It’s nothing new to marketing or brand managers: your two primary objectives are to retain existing customers and to acquire new ones. As online services become more important it is evident that learning and implementing digital marketing tactics increases motivation and maintains an interest in your business. However, focusing on online business can be fatal. Having looked at the complete online to offline customer experience we have identified 5 key mistakes that marketers make:

Offline and Online go hand in hand

While it may be considered far more “efficient” to provide a service for customers purely online, people will often be more inclined to make a purchase after human interaction whether it is over the phone or in person. Because of this it can provide a negative brand image if a service is purely based online. When customers are considering a purchase 54% of people want the reassurance of some human interaction before deciding. Furthermore statistics show that 64% of people get frustrated when they are only able to interact with a company online. Don’t ignore these signs and ensure that customers can move freely between online and offline interaction to guarantee a painless customer journey.

The importance of the phone call

As technology becomes more mobile people will use a wide variety of devices when researching before making a purchase. For example, people may begin researching flights for a holiday on their mobile phone before continuing on their laptops at home. During this process marketers are building up a digital footprint and lots of information on the customer’s preferences. If this information is used effectively it would be possible to deliver a seamless experience for your customer and even bring an end to the horrifying experience of long and ineffective phone conversations with automated menus. With an ease of access between the online and the offline, the phone call becomes a vital aspect of promoting your brand.

Stay connected

It is clear that the customer journey is not only online, therefore, in order to supplement this in a way that ensures a painless and quick experience, we as marketers need to understand every aspect of our businesses that influence the customers experience. While 39% of businesses will say that the responsibility of tracking phone calls belongs to their call centre or customer service team, a shocking 59% will say that they are in no way integrated with these teams at all. As marketers, we have no way of preventing the inevitable fact that sales are happening over the phone. The only way we can respond is to ensure we acquire and retain customers by connecting with other parts of our businesses, especially our call centres and CRM centres.

Wasting data

As has already been established, as marketers we build up data on our customers well via their digital footprint. But how is this data used? To start, it is dubious how much of this data we do use and when we do it is usually focused on driving efficiencies for our online services. We are unable to turn our data into accurate insights to improve the customer experience until a broader set of data is incorporated to help us understand what drives offline activity as well as online activity.

Tracking online activity

For 65% of businesses, the phone call is a vital part of your customers journey. In order to ensure that you, the marketer, understands your customer it is important to understand what drives them to make the phone call and the point at which the call becomes critical. If the customer finds interest in your website through a paid search and then subsequently visits your site through brand terms before using the phone it becomes hard to answer this question: should the attribution be based on the first or last click? The problem of misattribution is clear as last click analysis is typically misleading. However, with a full data set, attribution can be based on first click and every click thereafter whether or not the customer remains online.

 

Bhavesh Vaghela has over 15 years marketing experience and is the CMO of ResponseTap, a call-based marketing automation company that helps businesses deliver a seamless online to offline experience

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