ThinkNick

OK, so there might be a better name for this, but …

One of the big challenges for marketers who want to understand and drive integrated marketing activity, is how to join up offline and online response analysis.  Both sets of reports can be detailed and illuminating.  Generally though it’s incredibly difficult to work out where the overlap is.  You know that 4.35% of your mailing responded, and you know who they are.  You know that you had 47.3% more hits on your website in the days after the mailing landed, and you know an awful lot about what they did on your site.  If only you could join the two sets of information …

… then you could really tell the incremental impact of your offline marketing; you could prove the difference it makes to use on- and off-line communications together in the same campaign; you could link directly to the call centre for more meaningful follow-up …

After a bit of thinking and a lot of testing, it turns out that you can do this.  And you can do it without having to spend a lot of money for fancy tracking tools.  In fact, the technology is all out there, open source, free.  All you have to do is use it.  I’m showing this to clients now, and it’s really exciting.

Now all I have to do is think of a clever name for it.

Picture: IBM events

It looks as if someone has managed to create a single platform for analysing both on- and off-line customer activity, and then turning that data into effective media-neutral marketing activity. Huge step forward. It’s no accident, they’ve been working on it for two years. Will be fascinating to see how it develops.

One of the early challenges is going to be how to describe it to a client or prospect. You can’t call it CRM because that’s become meaningless now; it’s a lot more than ‘web analytics’ or ‘modelling’; ‘campaign management’ also sells it short. Here’s a suggestion – Integrated Customer View Marketing (or ICVM).

For a bit more detail, take a look at http://www.talkingnumbersmagellan.com/index.html