Increasing Business ROI through Online Data Integration and Predictive Analytics

Can you identify the online behavior of your most profitable customers to improve your acquisition campaigns? Can you enrich your customer profiles with online behavioral data to increase loyalty and retention? Can you leverage the purchase information from your retail stores to cross sell on your Web site?

To truly answer these questions, one must look beyond traditional online analytics. In general terms, online analytics is the discipline that focuses on but not limited to visits, clicks, purchase ,Web traffic and associated activity like adding items to a shopping cart, clicking on a banner ad or watching a video.

The approach should go beyond the information captured by traditional online analytic platforms. First, the solution should be completely integrated i.e. All granular online data with all available offline data sources, for example, product ownership from an invoicing system with new product interest derived from recent online behavior. Then, this integrated dataset could be used to develop leading-edge analytical models, which would deliver the right insight to drive concrete strategies that increase profitability. The enriched analytical database delivers a complete and actionable view of each customer’s behaviors, interests and future needs to accelerate marketing performance across channels.

So how do you benefit? Through a more thoughtful and robust approach to online analytics, you can:

Gain Deeper Customer Insight. Behavioral data should be the lifeblood driving your customer insights; in most environments, online data are the richest behavioral data available. Sifting through massive amounts of online data to find and store the most valuable pieces is the first step in bridging your offline data sources with your online data.

Leverage Actionable Analytics. Online analytic tools allow you to identify certain online behavior, typical paths and trending over time, but they may not be complete and execute on advanced analytic techniques that provide a measurable business impact, such as survival analysis, lifetime value analysis and detailed campaign response analysis. For instance, one can quickly customize engagement metrics and areas of interest by leveraging the available event tagging within the Web analytic tool, right out of the box and deliver the next best action at the right time

"Bridging the gap between analytics and real-time delivery requires a delicate mix of marketing, technology and analytics"

The solution should provide for a wholistic integration of the data in such a way that they can be used to deliver inbound campaigns like real-time email or dynamic offers for the Web or call center as well as traditional trigger or batch outbound campaigns.

Enable Quick Wins: leveraging mainstream technologies to accelerate and automate data integration.

Track Promotion Performance across Channels: Merging your online and offline data sources provides the clearest understanding of where to properly allocate your promotional dollars to support your Customer Experience strategy and to optimize your marketing mix.

Track Marketing Message Effectiveness: Measure the online engagement to understand the level of interest in one promotion and the long-term effect and incremental value of all marketing messaging.

Develop Meaningful Customer Segmentations: The proper analytic transformation of your rich online data will result in well-formed segmentations and a strong predictive arsenal at your disposal. In many environments, online behavior will provide much more value than traditional offline sources when developing segmentations.

Extend Profile Opportunities: Online data include referring and exiting sites as well as domains, which provide a valuable understanding of those prospects, customers or segments that are interested in your competitors. Online data also include attributes that allow for dynamic messaging and may not be available in offline sources. These data should be stored in an efficient format to promote real-time responses via dynamic online content or real-time emails.

Increase Campaign ROI: Now that your predictive analytics are in place, the proper online and offline customer interaction processes can be used to tap the power of the analytics and consolidate your contact strategy across channels.

Simplify Your Marketing Efforts: Online behavior linked to registered users and customers can enhance your current marketing efforts significantly. A classic instance would be - in many industries, true interests are not stored because offline systems only capture the final action, such as a purchase or hotel stay, but not the prior comparison shopping. In many cases the true interests and potential reasons for purchase can be observed in the online activity.

Execute More Effective Cross-Channel Campaigns: Marketing processes have become much more complex given the timeliness and fluid nature of online marketing. marketing management has evolved greatly over time and can be used to coordinate online and offline planning and execution activities and foster efficiency gains through greater capacity.

So how do you get there from here? Well, the first step in many environments is an online data integration roadmap, which identifies the online data and steps required to integrate with your current offline environment. It is important as well to include strategic, technology and analytic components into your online data integration roadmap to ensure that all marketing dimensions are properly aligned and able to take advantage of this rich, multi-channel marketing environment.

Ultimately, a seamless multi-channel, analytics driven solution will maximize customer penetration and profitability.

(The views expressed in this post are personal and do not reflect that of my employer Microsoft and/or its subsidiaries or partners)