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 which incorporates all the web intelligence that an organisation needs to drive the channel which is why at QXL (an online auctions company) we developed our own approach based on a bespoke customer warehouse with which we integrated our transactional and marketing systems. Although I had the advantage of working with a greenfield site, it’s amazing how many legacy systems a new company can quickly acquire!
At the heart of our system was the customer data table which held all the information that we needed to know about our customers. This was the first thing that we built, even before we necessarily had all the data to populate it. Our strategy was that all our systems would integrate with our customer warehouse and enable to have a single view of the customer. In it we stored for example:
· Customer details (name, address etc)
· Billing details
· Behaviour segment data from our transactional systems (ie buyer, seller, repeat buyer/seller etc)
· Recency, Frequency, Monetary data (eg date last bid, number of items bought, lifetime value)
· Email preference and permissions
· Source of acquisition (fed in from our web analytic systems)
This formed the basis of our acquisition and retention strategies and allowed us for example to:
· Calculate customer profitability by source of acquisition
· Generate very targeted mailings (with resultant CTRs of over 40%)
· Understand retention issues more clearly and target communications more effectively
· Start to understand behaviours exhibited by high value customers
Obviously having the ability to integrate our data was at the heart of the strategy and became one of our success criteria when choosing what systems to use (ie web analytic systems, email marketing systems etc). One the key things though was also having a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve and scoping that out early in the process, even if it takes a while to get there.
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
