Cross-channel Marketing

Mobile marketing works best as a compliment to your existing marketing mix. In today's blog, I'm going to discuss how web site analytics can play an important role in your mobile marketing campaigns.

If you've been in online marketing for a while, then certainly companies like Coremetrics, Omniture, and WebTrends are very familiar to you. (Google also joined the pack with their absorption of Urchin Software back in '05.) One thing that advanced web analytics packages can do is give you information regarding individuals who did something on your web site at some point in time. Interactive marketers have been combining web analytics with email marketing for a while now with great results. It's time now to combine web analytics with mobile marketing to boost your results.

Typical web analytics provides three types of data points for customers identified as email marketing subscribers. There is an action (e.g. Viewed, Carted, Abandoned, Purchased), a product (e.g. Product ABC, Prospectus XYZ, etc.) and a date/time stamp. Savvy interactive marketers use this information to construct highly relevant and highly targeted email remarketing campaigns. For example, you can send out a "reminder" email to your subscribers who have purchased laser printer toner three months ago that it might be time to buy some more soon. Include a personalized offer in that email and you're certain to boost your conversion rate.

The mobile marketing channel is another way to leverage the power of your web analytic data. A lot of mobile marketing initiatives I've seen don't go much further beyond sending alerts and offers to people who have opted in to receive SMS messages. Nevertheless, the same segmentation discipline that you use in your email marketing should be applied to your mobile marketing. Just like with an email campaign, you can create a "reminder" text message that is sent to any subscriber who has recently purchased a renewable commodity. And since it's a text message, schedule it to go out during the daytime when it's more likely that your subscriber is out and about and in a position to actually act upon your call to action.

As of today, web analytic data is compiled in batch mode and isn't available in real-time (please comment below if you know otherwise). But if in the future, it does become available in real-time, please heed my advise and DON'T CREEP OUT YOUR CUSTOMER! What I mean by that is, don't send your customer a real-time text message as soon as you discover that he abandoned his online shopping cart...""Why did you not buy,....Dave...?" Yes, it's still a good idea to send a follow up message to someone who abandoned an online shopping cart - just wait a bit before sending that message.

Any additional ideas on how web analytics can compliment mobile marketing campaigns? I want to hear from you!