As a marketer, you have data housed in many data silos – in different locations and in multiple formats. From campaign performance data and site analytics through to CRM and email data, you capture a huge volume of insights into customers and prospects.
But how much of that data is really actionable? And how do the different data sources you have work together to provide a holistic view of your target audience? With Lotame’s data management platform (DMP), you can capture, organize, and make all of this separate data instantly actionable to underpin your marketing programs. By combining your data from any source in one overall platform such as Lotame, you are given a holistic view of your consumer across screens and platforms.
The combination of online and offline data will help you gain a holistic view of your target audience and its behavior. To obtain a competitive edge, you need to look beyond last click wins. It’s crucial to get a comprehensive overview of your audience’s complete journey, including both online channels such as website visits and online purchases, and offline channels such as in-store transactions and customer service cases. When you have an overview, you can evaluate all your marketing efforts across all channels to determine their value and ROI.
Let’s say you’re a hardware retailer and you want to get a full understanding of one of your target audiences — male homeowners with an income of $75,000 a year who perform DIY projects to save costs on home maintenance and improvement. Using a traditional approach, you’d just look at where a lead comes from. If a lead originated on an ad and purchased a drill on your website, you’d look only at the ad and where it was located.
Using the new approach, you’d combine both online and offline data to obtain much more information about the lead without any personally identifiable information (PII) attached. In our example, you’d collect the data points regarding the following:
Our example includes just a few of the types of data you can collect to paint an accurate picture of any target. As long as you know how to access and combine both online and offline data points, you have dozens of options.
Online data is data that’s generated as a result of online platforms and campaigns, as well as e-communications. It includes website clickstream data as well as data from marketing campaigns, social media platforms, emails and chats.
Lotame enables you to collect multiple behavioral and demographic data points from across your sites, apps, ads and landing pages. By capturing the ways in which consumers are interacting across these different digital touch points, you can build a detailed picture of them: What content they are consuming, on what device, and what specific actions they’re taking. These data points combine to provide rich insights, which can then be used to optimize content development, ad targeting and creative messaging.
When accurately and appropriately collected, you can use your online data to see which online campaigns were successful and to what extent by matching data points to online transactions. Moreover, as long as your data is collected anonymously in order to remain compliant with privacy rules, you can combine it with offline data to see which online journeys also led to offline sales.
For example, let’s say you’re running an online marketing campaign for a new line of ceramic cookware. You can use all of your online data to track your customers’ journey to the appropriate landing page on your website from online ads, blogs and social media posts. What’s more, you’ll get information on how they’re accessing that information. Are they using smartphones, tablets, laptops or desktop computers? Finally, you’ll be able to see whether their journey inspired them to purchase online or in-store — or whether they dropped out of the sales funnel for some reason.
Having this type of information at your fingertips allows you to optimize your campaigns. You won’t target in-store promotions to people who never shop at your location offline, just as you won’t offer online-only sales to people who prefer to shop in person. Optimizing your campaigns means spending your advertising budget in a way that leads to more leads, conversions and increased overall profits.
Our rules-based data collection goes far beyond metatags and URLs. Read more about Lotame’s thorough data collection process here to see how we can collect dozens of data points on each page of your website.
Offline data collections consist of information from offline sources and include contact information, loyalty card data, purchases, customer care cases, subscriptions and even demographic data. In most cases, it’s stored in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. It’s important to note that this data is usually personally identifiable.
One of the key benefits of Lotame’s platform is the ability to not only capture data from your sites, apps and ads, but to also combine these insights with other offline data points you may have. This could be data housed in your CRM system, transaction level data, insights within your marketing automation platform, or site analytics data.
Lotame’s onboarding services means we can match these data points to cookies and mobile device IDs inside the platform for an additional cross-platform view of your audience. This data onboarding process captures valuable demographic and behavioral data points, but without any PII attached, which helps ensure that privacy standards are upheld.
Combining online and offline data in one central platform provides you with a complete 360 degree view of your customers and prospects. These insights will underpin audience targeting, enable you to deliver more personalized marketing campaigns, and maximize the ROI you generate from your marketing budget.
What is CRM Onboarding?
When you want to bring your offline data online, you can simply onboard your CRM with Lotame’s CRM Onboarding solution. In between five to seven days, all of your offline data will be uploaded to your Lotame account. The process includes CRM files, subscription lists, in-store purchases, registrations and other offline data points. All of this data is uploaded without personally identifiable information so you can retain the privacy of your customers.
Once all the information is onboarded, it’s combined with your online data in your Lotame account so you have a full profile of your target audiences. With all of your on- and offline data in one place and not broken down into silos, you finally have the comprehensive overview you need to gain valuable marketing insights. In turn, these insights can be used to create highly effective advertising campaigns.
Contact us to find out more about how we can help you maximize your audience data.