The days when surfing the web was a minority pastime are long, long gone. With broadband penetration running at 94 per cent in the UK, and consumers comfortable with the idea of researching and shopping via electronic channels, the web and email are second nature to the modern consumer's daily life.
All of which presents something of a dilemma for brands, many of which have, up until now, chosen to treat the data that they hold about their customers' and prospects' online and offline activities as two entirely separate entities.
As Amanda Arthur, director of planning and analysis at EHS Brann explains, this situation has arisen in many cases because the online channel was set up initially as a 'skunkworks': a separate part of the business with a totally different set of cultures associated with it.
"Brands have a series of organisational silos with separate marketing departments associated with different channels. This caused a divide in customer ownership - there are some real barriers in the way of putting it back together again and it needs some fairly hefty ownership to put things right," she says.
For consumers, this creates situations where the agent in the call centre, for instance, has no visibility of the fact that the woman on the other end of the line is one of the company's highest-value customers, who just happens to buy all her goods from the company online.
This, not unnaturally, leads to customer dissatisfaction, since customers and prospects don't pay much attention to the organisation's internal structure and politics.
"The division between offline and online is all a bit artificial," says Brian Wyatt, head of consulting at Acxiom. "From a consumer's perspective, it's all about how you want to engage with a particular organisation at the point where you have a need to fulfil. This will only be achieved with consistent customer insight across all touchpoints."
Single approach
There's little doubt that marketers need to be thinking about building a 'single customer view' marketing database to complement their multi-channel communications. In this way, marketing data from a range of different sources can be brought together to inform a single consolidated approach.
This is easier said than done, though, with one obstacle being a lack of validated email addresses. Guy Hanson, head of email marketing at Database Group Interactive, says that marketers need to bite the bullet and take a more disciplined approach to data-gathering approaches, embracing email append services even if these are relatively expensive.
"They should also get in the habit of re-integrating campaign data in order to learn from consumers' reactions to previous activity, and they should allow customers and prospects to choose their preferred method of communication - whether it's post, email, phone or SMS." Those that do, Hanson argues, have seen responsiveness to their campaigns increase by up to 60 per cent.
Internal politics can prove another major stumbling block, as any initiative to integrate on- and offline data must be seen to have backing at a senior level. This can perhaps help to explain why the 'single customer view' is not yet as widespread as it might be. John Wallinger, data planning director at Craik Jones, says that few clients are actively adopting this approach, but cautions that they should be.
Having created a marketing database and got direct mail off to a fine art, says Wallinger, brands have gone online and found that "the pipework does not join up." Fearing the cost of putting things right, many choose to ignore the problem. But in fact, argues Wallinger, the problem may not be as big as they think.
"Technology has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years" he says. "The opportunity to join systems up is sitting there staring them in the face."
Keep it simple
Nick Earnshaw, senior consultant at Jaywing, tells a similar story. In his experience, there are plenty of client companies that realise this is something they should be doing, but, because of the way they have set up their digital environment, realise it won't be easy. There are many more, however, that don't yet realise it needs to be done. In Earnshaw's view, the belief in the need for data integration is crucial to any successful implementation. "It is certainly achievable, but it takes a specific desire to make it happen, and making it happen is not just a marketing function," he says. "It's about integrating marketing, IT and operations, and with big organisations, that can often be a problem. But it can be done, and it has to start with the data; you have to create the right data environment in order to drive the analytical and contact strategies."
On the client side, Andrew Mann, marketing director for Tesco Clubcard, is pragmatic about the problem. He argues that true online and offline integration is difficult, especially for a brand like Tesco that has multi-faceted connections with its customers.
"You have lots of different channels that you can communicate through, and lots of different messages you want to communicate. It's a big ask when you have 14 million customers," he says.
Instead, says Mann, Tesco concentrates on relevance and simplicity - making the message relevant to the channel used to communicate it, and keeping the offer simple.
One example of this at work is the way Tesco identifies customers who shop on Tesco.com so that when it sends out their quarterly Clubcard statement, it can offer them vouchers that can be redeemed online or in store. It also offers, to those online shoppers who say they want it, an email a few days ahead of their statement to say it will be with them soon.
"It's a really simple approach, rather than trying to integrate many different forms of media" says Mann. "This in itself is difficult enough when you have lots of messages going out."
On the other hand, Matt Button, CRM and database marketing manager at car marque Lexus, says that the data integration issue is not as big an issue for the business as it may be in other companies. All responses to all campaigns are channelled via a single database, adds Button, and everyone is working to the same end.
