Lessons from consumer marketing

Carl Holmquist looks at consumer marketing and how to best keep customers coming back

The future of marketing lies in understanding the customer journey. Consumers constantly engage with brands through various marketing channels, such as emails, display ads, paid search ads, social media, and direct website visits. But do we make purchasing decisions on all marketing channels?

No, we do not. The decision-making process usually starts with the consumer becoming aware of a need and considering if this is a true need, leading to an intention to buy, and finally making a purchasing decision. Display ads and social media act as awareness builders. When we progress in our decision-making process and have an intention to buy, we usually research the item or service of interest on the internet.

Once we have made our decision, we visit the website of the chosen vendor. Various experiments have been conducted to create a shortcut in the consumer decision-making process, including being able to buy directly on Facebook, which is in the awareness-building stages.

This rarely works.

Creating social footprints using Facebook and Twitter raises awareness, but ultimately no purchasing decisions are made via these channels. Facebook is very successful at raising awareness using retargeting technology where consumers who have shown an intention to buy a product but dropped off are retargeted with messages related to this purchasing intention.

Retargeting is successful everywhere, no matter which website the consumer is on; however, Facebook is a particularly effective retargeting channel as people spend so much time on the social network.

Google has just released a report based on data collected from 36,000 Google Analytics accounts which maps the customer journey and shows where various marketing channels sit in the typical online path to purchase.

However, what this report doesn't tell you is that online consumers complete transactions beyond the internet as well, including over the phone. This number is growing in direct correlation with the amount of time spent on our smartphones, which is quickly overtaking the amount of time we spend researching on a computer.

When using a computer, the opportunity to talk to a consultant at a contact centre would typically require you to pick up a separate device.

The online path to purchase ends with either an online transaction, or a serviced transaction over the phone. More than half of e-commerce transactions for non-commodity-selling verticals such as finance, insurance, automotive, healthcare, and travel are serviced over the phone.

All marketing tools you are familiar with today, including Google Analytics, lack the ability to collect data from e-commerce transactions that have taken place over the phone. These customers are then treated as drop-offs or bounces.

Marketers don't like bounces and want to reduce those numbers where possible. By using data in our decision making and trusting legacy analytics tools with gaping holes in the transaction phase, we are making sure our most valuable audience will never find us again.

Being data-driven in your marketing comes with the responsibility of being interested in data, continually questioning the data model, and the ability to effectively collect data about user activities from marketing tools that you trust.

You can start by modelling customer journeys on a whiteboard. While doing so, ensure you do not limit yourself to input from your existing analytics tools.

It's quite easy to spot the marketers who've done their homework on data. When you visit websites that offer two distinct ways of buying – either through the online store or by speaking to a salesperson – you know they have built a data-driven UX system.

Both transactions are considered online sales as they come from online consumers using the web to research a business, as well as for decision making.

Despite this, there are many more websites where there is still work to be done. Every day I see websites of major brands that I know manage some of the best sales teams in the market, and their website makes it almost impossible for me to talk to them if necessary.

That's not a data-driven UX system. It's UX based on what can be tracked with legacy analytics tools, not on how consumers choose to transact with you. That's a dead end, unless you're happy for your business to stand still.

Carl Holmquist is founder and chief executive of Freespee