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Resources Case Studies Articles About Maxsi Ltd Decisions, decisions, decisions Web Analytics and CRM Asking the Right Questions KPIs for Insurance The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Understanding the Importance of SEO |
Article - Combine Web Analytics With CRM To Calculate The True Value Of A Customer Acquisition By John Harrison, CEO of Maxsi Ltd - Developers of eVisit Analyst Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been around for a long time and provide a useful range of functionality for the hard pressed marketer, including the collection of customer interactions, providing data for analysis, a base for proactive marketing campaigns and - perhaps most important of all - the ability to track customer activity over their lifetime of contact with your organisation. They do have their problems though; most are designed for B2B use, focus on sales and post sales, are designed to work with humans and other systems rather than websites, and can be quite expensive. In comparison to CRM systems, website analysis systems are relatively new kids on the block. They store website visitor interactions, provide data for analysis, and are used to influence website marketing. Most importantly, however, they are used to track visitors from initial acquisition and then quite often for long periods before they become customers, even before they can be fully identified. Website analysis is not without its problems; data is visitor and not customer focussed, information tends to be analysed collectively, and sales and post-sales data is recorded poorly. The biggest problem with website analytics, though, is that they tend to treat multiple visits to the website by a visitor as discrete entities rather than one customer making repeat visits. The significance of this is that only by using the latter can the true return on investment (ROI) of a customer acquisition be determined. To calculate true ROI of a customer, you need to calculate the total cost of acquisition. It is one thing if your customers click your expensive search engine ads to arrive on your website initially, it is another if they only return to you by continuing to click your expensive search engine ads instead of book marking your site. You also need to establish the value of lifetime purchases made by customers on your website - relatively straightforward if your website supports e-commerce. Otherwise, you can allocate notional costs against actions, e.g. an online request for details of a life insurance policy is worth say £2.00. By combining website analytics and CRM you can use web analytics to track the cost of acquisition and CRM the lifetime value. So, how do you go about putting this into action? One way is to build all this into your website. You will need either to develop in-house or integrate proprietary systems and services including e-commerce, CMA, website analytics and a customer database. One can almost see the tears in your Financial Director's eyes forming at the thought of the cost of this. A second method is to upload raw data from a website analysis system into a business intelligence (BI) system (eg SAS, Cognos, Business Objects etc) and combine it with sales data from your e-commerce system. A number of our clients do exactly this, maximising on their existing investment in BI systems and utilising their pool of trained analysts. If your free website analytics supplier doesn't provide a raw data feed there are some suppliers, like us, who provide raw data feeds at no extra cost. Finally, top of the range website analysis products do offer CRM functionality. The even better news is that this functionality is now appearing in middle range website analytics products so it is now more affordable. |
