Predictive Marketing

Appendix

Overview of Customer Data Types

Purchases and Transactions

You can track online purchases by a tag you install on your website or directly from your order management system, which could be your e-commerce platform. You can track in-store purchases from your point of sale (POS) application or an order management system. Often, store purchases are collected by a different system than online or phone purchases. It is extremely important to be able to tie all purchases back to the same person. For example, if you send abandoned cart reminders without reconciling online and phone purchases, people who abandoned a cart online, but completed the purchase over the phone, may receive a discount coupon for checking out their abandoned cart. These customers are going to be upset and complain: “You mean that if I had waited, I could have received a discount for my item?”

Web and Online Behavior

If you are a business marketer, web browsing behavior and email interaction may be even more important than purchases. These two behavioral data points give you a good idea of the future intent of a prospect or customer. Purchases alone would not give you enough information in business, given that there are typically much fewer purchases than in consumer marketing. On the flipside, the decision cycle in business marketing is much longer so there are more of these prepurchase data points. In fact, predicting who will purchase in business marketing is so lucrative, that a cottage industry ...