Integration makes your email dialogue count

You already know how to use existing data to measure each channel individually, and understand that a more complete analysis means looking across different channels. But up until now, many marketers have felt that the technology needed to consolidate and integrate data wasn't mature enough to deliver the value they were looking for.

However, recent advances in the technologies and tools available to us have addressed the technical challenges of combing the underlying data from multiple channel systems. These technologies have opened the way to create individually-targeted customer segments that aren't focused on demographics or age alone, and make your dialogue count by delivering much more relevant, automated communications.

One of the areas that has provided the most impressive payback from doing this, has come from integrating email and web analytics platforms, then embarking on remarketing actions based on observations made from web behaviour. These programmes can be enormously profitable, but require deep customer insight, accurate segmentation, a solid communication strategy and ongoing measurement to be successful.

Remarketing is an extremely efficient way to focus your marketing efforts on speaking with existing active customers instead of spending budget you don't have creating new relationships. It makes perfect sense as your existing customers are already in a relationship with you, and welcome the attention.

There are two main marketing objectives you can fulfill by utilising integration in this way:

• Deliver integrated campaign reporting: This involves pulling email delivery and response data into your web analytics campaigns reports to allows a side-by-side comparison of your email campaigns with other marketing channels (paid search, organic search, display advertising, affiliate programs etc.), creating a true cross-channel overview. You will not only be able to see impressions and response rates for individual campaigns or channels, but also what actions were taken and which products were purchased, allowing you to understand market from the outside in. If you understand how a market behaves, you can focus on and encourage the profitable behaviours.
  
  
• Create segmented remarketing programmes: You can trigger messages to launch email campaigns based on site activity, promote high value products, re-activate inactive users and build targeted content areas for customer segments. This allows you to make your dialogue count and provide relevant automated communications, delivered in your customer's preferred format that make the most of customer LifeCycle programmes.

How it works in practice

By using web analytics data, you can pinpoint the fall-out of a specific desired behaviour. An abandoned shopping cart represents a purchase (desired behaviour) that began but was never completed (fall-out). You can then examine the timing and characteristics of the completed behaviour, the insight from which will reveal the typical cycle time of purchase and the web visit patterns that correlate with positive, completed orders. Your remarketing programme can be timed and crafted to address these conditions.

Often a relevant, timely follow-up message to the abandoned shopping cart visitors will generate a 5-10% response rate, and can increase the revenue of a campaign by 25%.

However, there's no perfect strategy in online marketing. Different channels work for different products and customers. The best answer is usually test, test and test even more. You'll meet short-term goals while ensuring online marketing efforts remain successful over the long term.