Customers are multidimensional; they use a variety of channels to learn about and interact with your product/service. They don’t consciously think about their online versus their offline life. With the advances in Marketing technology, capturing customer online behavior has become relatively easy.  If you only use this data to build a view of your customers, you’ll be missing critical pieces of information.  This is why every company needs to think about data onboarding to create a holistic view of the customer.

Online channels do not paint the whole picture. If you only analyze the way your customers behave in one world, you will not have a holistic view of your customers. Bob Intarakumhang, vice president of Digital Media Solutions & Operations at TransUnio,n once said, “Relying purely on online signals to inform how your marketing efforts are driving business for you is a very incomplete picture.”

The key to a successful, integrated Marketing strategy lies within the use of all channels. This requires data from both worlds.

Data-Onboarding Helps Measure Marketing Success

How can marketers build a complete and descriptive picture of the customer that allows them to measure the success of their Marketing efforts across both worlds? The answer is data onboarding. Data onboarding refers to the ability to bring offline data into the online world.

With data-onboarding you can apply knowledge gained from offline data for online marketing ,ultimately enabling you to improve the customer experience and enhance customer relationships to acquire and retain more customers. The goal of data onboarding is to match offline data and online user profiles.

Below are some examples of where you can acquire offline data.  Avoid taking an ad-hoc approach for gathering data. Be thoughtful and deliberate about how you might use these to gain additional data and information about your customers and prospects. Tap experts in your initial phases of doing this work.

• Event Transactions. Many businesses use online channels to create Marketing strategies, but struggle to determine the ROI because the transactions are made offline. Measure and upload the number of transactions and the associated revenue to your CRM platform and you will have a better idea of the overall influence and contribution of your Marketing investments.
• Conversations. The goal of your social media efforts or advertisement campaigns is not to measure the number of likes, tweets or shares. What matters is if you were able to secure your customers’ attention. Did you deliver critical information? Did you start a discussion? Did your customer take an action or initiative? Understanding this can drastically change your perception of the success or failure of your Marketing initiatives.
• “In person” demos.  Serious prospects in the evaluation phases of their buying decision are willing to take the time to listen and evaluate your product/service. Build in ways for customers and prospects to experience your product/service. The goal of your demo should be to transform prospects in the evaluation phase into prospects in the selection phase of their journey.
• Presentations. Whether it is in a conference or at a roundtable meeting, if you are giving a presentation, your goal should be to create qualified opportunities. How many participants responded post-presentation with interest in your product/service? Did you schedule meetings or phone calls with these people? Are your presentations creating the next conversation, and are they converting to real paying customers? These are questions you need to answer to determine the effectiveness of your presentations.
• Call Centers. A call center can be an expensive yet essential tool to ensure customer satisfaction. Collect information about how many prospects call to learn more about your offering and what they want to learn. Are they interested in your product/service? What kinds of questions are they asking? How many of these conversations go to the next step in the buying journey
• Technical help calls. It’s important to solve the customer’s problem before you ply them with questions. Once the problem is addressed, your technical team can be an important channel for gaining valuable information from your customers. In addition, the data from the calls can provide insight into whether your product/service is robust. Use technical help calls to find out the degree of difficulty your customers have with your product/service. Are they challenged when using your product or service? How many times is the same customer called for help? These are great ways to measure the quality of your product/service and to discover what your customers want in your product/service.

Buy Your Best-Practices Workbook

Data from these offline customer and prospect interactions adds color and dimension to your view of the customer. A more holistic view enables you to develop richer profiles and personas of your customers. Be sure to add fields for this data into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system .This will provide a holistic view of both your customers and the success of your integrated Marketing initiatives.

FAQ:

• Event transactions: Offline purchases influenced by online marketing; upload transaction counts and revenue to CRM to improve ROI and contribution analysis.
• Conversations: Outcomes of social and ad efforts should be evaluated by attention, information transfer, discussion, and actions taken—not just likes/shares.
• In-person demos: Track how demos move prospects from evaluation to selection stages.
• Presentations: Measure post-presentation responses, meetings scheduled, and conversion to qualified opportunities and customers.
• Call centers: Capture why prospects call, what they ask, and how many advance to the next buying step.
• Technical help calls: After resolving issues, capture difficulty patterns, repeat-call frequency, and recurring problems to assess product robustness and identify improvement opportunities.

Comments are closed.