The following two sections present a checklist of the critical considerations for marketers who intend to lead the path toward improved Online Channel ROI.
1. Contact: An effective contact strategy should think beyond traditional outbound email promotions that make up the vast majority of email programs developed to date to include more sophisticated forms of promotion, integration with offline programs and automation of costly offline communications.
2. Profile-based targeting and personalization. Sophisticated targeting of prospects through acquisition campaigns and of customers through cross-sell and up-sell campaigns combined with personalized messages yields dramatic increases in conversion rates over promotional email
blasts or more basic targeting.
3. Event-triggered marketing. Marketers that realize they have their customers' most attention during inbound requests and the transaction cycle can capitalize on this fact by anticipating these events and automating event-triggered communications (either via email or on the website) with far greater response and conversion rates than outbound promotions.
4. Integrated multi-media campaigns. Integrated campaigns are essential to maintaining a consistent brand experience across all media used by a customer. Such campaigns will be most effective at reaching all members of a target market regardless of their preferred medium and at driving up sales through both channels. Online testing of offline campaign messages increases effectiveness at reduced research cost.
5. Viral marketing. Mastering the art of developing relevant, interesting content and engaging creative to inspire recipients to tell a friend, combined with tools that will encourage and measure viral vehicles, will enable marketers to reap the benefits of this lowest acquisition cost form of marketing.
6. Loyalty programs. Loyalty programs enable creative marketers to cost-effectively influence customer behavior by awarding benefits according to specific actions, but only if they have the right combination of tracking, analytic and communication tools.
7. Automated lead management, transaction-related communications and service. Companies that can distribute collateral and correspond with customers relative to order and shipping status via email and that can successfully drive customers to purchase and receive service online will significantly reduce their cost to acquire and serve customers.
8. Customer control of context and frequency. Allowing customers to control the context and the frequency of
email communications improves customer satisfaction, reduces email fatigue and ensures retention of opted-in customers.
9. Profile: To enable the highly targeted, high ROI campaigns referenced above requires detailed information on
prospects and customers. Complete profiles of online customers allow marketers to conduct detailed segmentation and analysis to determine the characteristics of their most valuable customers and then target more like them while eliminating wasted marketing spend.
10. Registration data. The most basic form of an online customer profile is the data captured by companies at the
time of registration which typically includes contact information, demographic and preference information. Third party data. The ability to combine third party demographic, psychographic, preference, purchase behavior and firmagraphic information is critical to supplementing online databases with information visitors have not provided about themselves.
11. Web behavior data. The addition of behavioral data from your website enables the company to email a special offer to a prospect who browses a product area but doesn't purchase and provides analysis of events such as the customer who receives an email campaign and does not respond but then returns
to the site later to buy.
12. Campaign response data. Knowledge of the characteristics of one campaign that drove a customer to
respond and of that customer's detailed response behavior enables sophisticated marketers to develop more personalized, impacted future campaigns.
13. E-commerce data. Linking purchase behavior to all other information about a customer is critical to targeting and analysis of lifetime value and purchase behavior by such factors as source and segment.
14. CRM data. Marketers who leverage existing CRM data for online success will be leaps ahead of the competition as most marketers continue to attempt costly adaptations of CRM systems in hopes of realizing a return on their significant investments. |
