On and off marketing–Online and offline, that is

I realized that I never posted my slides from last week’s Dallas Inbound Marketing Summit. I’d only tweeted them to my Twitter followers. So, today, I am posting a longer version of those slides, called Internet Marketing by the Numbers, but I also want to tell you something about those slides. They make my phone ring a lot, with so many companies struggling to measure their marketing in terms of sales, all because they sell offline.

You see, e-Commerce marketers seemingly have it easy, because the same Web metrics programs, such as Google Analytics, that count visitors and page views can also count actual online sales. So, every move the marketer makes can be tracked and judged on its success and failure. You do more of what works and less of what doesn’t, and suddenly you have a very successful business.
Online marketers that sell offline envy that kind of clarity. They live in a world where they attract more visitors to the site, they show them some information, and then those visitors vanish. We hope that they pop up offline with a phone call or a store visit, or some other way to restart the sales cycle, but often we can’t tell which Web visitors did so and which ones just dropped out.
Our mistake is to treat this situation as though its uncorrectable. It’s not. As I show in the slides, direct marketers pride themselves on the many ways that they connect their marketing activities to sales. The venerable, “Call 800-555-1212 and ask for Alice” is one version of this technique, where “Alice” is a code name for the particular issue of the magazine the ad ran in. By coding each piece of marketing, you can measure which ones worked better than others.
So, how can you tie customers offline activity back to their online activity? Let them press a button to send an e-mail. Let them print a coupon to turn in at the store. It doesn’t matter what the technique is, as long as both your customers and your offline sales folks are willing to do it.
And that’s why my phone keeps ringing, with company after company calling to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of their online marketing activities to offline sales. It’s exciting to see so many marketers taking the leap to measurable outcomes. Once they do, they can start experimenting just like those e-Commerce companies–doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.