An online marketer and an offline marketer walk into a bar. Tired of always drinking the same old beer that they do, today, they intend to try something new that they'll actually like. The objective
is to maximize their enjoyment rate.
How do you think the online marketer will go about that vs. the offline marketer?
Well, the offline marketer does what she always does. She
goes to all the tables in the bar. She makes notes of who is drinking, what they're drinking and what their demographics are. She rates the happiness levels of each drinker. While at it, she surveys
the patrons on how they would rank their drinks and how many they have had.
Then the offline marketer groups that data into buckets by demographics groups. She figures out which bucket she falls
into herself. She rank-orders the 15 drinks consumed by the people in that bucket vs. their apparent happiness. She orders the top 5 drinks and has a sip of each.
Before too long, she decides
that her new preferred potable is a Hefeweizen. Sated, she heads back to her friend, the online marketer, to see what she came up with. She finds the online marketer flat out under a table, totally
wasted, with a big grin on her face, and her empty wallet flung into a corner.
What happened?
Says the online marketer: Mmmvvtt.
Offline marketer: Huh?
Online marketer: Mmmmvvt.
Offline marketer: What?
Online marketer: Darn you, I tried multivariate testing. And now I am very happy.
The moral of that story was not to insult friends of multivariate testing, but rather
to highlight that online and offline marketers each have developed sophisticated methods over time.
But they have not shared these methods with each other.
Well, it's high time for the
sharing to begin now!
The online marketer has loads of data. The offline marketer may have a few better analytical approaches.
One of these useful approaches that online marketers could adopt
is Customer Decisioning. Let me explain.
When marketers from online vs. offline worlds come together, the offline guys are always surprised that some steps are missing in the typical online
marketer's approach. Namely, online we spend a lot of time analyzing how to improve Web pages, keyword portfolios, advertisements. But most of us rarely analyze the database of existing customers for
deciding what marketing promotion we want to extend to each customer and when. Rather, we often enroll customers in our "news" letters and blast out an email of the products that are currently
"hot."
The better online marketers have gone as far as segmenting their lists of email recipients into buckets based on their click-throughs on hyperlinks in previous emails. Very rarely,
however, do we meet an online marketer who has gone as far as targeting future emails based on past Web pages browsed, or search keywords used.
In offline marketing that kind of neglect wouldn't
fly. The cost of sending untargeted mailings to too many recipients would cause the marketer to lose money. The costs would be too high to break even. But email is free. So email marketers have not
felt as much pressure for being targeted.
"So what if half the emails that we send are wasted? They hardly cost anything!"
Ah not so!
Untargeted email is not free. It causes recipients
to cringe and press the Spam button. In Seth Godin's words, you lose the permission to market, and that is very expensive to restore.
Thus, the role of customer decisioning is to predict for each
customer what marketing offer they are most likely to find relevant. Customer decisioning is done by savvy analytics staff using suitable analytics technology. The analytics can range from basic
reporting to sophisticated predictive modeling.
But the offline marketers are data-poor. They have never seen the kind of data riches that Web analytics provides.
So we raise our cups today
to online and offline marketers who collaborate. The online marketer brings the data, and the offline marketer some new old ideas. When done right, spam will be reduced as a result.