Marketers can concentrate on customers who have visited web pages that show new products, but have not yet made an online purchase, and send them promotional discounts. Customers can also be monitored by their “abandonment points,” as the experts put it, where and when and why they leave the website at a particular time. That data can be grouped to determine patterns of behavior. Those customers, as a result, could receive one of several variations of e-mails, direct mail, and even targeted telesales calls.
This can be quite effective. A recent survey by Jupiter Research, based in New York City, indicates that e-mails based on the website “clickstream data” offer a three to nine times revenue improvement when compared to “broadcast” e-mail marketing. In other words, the e-mail messages are more relevant because they pertain to the site visitor's interests.
“The shackles of traditional web analytics reporting are coming off,” said Greg Drew, President and Chief ExecutiveOfficer of WebTrends Inc., a developer of analytical tools for online marketers, who knows that old measures such as hits, and clicks, are not enough.
Some things in marketing online, however, remain more intuitive, and so-called viral marketing seems to be quite powerful for customers who do not have massive advertising budgets. A spokesman for Atlantic Webworks, an online marketing firm, told The Web that there is still significant “clutter” in the online marketplace that keeps prospects from finding the companies they would like to do business with presently.
“When they have a particular problem that needs a solution, they have to wade through mountains of irrelevant advertising to find what they need,” the spokesman said. “Smart businesses are using their websites to enlist others to ferret out those prospects and make direct contact where they live.”
Earned search results, paid advertising, directory listings—all have been considered good ways to make contact with people at the very moment they're looking for your products or services online. “But these days, websites are not only being built with the goal of being easy to find and easy to understand, but they're also being built with a conscious focus on encouraging visitors to pass along that information to colleagues, friends, and families,” said the spokesman.
One illustration—Atlantic Webworks—has posted an e-book about viral marketing on its own website. Visitors to the site download the e-book, read it, find it of value, and forward it to the exact person they think will find it most useful—the exact person the company would target for new business if executives there knew he or she existed. “The e-book— and the Atlantic brand—are given an implicit endorsement by the original reader, and the final recipient feels confident in placing a call or sending an e-mail to ask for more information. It's an elegant solution to a complex problem,” said the spokeswoman.
Gene Koprowski is a Lilly Endowment Award-winning columnist for United Press International, for whom he covers networking and communications.