"The important thing in our organisation is that marketing, operations, sales and dealer networks all speak the same language," he says.
"We create prospects, convert them to sales leads, deliver them to the dealer network and then they convert them to customers. Everyone understand the objectives of our marketing and everyone can see the outcome."
This contrast between the grocery retailer and the luxury car marque is an enlightening one. While Tesco's Mann is candid enough to admit that there's just too much activity to achieve true 360-degree integration, Lexus's Button acknowledges that a small team can make a single database more of a reality.
If brands have millions of customers choosing from thousands of their products every week, then they have to retain a sense of realism. Those brands that have a much smaller product range and a much longer buying cycle can perhaps afford to be a bit more ambitious. Everyone inbetween must make their own decisions and hope the competition is not making a better fist of data integration than they are.
POWER POINTS
- Many brands treat their data about customers' online and offline activities as separate entities
- Marketers need to think about building a 'single customer view' database to help consolidate their approach
- This could mean embracing relatively expensive email append services.
NEED TO KNOW: THE KEY TO ON- AND OFFLINE DATA INTEGRATION
RICHARD TREMELLEN - Partner, marketing & new propositions, Experian Integrated Marketing
It takes serious investment in a powerful marketing database to be able to match web users who don't sign in or make transactions to offline data, because they can only be identified by cookies and IP addresses.
The critical starting point is to disentangle millions of IP addresses and cookie IDs and turn them into real individuals with the corresponding offline profiles.
It's important that suppliers give clients an appreciation of the intricacies involved in blending offline and online data insight.
We've heard of some service providers positioning integrated marketing capabilities that actually fall well short of the mark, as this is a case of taking geographic IP addresses and targeting the locale with 'relevant' messages. These are spray and pray tactics and devalue the science that goes into genuine integrated campaigns.
TOP TIP - Invest in a database that can match web users with offline data. It's an intricate task and clients need to be aware of this.
KATHRYN JEFFERIES, Head of offline media & insight, Equi=Media
To bring online and offline data together, all tracking systems should be joined up. We have implemented technology to enable us to bring together data from all media sources into our data warehouse. This allows us to measure response and apply attribution modelling more accurately. We are therefore able to consider brand uplift online as a result of direct response, as well as any uplift that online has had on our direct response campaigns.
Marketers' tracking systems often lack the common standards to understand the real customer journey and the channels used. Without common standards across different software, the ability of brands to understand their customers' behaviour and channel use will be hindered by mismatched information.
Suppliers of tracking and reporting systems often try to lock-in clients to their system across various channels, making it more difficult to integrate analysis software from different suppliers.
TOP TIP - Insist on your supplier providing common standards across on- and offline tracking systems
CASE STUDY - Peugeot tracks responses to 207 launch
Client: Peugeot
Brief: To launch the 207 model across multiple channels
Supplier: Clark McKay Walpole
For the launch of its 207 model last year, Peugeot used a mix of media and channels to build anticipation among consumers and generate showroom traffic.
These included interactive TV, SMS/WAP, web, email and direct mail. The challenge was that the potential customer could respond through any channel they chose, not necessarily the one through which they were contacted. This would have been less of an issue if they were only to be contacted once, but as the aim was to get people excited about the vehicle, get a brochure in their hand and then get them into the dealership, Peugeot needed to be able to track which communications individuals had received, how they had responded and whether they had visited the dealer or organised a test drive.
All response and contact data had to be amalgamated to see where each individual was in the purchase process. The issue was that the data available through each channel was different.
Digital responses have a name and email address; telephone and postal responses have a name, telephone number and postal address. So how would Peugeot know if someone who responded through email was on the original direct mail campaign when the two bits of data don't match?
Peugeot agency Clark McKay and Walpole pulled together responses from all channels and matched them back to data held on the Peugeot marketing database.
Francis Smith, head of data planning at Clark McKay and Walpole, says: "We had to develop bespoke tools to do this as the Peugeot database couldn't make these type of matches and couldn't process these files in the 'apparently real time' needed to drive the communications."
In some cases, however, the data did not exist to make the necessary links. For these, the communications programme was designed to take account of the fact that some people could be at a different stage in the sales process than they appeared to be from the data that Peugeot could see.
"The big win for Peugeot was that the customer got the option to select how they wanted to respond, through whichever channel. They had a journey that was coherent and appropriate, whichever channel they chose," concludes Smith.
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