Fully agree with Ashley that a customer-centric view is the ultimate goal. Direct retailers have had the concept of customer lifetime value for years, but it is now slowly filtering through to other industries, including store retailers who in the past were only concerned with converting anonymous footfall to anonymous sales (some I know don't even have number of transactions as a metric, only sales in £).
I mostly work with multi-channel retailers, and measuring and understanding customer behaviour in all channels is definitely a hot topic for them as they are working towards the holy grail of measuring customer lifetime value across channels.
There is lots of anecdotal evidence that customers who shop from multiple channels spend more with that retailer compared to single channel shoppers (some US retailers quote up to 3x). Question is, how much, and how to track it.
Two particular challenges retailers I talk to are grappling with at the moment:
1) Free web traffic without a source
Big brands like John Lewis, WHSmith and B&Q get a large chunk of their traffic from people who type in the URL, i.e. they don’t know the source of that traffic. Great that the traffic is free, as this lowers their customer acquisition cost per order, but if the majority of their orders come from brand awareness, why bother with paid-for online marketing at all for customer acquisition?
I don’t have an answer for this apart from asking customers in an online survey ‘why did you come to our site today?’, so I would be very interested to hear what people are doing to track the source of ‘free’ traffic.
2) Customers moving between channels for researching a product and buying it.
This works both ways, i.e. the classic ‘research online then go to store to try and buy’, but there is also evidence of try out in store then go online to order for home delivery. Unless the retailer has a customer-centric view across channels, they will treat the research part as a failed sale, and never get to understand the true lifetime value of the customer. For instance, customers who regularly research online and then go to buy in store might be viewed as non-converting low value customers by the eCommerce team.
The main challenge here is to measure the in-store behaviour (assuming we have a wonderful web analytics tool in place!). Apart from account cards such as Boots’ Advantage card, I have come across some other interesting approaches to this:
- Argos' Click + Collect scheme, which allows customers to reserve items online for a particular branch. Great service for the customer, visibility of the halo effect for Argos.
- Agent Provocateur store staff ask customers at the till whether they are on the mailing list, then look the customer up by postcode (much like a call centre agent does). This would obviously not work for Sainsbury’s, but I think it’s a great approach for low volume, high service/value retailers.
- B&Q’s website offers a print shopping list function, MFI has an online kitchen planner which encourages customers to print off their research and take it to store. Both have anecdotal evidence of customers coming into store with website printouts, which cuts down time store staff need to serve the customer. But as far as I know they don’t track this systematically – perhaps include a coupon on the printout with a bar code for store checkout staff to scan?
I’d be interested if anybody has come across other ways to tie store customers back to their online identity.
Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Ashley , 4 Feb 11:56 From all that we see, and those we talk to, measurement and analytics is an increasingly hot topic. Not really surprising as we all seek to maximise ROI. However, increasingly the ...
Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Jim Sterne, 4 Feb 15:45 First of all, Ashely and I are in violent agreement here. But rather than posting a "Yeah, what he said" message, let me add the transitional component.
In an ideal world, all t ...
Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, dchaffey, 4 Feb 22:35 Integrated online marketing campaign metrics/tools
I am going to violently agree with the two previous posts too.
Following up on Jim's list of systems. If we're talking cus ...
Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Obi Felten, 5 Feb 12:01 Fully agree with Ashley that a customer-centric view is the ultimate goal. Direct retailers have had the concept of customer lifetime value for years, but it is now slowly filterin ...
Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Ed Lamb, 6 Feb 12:30 I agree with Obi's two challenges that retailers are grappling with.
Regarding your second point about customers moving between channels for researching a product and then buyin ...
"Free traffic", NeilM, 8 Feb 20:32 Yes, I also see that a number of major retailers have “free traffic” but I think that this is only inevitable. Big brands can use their equity to acquire traffic at relatively lowe ...
Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, NeilM, 8 Feb 20:17 I completely agree with a “customer centric” approach and this is where I think that web analytics is ultimately headed. I don’t think that there is a single system on the market w ...
Measuring online driving offline sales, Obi Felten, 3 Mar 15:27 I came across a good article by ex Philips marketer on tactics/measurement methods of how measuring the effect of online marketing on offline sales.
Excerpt below, link to full ...
Measuring online driving offline sales, Jim Sterne, 3 Mar 16:04 On 15:27:31 3 March 2004 Obi Felten wrote:
>I came across a good article by ex Philips marketer on
>tactics/measurement methods of how measuring the effect of
>online marketing ...
Integrated Online Marketing and measurement / analytics, Ashley 
, 4 Feb 11:56
