Marketers and web analysts talk about the huge value of website data, but basically only skim the surface by just looking at the broad patterns of how customers get to their website and what they do once they get there.

 With this, they miss out on a huge potential – the ability to personalise web and cross channel campaigns, based on the behaviour of individual customers on the website.

Online marketers should actually start building visitor level profiles for the basis of their marketing activity, link web behaviour to existing customer data, and personalise marketing activities towards this customer so that their experience is highly relevant and based on a combination of previous views, clicks, and orders, spliced with individualised data such as search terms, referrers, geo-locations (based on IP addresses), and registered customer information. 

Here Marcel Holsheimer, the EMEA VP of marketing for web analytics firm, Unica gives us his five ways to drive value out of visitor level data. 

1. Recommend products.  If you’re like millions of consumers worldwide, you’ve experienced the product recommendation function on Amazon. The site simply presents suggestions based on what people who looked at similar pages (or bought similar products) have also viewed or purchased. Building a visitor level profile allows you to target visitors with individualised offerings.

2. Budget allocation.  It’s much cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one. But if a customer is likely to stay without prompting, money is wasted. Worse, there’s an entire category of customers, “sleeping dogs,” who might respond with the behaviour you don’t want – leaving.

Customers fall into four distinct groups:

• “Lost causes” who will leave irrespective of your efforts
• “Sure things” who will stay, regardless
• “Sleeping dogs” who will leave as a consequence of your promotion
• “Persuadables” most likely to stay as a result of your retention effort

Direct your money where it belongs: the “persuadables” – keep them by providing them with an additional incentive.

3. Select the most appropriate ads.  Suppose ads and other marketing messages could be as precisely targeted as product recommendations? By building visitor profiles, web marketers can deliver more relevant messages and increase engagement.

4. Send follow-up emails for cross-sales or re-marketing.  Why not send targeted email offers to visitors who look at, but do not purchase, your products? However, many visitors can regard these emails as spam and may actively turn away from your business unless messages are carefully targeted at them.

Improve effectiveness by following up with personalised email campaigns – based on the actual behaviour of this visitor on your website.

5. Integration and automation are key to going from analysis to action.  Neither personalisation nor web analysis by themselves generate profits.  Bring the results of your analytics to fruition by integrating all of your efforts into one suite of activities that can be easily managed and monitored for maximum effectiveness:

• Web analytics with a built-in visitor level data mart feeds predictive analytics
• Interactive marketing solutions combine visitor, customer, and predictive score data with marketers’ business rules to determine the right offer, based on this behaviour
• Execution solutions deliver the message to whichever inbound or outbound interaction point your customers interact on

By completely integrating the creation of visitor level profiles, interactive marketing, email and website personalisation from end-to-end, marketers can capture the full value of every customer interaction.

You want more?

Unica’s twitter feed is here

And here’s the Unica blog