Moving Away From “Spray and Pray”

Clearly, the Inter­net is estab­lished as a global medium that allows over a bil­lion peo­ple to effi­ciently obtain infor­ma­tion, com­mu­ni­cate and con­duct busi­ness. It is the pre­ferred tech­nol­ogy by which new social net­works form to shape and influ­ence our cul­ture and how busi­nesses inter­act with their cus­tomers.Cus­tomers have new expec­ta­tions when it comes to inter­act­ing with a brand online. They may have cho­sen not to leave their home to visit a store, but they still want a highly rel­e­vant, highly engaged expe­ri­ence. And when they don’t get it, cus­tomers can change brand pref­er­ence at the click of a but­ton. Never before has the cus­tomer been in greater con­trol over their inter­ac­tion with the busi­ness. As a result, top brands are con­stantly explor­ing new ways to dif­fer­en­ti­ate their offer­ings and per­son­al­ize their inter­ac­tions to meet cus­tomer needs and desires.

The bar for doing it right in our dig­i­tal world is ris­ing each day.Using web ana­lyt­ics to mea­sure vis­i­tor behav­ior pro­vides key insight into the expe­ri­ence cus­tomers want, based on the clues with which they have pro­vided you along the way. But giv­ing them what they want, when they want it extends well beyond under­stand­ing their behav­ior. You need to have the right deliv­ery mech­a­nisms in place to human­ize and improve the rel­e­vance of inter­ac­tions to meet cus­tomer needs and desires in near real-time. And when you suc­cess­fully give cus­tomers what they want, when they want it, your ROI reflects that suc­cess. Many smart brands have rec­og­nized this and are engag­ing what I refer to as “rev­enue recov­ery campaigns.”

You see, unlike an air­plane that takes off with empty seats and can never recover that missed rev­enue oppor­tu­nity, dig­i­tal inter­ac­tion with cus­tomers pro­vides all of the cues needed to re-engage and either recover or enhance cus­tomer value. New strate­gies like this are achieved by inte­grat­ing mul­ti­ple tech­nolo­gies together with web ana­lyt­ics as the foun­da­tion that makes the sys­tem vastly more intel­li­gent than the indi­vid­ual sys­tems oper­at­ing inde­pen­dently. Mar­ket­ing inte­gra­tion solu­tions like Omni­ture Gen­e­sis enable this capa­bil­ity, allow­ing mar­keters to achieve a more rel­e­vant and engag­ing expe­ri­ence for their customers.

In the “rev­enue recov­ery” exam­ple, mar­keters are using web ana­lyt­ics to track prod­uct or brand engage­ment, shop­ping cart aban­don­ment, etc., and then, using these behav­ior cues auto­mat­i­cally trig­ger highly rel­e­vant emails to poten­tial cus­tomers who bailed halfway through the check­out process, offer­ing them other prod­ucts, within the same cat­e­gory, that have high rank­ings and cus­tomer reviews.Conversely, mar­keters who still prac­tice what I call “spray and pray” mar­ket­ing — offer­ing the same mes­sage to all vis­i­tors, regard­less of behav­ior — are doing them­selves and their com­pa­nies a dis­ser­vice. We have found that, when you take time to under­stand your audi­ence behav­ior, craft rel­e­vant offers and time their deliv­ery to behav­ioral cues, rev­enue recov­ery for a cam­paign can improve by as much 500 percent.