Online behavior activity

E-mail has invaded every aspect of our lives. We don't need a survey to tell us as much, but new research from Xobni and Harris Interactive confirms that we're not alone in dealing with e-mail overload.

Online behavior activity

How customers behave is very important. “Knowing who your customers are is great, but knowing how they behave is even better.” John Miller

McKinsey wrote in The Coming Era of On-Demand Marketing, “Online behavioral models built with web traffic, search behavior, lifestyle data, and demographics are particularly effective at identifying prospects not found with traditional demographic prospecting models.”

Forrester Research in 2008 reported that targeting emails based on Web click-stream data increased open rates by more than 50%, and increased conversion rates by more than 350%.

Forrester Research 2008

Conversion rate: the number of ‘take-ups’ resulting from the email activity. For instance the number of completed transactions.

According to Forrester, only 45% of marketers are currently capturing and consolidating customer behavioral data from multiple channels into a single database. Data come from many sources, and customer-facing systems don’t always talk to each other. Social data, for example, are sometimes connected; sometimes not. Website data are almost never connected to transactional data.

A Smart Database with Smart Lists

That’s why modern, engaging email marketing needs to be powered with a behavior-smart database at the core. This database serves as the system of record for all prospect and customer interactions within marketing, sales, and transactional systems. The result: a single place from which marketers can build highly targeted campaigns tied to trackable information about each individual contact.

With a smart database, marketers can easily target their subscribers using demographic AND behavioral filters and triggers, such as:

• Demographic: name, location, age, registration source, household, preferences, score, custom fields, etc.
• Email history: sent, opened, clicked, bounced, unsubscribed, etc.
• Social: shared content, referral, poll answer, etc.
• Website: visit, clicked link, completed form, referral source, search query, etc.
• Campaign history: campaign membership, campaign response, campaign success, etc

This type of email marketing system makes marketing self-reliant, so that marketers can easily create and manage sophisticated behavioral-targeted campaigns.