to return and complete the process. Inform your customer that the shopping cart will expire, or that items are not guaranteed, and consider including an incentive to purchase the abandoned item(s). Increase message relevance and potential ROI by introducing two or three other high-margin, related products that the recipient may find interesting. Five Ws for five quick starts JupiterResearch reports that the 9 percent to 10 percent of marketers who use triggered messages, such as shopping cart abandonment messages or order confirmations, enjoy significantly better conversion rates than conventional untargeted or broadcast marketers. And, triggered messages can generate three times the revenue and seven times the net profit of broadcast cam paigns.2triggered campaigns are set up once and reoccur as the event happens. - Inspired by the maxim of the Five Ws a formula used to gain a more complete understanding of a situation or subject the following five tac tics will enable you to gain and leverage a better understanding about your If you undertake this tactic, be wary of training your customers to abandon shopping carts in order to receive a discount. Savvy mar keters may limit the frequency of discounting to, say, once every 90 But learning how to extract online relationship marketing ROI from the formulaic machinery of databases, business objectives and procedures doesn t have to be as difficult as it sounds or as many make it. The secret is to start small. Choose a single campaign, prove the ROI, and then move on to the next.

3 days, or they may discount in the form of an up-sell bundle (e.g., Buy this printer that you abandoned, plus a spare ink cartridge and receive $10 off. ), or they simply offer non-monetary incentives such as tips on how to use the product to the greatest advantage. Keep in mind that the abandoned shopping cart is a broad concept that can be applied beyond e-commerce sites. Any incomplete process signifying a step in the customer lifecycle, whether it is signing up for membership, filling out an application or asking to be contacted with more information, essentially represents an abandoned shopping cart. 2. What pages do they visit? Target based on: Site Usage A customer conducts product-specific searches, or browses particular pages or areas of your Web site, possibly indicating product affinity or a particular stage in the sales cycle. Marketing Tactic to Convert Follow up with a message that includes product information and incentives related to the products or categories browsed. For example: Seeking to boost conversions for a particular product or product group on your site, you send an promotional message to recipients browsing those pages. JupiterResearch described a campaign in which a clothing retailer sent offers to customers who browsed its three worst-performing product categories. Compared to the control group, the campaign yielded a fourfold improvement in click-throughs and a 66 percent increase in conversions, result3 ing in a more than sixfold improvement in revenue per sent. Tracking Web-site usage to infer how far along recipient is in the conversion process, you see that a customer has browsed a product range, a specific product within that range, product specifications, and is now looking at delivery costs. Surmising that your customer may be closing in on a purchase, you send a message containing a limited-time offer for discounted or expedited shipping. According to MarketingSherpa, of those marketers who get aboveaverage click-through rates, 64 percent of those who have targeted on behavior (such as product views) say the tactic yields a 4And, a JupiterResearch/Ipsos-Insight strong ROI and is worth doing. consumer survey found that 60 percent of consumers who made immediate purchases from did so because the 5 contained products they already were considering. To avoid that Big Brother feel, focus the messaging on the category of product viewed, making only a passing reference (if any) to the specific product viewed by the customer. So, if a customer looked at a specific ceiling fan, send a message about ceiling fans or lighting in general, and include the specific ceiling fan along with other popular or related choices. 3. When do they visit? Target based on: Site Recency and Frequency A customer is checking your site every day or has just returned after an extended absence. When recency/frequency patterns change, consider changing your messaging as well. For instance, someone who s checking your Web site every day may be highly aware of your current promotions, and find your subsequent campaigns redundant and annoying. Rather than risking the ire of your most loyal site visitors, reward them with a special campaign. For example, invite them to participate in hidden promotions or sweepstakes not available to your other customers. Consider also that this frequent visitor may be an evangelist waiting to be tapped. Include share-to-social links in messages and landing pages to encourage frequent visitors to spread your message to their networks. On the other hand, someone who has just returned to the site after an extended absence may be re-engaging and welcome your well-timed message. Send returning prodigals a message based on their latest browsing behavior or a product replenishment survey and incentive based on their last purchase. 4. From where are they arriving? Target based on: Referring Domains and URLs Using Web analytics data, you may be able to see what site a customer visited just before arriving at your site. Tip! Use Web Analytics for Ongoing Campaign Optimization Most marketers find that the percentage of recipients who don t open their messages is higher than the percentage of recipients who do. By using Web analytics to analyze the behavior of non-openers for whom you have site usage data, you may be able to gain useful insight on how to better align your campaigns to your customers needs. Used as a tool for customer retention, this tactic can prove particularly valuable.

