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November 11 2008
Guest Comment: A customer is for life, not just for Christmas
Christmas represents a feast for online retailers, a once a year opportunity to establish a relationship with thousands of new customers and to start to capture data about their behaviours, interests, preferences and experiences. Speed-Trap's Malcolm Duckett takes a look at how to turn Xmas into a long-term opportunity...
Data captured during the Christmas season can be fed into your marketing programs and transformed into proactive and targeted marketing and promotional campaigns which will make these occasional customers, like the proverbial dog, "not just for Christmas".
A brief online visit to your web site from Mrs Smith looking for, but not finding, that perfect gift for Mr Smith can create the start of a customer record recording her interests, preferences and behaviour.
Mrs Smith may not purchase from your site (or even tell you she is Mrs Smith this time) but you don't need a purchase to capture the data, you don't need a purchase to begin turning her into a customer or prospect for whom you can build a record — her likes and dislikes, buying habits, interests and even aspirations by the products she looked at but did not basket or buy.
This turns a one-off visitor into a potential long term customer you can have a dialogue with; a customer that you can engage and sell to with relevant offers — and a customer who will start to sing your praises via word of mouth or the much-vaunted social networking scene and bring more people to your site.
This sounds like a heavy process — to capture the data, transform it and convert it into meaningful output — but it can and should be done, even in real-time, and it must be linked to other channels. If you knew that Mrs Smith had been in your high street shop and had purchased an iPhone, why not offer her the accessories for the iPhone through her e-mail or the next time she visits your website? Or when the call centre calls about the renewal of the product warranty, perhaps they could link into the conversation something she has been looking at (but not yet purchased) online?
Integrating the channels provides a complete picture of buying patterns and allows the management of the relationship and offer extra value. And enough individual customer records can provide accurate and comprehensible trends, though the reverse is not true; an over-arching appreciation of a trend does not provide insight into individuals.
With an improved understanding of their customer base, for example, HotelConnect were able to spot a trend in customer Christmas activity and ascertain the most appropriate timings and approaches for their marketing campaigns. Specifically, the Christmas deal campaign was scheduled for September, rather than October, simply because of the inside track into customer needs and motivations with which they were provided.
The statistics from 2006 showed that many visitors were approaching the site looking for Christmas bargains as early as September, but were leaving and going elsewhere when none were found. Accordingly, a Christmas-focused marketing campaign in September 2007 was started to catch this influx in interest.
While to the outsider it appeared to be a rather premature strategy, the increased traffic through that section of the site proved it to be a perfectly worthwhile maneuver as the Christmas offers became the most popular areas of the site almost overnight.
So this Christmas could be your Santa's Grotto. Fill your company's stocking with visitor data and turn them into long term customers throughout 2009, and beyond.
Malcolm Duckett is VP Operations and Marketing at Speed-Trap, a provider of software that uses Web 2.0 technology to capture and deliver complete real-time data on every individual online customer and prospect, based on detailed analysis of their current and historic online behaviour and experience.
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