Making the most of your online assets – being smart with data

As the digital revolution unfolds, first impressions of a business or brand are increasingly happening online. As such it’s important your website is working hard for you and potential prospects aren’t slipping through the net.

Having an effective SEO strategy in place will bring more potential customers to your site.

But many websites that rely on online sales find visitors browsing the site can easily become distracted and not complete their purchases.

So it’s not enough just to lead people to your site, you must actively engage them to ensure your business is really performing at its best.

In addition to engaging content and high functionality, you need to ensure you’re capturing the right data efficiently, so you can develop intelligent communications with customers and prospects and deliver relevant propositions accordingly.

At the point of purchase you can record basic contact information including a home address (if an individual). This unlocks a vast array of information about individuals’ through publicly available lifestyle and geo-demographic databases that will provide more insight for marketing.

If they are not ready to buy, think about at what stage of your visitor journey through your website could other data collection happen? Will potential clients be happy to sign up to a newsletter and receive regular contact from you?

Once you’ve made the decisions about what, how and when the data is collected, you must decide how to manage and use the information to greatest effect.

This can start with relatively simple segmentation of your database such as dividing up men and women, age, or lifestyle group, so you can send out specific offers they should be more interested in.

Personalisation, targeting and relevance are key in enabling you to get closer than ever to your target market, and this is only possible with a well managed database and relevant, tailored marketing communications.

Furthermore, ensuring your data is working hard for you will result in less wastage, higher response rates and an overall improvement on ROI from the marketing spend.

Simon is the founder and CEO of Information Arts one of the UK's leading business-to-business marketing consultancies set up in 2000. Simon has over 17 years experience within the industry and is widely regarded as a leading expert in businesses marketing to other businesses. http://www.information-arts.com/