Multichannel Metrics – one year later – how far did we get?

Just about a year ago, the mutlichannel marketing metrics book was published. Since then I have had a chance to tour through Europe and US to speak with many marketers from online and more traditional sides of the house.

Here is what I am finding as to how far companies have come in the past year.

• Online – offline integration has not yet become mainstream
• But there are more and more examples of companies implementing something and those who do have great business results to show for
• It doesn’t always have to be online and offline integration. Lucrative enough for online marketers can be to integrate click data with online customer data. Business cases that I am aware of also look very strong.

I will share sample business ideas that companies have implemented in a coming series of blog posts.

Before then I should point out some things that haven’t changed yet.

• The question about anonymous visitors and cookie deletion remains one of the most frequent ones that I am asked
• Privacy considerations come up frequently
• Marketers wonder why they should look at web analytics data closely now even if they haven’t yet used other data sources that are available to them to the fullest potential.

Which industries are doing the best job at this?

The leaders today seem to be in the area of highly considered purchases such as automotive, group travel, telco, real estate, B2B high-tech, etc. Common to these industries is that

• Before the WWW, buyers used to get all their advice from a live sales person whereas today most initial research occurs online in a DIY fashion.
• The buying process often crosses online and offline channels, e.g.
  • Awareness is prompted via TV commercials
  • Research is performed online
  • The purchase often occurs offline

In the coming posts we’ll look at examples from acquisition marketing, persuasion, re-marketing, cross-sales, and retention / win-back.

Check the following posts that continue this thread:

1. Online to Offline Conversions
2. A modern example from B2B, National Instruments
3. An example from a B2C, real estate web site
4. Online to Offline cross- and repeat sales in the travel industry
5. Online to Offline cross-sales in retail banking
6. Privacy, Schmivacy!
7. Online-Offline integration for retention marketing