4 Where are your site visitors coming from? Were they browsing your competition, your partners or your own publications? If so, send a message that asserts or reinforces your competitive or leadership position. For example: Know thy competitors: If a customer comes to you after visiting a competitor s site, let your messaging reflect your competitive position. Send a message linking to industry reports, accolades, product reviews, case studies or anything that helps your customer to learn more about how you compare or are regarded favorably by others in your industry. Five Ws and an H The maxim of the Five Ws incorporates a sixth question: How? How do marketers make the connections necessary for these campaigns? The above tactics depend upon your ability to connect a specific recipient to the browsing behavior associated with the visitor history or profile in your Web analytics program. Thus, Web analytics integration works only for the subset of customers in your engagement marketing database whom you ve also identified on the Web site. This may be accomplished by using information submitted on the site, or through conversion tracking, in which a customer accesses the site by clicking a trackable link in an . Know thy partners: If a customer comes to you after visiting a partner s site, emphasize the benefits of the partnership. Send a message that addresses and demonstrates an understanding of your customer s unique needs and shows your dedication to meeting those needs via your partnership. Regardless of whether Web analytics data is loaded into the engagement marketing database, or recipient profile data is loaded into the Web analytics program, once this connection is made, you can begin tracking your recipients Web-site behavior. Know thine own marketing: If a customer comes to you from one of your own e-newsletters or white papers, or from an advertisement or paid search term, market to them about that topic. integrated providers 5. Why do they do what they do? Target based on: Demographics Tied to Site Behavior You thought your Seattle recipients would love your umbrella promotion. You didn t realize that windy conditions often preclude the carrying of umbrellas. If you had watched them on your Web site, you would have seen that they like raincoats with hoods better. What does your engagement marketing program know that your Web analytics database doesn t? And what in turn can Web analytics tell you that may surprise you? By pushing customer database demographics such as age, gender, occupation, income and geographic data into your Web analytics program, you can learn what product categories and pages are currently appealing to your demographic segments rather than relying strictly on past response and educated guesswork. Leaving Seattle for snow country, you use the data in your engagement marketing solution to help your Web analytics program identify site users who are male homeowners, age 30-49, located in the Mideastern United States. Based on past campaign response, you presume this group will respond favorably to a snowblower promotion in November and expect to see members browsing that product group on your site. But you are surprised to learn they are spending more time looking at insulation, perhaps in anticipation of higher winter heating costs. Knowing this, you are able to retool your campaign accordingly by revising your snowblower pitch and including a cross-sell for insulation. Integrated programs benefit from To properly support your integrated initiatives, your engagement marketing and Web analytics programs must be able to pass data between applications. In the past, companies were forced to cobble together this connection in a time-consuming, expensive and often frustrating process. Today engagement marketing providers and Web analytics vendors are teaming up to make integration a smooth process so marketers can focus on campaign design, rather than playing middleman between their vendors. Vendors like Silverpop have established partnerships with major Web analytics vendors to make integration tasks faster and easier. Silverpop was the first marketing technology provider to have partnerships with all of the largest Web analytics providers: Coremetrics, Omniture and WebTrends. Such partnerships lift the burden of adjudicating between platforms and enable marketers to take their campaigns to the next level more quickly and with greater ease than ever. Conclusion When Forrester Research asked Web analytics users to name the single biggest challenge with analytics, nearly half cited difficulties 6 actually acting on the data. When JupiterResearch asked marketers why they weren t incorporat ing Web analytics data, 41 percent said it was because they lacked the resources, and another 36 percent said they lacked the necessary 7 integration between applications. But crafting these highly relevant messages empowers you to more effectively engage customers and can generate nine times more improvement in revenue and as much as 32 times more improvement 8 Even after in net profit over undifferentiated broadcast campaigns. including additional Web analytics spending, the use of Web-site

5 clickstream data as a targeting attribute still significantly improves both 3. topline and bottom-line results. 4. With several top service providers and Web analytics firms establishing partnerships to ease the burdens of passing data between 5. platforms, leveraging Web-site clickstream data has never been easier. Footnotes The ROI of Relevance, JupiterResearch, May Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006, MarketingSherpa, December 2005 The ROI of Relevance, JupiterResearch, May What Matters to Web Site Analytics Users, Forrester Research, June The ROI of Relevance, JupiterResearch, May Do Internet Users Want Their Cookies? Many Internet users regularly delete their cookies the small tracking files placed on users computers by Web sites. Web sites use cookies to store visitor histories, personalize visitors brows ing experience and to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and site enhancements. If users delete cookies, accurate long-term measurement of consumer behavior on the site is severely compromised, said JupiterResearch in a statement announcing its newly released report, Measuring Unique Visitors: Addressing the Dramatic Decline in the Accuracy of Cookie-Based Measurement. Lost in the ensuing uproar was JupiterResearch s finding that only 1 percent of Internet users delete first-party cookies cookies set by the site itself. In a column for imedia Connection, ThinkMetrics CEO Brandt Dainow reminded marketers of this crucial distinction, saying, People don t mind if a site they choose to visit sets a cookie (cookie deletion) is only a problem if you use analytics software running on another company s Web site which sets a cookie through yours a third-party cookie. User behavior is telling us pretty clearly that third-party cookies are unacceptable, he said. When setting up an integration between your messaging and Web analytics programs, be sure to solicit your vendors insights regarding the use of first-party and third-party cookies and the issue of cookie rejection and deletion as it relates to your unique business situation.