As marketers, you know that the cost of acquiring a new customer is not the same as the cost of retaining a loyal customer. So, you plan your communication operations by addressing differently your different predefined profiles: prospect, committed prospect, new customer, loyal customer… But how to define these profiles in the most accurate way? And how do you check if the people behind these profiles behave as you intended?
The most reliable solution is to use data to deduce the key characteristics of each typical profile and to follow the progression of Internet users in the acquisition tunnel.
So what are the steps to follow to adapt your media spend to your customers’ buying behavior?
CENTRALIZE INSIGHTS: FIRST STEP TOWARDS A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF CUSTOMER BUYING BEHAVIOR
How can you analyze the results of the impact of your campaigns on the targeted people, if their different paths are not reconciled? Centralizing information around a single, non-duplicated user, as well as reconstructing their conversion path (from the first exposure to an advertising campaign to the purchase) allows for a better understanding of customers, and an increase in overall ROI in the end.
Brands address the consumer through several communication channels (videos, TV spots, billboards, partnerships or sponsored links), but these channels are often driven in silos. As a result, users who are considered as prospects on one channel may have already been exposed to the message on another channel; these same users are therefore addressed several times by the advertiser, which costs the brand more and risks degrading the customer experience without leading to a conversion. Centralizing the collection of touch points between the consumer and the brand, and reconstructing the customer journey a posteriori is a key element not only to improve the customer experience, but also the performance of marketing campaigns.
Setting up a campaign tracking system will allow you to verify the following elements: did we really reach a prospect? Did they really see the advertising banner that was sent to them? Is the succession of prospecting-retargeting messages respected or are we spending money on inconsistent displays? Because yes, effectively combining prospecting/retargeting messages on several channels requires establishing a capping at the user level, which is only possible when the paths are unified.
KNOWING THE USER’S POSITION IN THE CONVERSION TUNNEL, ACCORDING TO ONLINE OR OFFLINE SALES
ROPO behavior (Research Online – Purchase Offline, and vice versa) is constantly growing [1], with a mix of online experience via smartphone and offline experience directly in the store. Integrating the notion of the physical store is therefore essential for any digital marketer whose brand has at least one physical store. Two lines of thought are then possible:
1- Is there a sensitivity of certain products to ROPO practices (do they sell better online? in store? or in both?)
2- Does the proximity of the points of sale have an influence on the consumer’s behavior towards communication campaigns?
DETERMINING THE BEST POSSIBLE CHANNEL COMBINATIONS THEREFORE ALLOWS YOU TO OPTIMIZE YOUR MEDIA INVESTMENTS.
How to achieve this? Only the notion of “customer” allows to centralize the purchase paths of the two dimensions online/offline, and there is nothing more reliable than a unique identifier of the customer: a loyalty number, an e-mail or phone address (important: which must always be hashed to respect the privacy of the users). There are several ways to incorporate this data into the purchase paths of phygital users, such as scanning a loyalty card, sending a dematerialized receipt, a purchase confirmation by email or recording the phone number along with the purchase confirmation in the call-center.
ISOLATE UNIQUE BUYING PATHS… TO BUILD GENERALIZED PROFILES
Once all touch points, online and offline, are centralized, we can finally understand the buying, re-purchasing and complementary product buying cycle to better juggle acquisition and retention strategies, adapting media investments according to the performance of the different profiles.
Segmentation of user profiles based on their actual actions and reactions with the brand is of great value, especially for estimating the necessary conversion time or quantifying the optimal number of touch points: how many views of promotional videos does it take before the user visits the site to learn about the product on promotion? What is the average time between a newsletter subscription and a purchase? Is it the same for buyers of all products?
To summarize: isolating the singular behaviors of consumers is becoming a necessity in today’s complex buying journey, and even more so, if you want to optimize your marketing spend. When buying paths are unified, the understanding of users’ habits is better: acquisition strategies are optimized, the global ROI is boosted, and the marketer is rewarded!
