Monday, June 28, 2010


Know Your Digital Customer: Using Web Analytics to Target Offline Customers

Any marketer worth their salt will tell you that knowing your customer is a key element to accurately targeting your marketing efforts.  In order to obtain this information, companies regularly spend thousands of dollars on consumer research projects.  Oftentimes, much of this valuable information can be gleaned from web analytics data already being collected on your Web site.  This online data can prove invaluable in understanding your customer’s behavior and how to tailor your offline messaging and offers to drive purchasing action.  Here are a few simple ways marketing professionals can put this information to use in their offline efforts.

Using Analytics to Guide Creative Development

The way customers interact with your website can provide very useful information on how to structure your offline promotional literature.  Are the majority of people who visit your website focused on product elements like color and features or are they more concerned about the product’s technological specifications?  Web analytics data can help you structure promotional literature in a way that’s easily digestible and highly relevant for your customers.

Using Analytics for Behavioral Insights

How do customers research your product?  What product information is most important to a customer in making a purchase decision?  Web analytics can help you gain a deeper understanding of what information customers feel is most important to their purchase by looking at what pages they visit and how long they spend there.

Geographically Targeting Your Offline Marketing

What languages do your prospective customers speak and where do they come from?   Web analytics data is rich with the geographical information for people who visit your website.  It’s a great place to learn about where your most active customers and prospects are located.   You may even find a new market you didn’t know existed.  I know of several companies who provide geographical analytics data to their sales teams to identify new opportunities.

A/B Testing of Sale Offers

What types of sale offers create action with your target consumer groups?   Web content is easily changed and provides a great place to test customer response to different sale offers.   Once the high-performing offers have been identified, they’re easily translated to traditional media without exhausting resources on offers that won’t meet ROI expectations.

Do you currently use web analytics for your offline marketing efforts?  What have the results been?  Share your feedback and personal experiences in the comments section below.

Rob McChane is the Founder and Managing Partner of Digital Sherpa, an online marketing consultancy specializing in direct response search engine marketing, web analytics, social media and email marketing.  Rob can be reached via email at rob@thedigitalsherpa.com, on twitter at @rmcchane or on Linked In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/robmcchane.

2 comments:

Email marketing service providers said...

Excellent blog. Thanks for sharing wonderful information here.

Jackie said...

Great blog! Probably this biggest thing we have noticed over the past 4-5 years, is how our number of inquiries and catalog requests has went down in correlation to our number of web visitors going up. This eventually led to less quantities of our printed catalog being ordered (and less pages) and more emphasis on our website. It is great to look at the cost savings (and environmental impact of using so much less paper)since then.

Post a Comment