Marketing is about understanding and reaching the right consumers, not “optimizing channels.” Customers make purchases, not channels. CohereOne understands the confluence of prospecting and developing the right audience. We pioneered advanced audience development over 20 years ago that identifies the likeliest and highest responding prospect to your marketing piece.
It’s important to remember that prospect lists are not made up of homogeneous individuals. There are great names in every segment, there are poor names in every segment. Some lists simply have more while others have less. By understanding transactional and channel behavior combined with various demographics and online intent behavior, we can find potential customer clones and clusters that will respond very well to your catalog and/or mailing efforts.
Nowadays, incorporating online behavior to improve prospecting or open up new avenues of prospecting sources using NaviStone, 4Cite and Path2Response is reaching a new and unique customers. Typically, we found recency of visit was predictive of response to a mailing. That made sense; they had an interest in an item and were browsing the site to finalize their decision. Going deeper, we found more orders came from the shoppers who visited in the first 4 months than came from shoppers who visited in the last 30 days. Maybe they got distracted while shopping and the mailing reminded them of the items they wanted earlier?
We then look at frequency of web visits and found this to be highly predictive of response to a mailing. In fact, a four-time visitor to the site was 10X more likely to make a purchase compared to non-browsers. Whereas, a one-time visitor in the last 30 days was only 2.1X as likely to purchase. A two-time visitor in the last six months was more likely to purchase than a one-time visitor in the last 30 days. A significant portion of these shoppers were mulling over their purchase. Maybe they wanted to make sure they coordinated the drapes with the pillows? Valuable insights. We checked out other measures, like how many times someone used onsite search. It too was very predictive. The response index for performing 2+ site searches over the last six months was again higher than visiting in the last 30 days.
Today, we are leveraging all of these behavioral tells and more to help our clients model their website visitors and maximize the ROI for their marketing programs. By understanding the confluence of these names and applying various scores, we can find the most responsive names. We can interpret and utilize the interaction of prospecting records to make better mail decisions. We will mail the great names repeatedly in multiple mailings and manage the worse scored names effectively or not mail them at all.