How should I use customer data?

My travel agency has done some search engine optimisation (SEO) work on getting traffic to our site, but I’m concerned that we’re not doing enough to capture the details of the resulting visitors and follow this up with intelligent marketing. How do I go about combining a smart data strategy with marketing that won’t alienate existing or potential customers? I’d also appreciate advice on list maintenance and making the best use of our database on an ongoing basis.

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A. Simon Lawrence writes:

It’s great that you’ve improved your SEO strategy, as this will bring more potential customers to your website. Ecommerce websites often find that visitors browsing the site can become distracted and not complete their purchases. It’s not enough to just lead people to your site, you must actively engage them.

The first step is to decide what data you need to collect in order to develop some intelligent communications with customers and prospects, and what information is merely nice to have. Need-to-have information will include contact data as a minimum, but also information that allows you to understand your customers in a little more detail.

At the point of purchase or engagement, you can record basic contact information, including a home address (if it’s an individual). The postcode is critical as it effectively unlocks a vast array of information about your customers from the lifestyle and geo-demographic data that is publicly available to reference.

If they’re not ready to buy, think about what would be the best stage of your visitor’s journey through your website to collect data. Will potential clients be happy to sign up to a newsletter and receive regular contact from you? You should also think about when you need to have the details – and aim to collect deeper information over a period of time. This allows you to demonstrate to the recipient that you are using the initial details in a responsible manner – and it will build trust, so they’ll provide you with more information when you ask for it.

Unlike a shop, where agents can make quick judgements about their visitors based on their appearance or manner, your online visitors are relatively anonymous. Ideally, you want to find out quickly what they’re looking for, namely information on business trips or holidays.

Once you’ve made the decisions about what, how and when the data is collected, you must decide how to manage and use the information to greatest effect. This can start with relatively simple segmentation of your database, such as dividing up men and women, so you can send out specific offers they might be more interested in.

Observed data collected from website visits and order activity can help to create richer segments over time, and then used to inform and refine your marketing communications and propositions database. There are a whole host of tools that can help you to do this. Personalisation, targeting and relevance are what enable a businesses to get closer than ever before to their potential clients.

Tying marketing and data together well has a huge number of benefits. Customers are more receptive to your marketing, it should cost your business less, response rates will be higher and you will see an improvement on your return on investment for your marketing spend.