Intelligent data use as the key to the customer's heart

Data is the key to successfully addressing customers. Of course, traditional print products still have their appeal. A newspaper, a glossy magazine, a practical service brochure. It's nice to hold them in your hand and smell the paper. And their advertising impact is also much better than many digital prophets would like to admit. Nevertheless, one major advantage of the digital marketing world is that every single click on advertising materials and websites, as well as every swipe movement in smartphones and tablets, can be recorded. The big question is how advertisers can make the most efficient use of the ability to monitor the Internet behavior of their potential target groups.Data as the basis for personalized targetingA growing number of software specialists, who are vying for partnership agreements with large companies by developing and programming ever new online marketing tools, find it easy to answer this question. "The more you know about your target audience, the better you can market your product. Data is the basis for personalized targeting," says Alexander Krull of Webtrekk, for example. The IT company sees itself as a customer intelligence platform that enables customers to link their user and marketing data across all devices, analyze it and use it for campaigns. "We help our customers increase their profits with DataDriven Marketing," says Alexander Krull. Click rate of AXA newsletter increased by 60 percentWebtrekk has developed a high-end customer analytics solution that enables cross-device and cross-channel tracking and thus user-centric targeting. In this way, the behavior of a user who uses and combines various end devices can be recorded across different devices and channels. Webtrekk customer AXA Health Keeper uses this targeting in the area of email marketing, for example. "For example, AXA Health Keeper identified users who went to running-related websites and created a so-called running segment for these users. Once AXA had this segmented data on users with an affinity for running, the segment was passed to the email tool to send newsletters tailored to those individuals with an interest in running tips, running products, running events, etc.," Krull explains. The result was a 60 percent increase in newsletter click-through rates compared to campaigns without such targeting.Campaigns that ideally match customer goalsThere are plenty of very similar examples. Tradedoubler Switzerland, for example, launched "TD ENGAGE" in 2016, a new product that develops customized and, according to its own statements, highly effective performance campaigns. Tradedoubler uses the technology to gain insights into customer behavior during the customer journey. The company then uses the resulting data-based insights to create individualized programmatic campaigns that are ideally suited to customer goals.Analysis of data as a challenge for marketers"Analyzing data is a key challenge for digital marketers. We focus on understanding users' buying behavior. Using first-party data, we can perform targeting based on demographic data, contextual information and behavioral insights," explains Patrick Ammann, Country Manager of Tradedoubler Switzerland. "Partnerships with third-party data providers enable us to integrate additional data sets to increase the reach of programmatic campaigns," adds Tradedoubler's Olaf Bertschinger. The results already achieved with "TD ENGAGE" are impressive. In recent tests, Tradedoubler Switzerland achieved a video completion rate of 90 percent and a 60 percent increase in sales conversion for a client in the travel sector. The importance of web analytics is growing rapidly As a lecturer and course leader at the Institute for Communication and Marketing at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), Darius Zumstein is intensively involved in online marketing and web analytics. The co-author of the brochure "Web Analytics - An Overview" attaches great importance to data analysis for the purpose of increasingly efficient online marketing. "Due to technological change and economic development, the factors of data and information are constantly gaining in importance over the factor of production."Steadily increasing the number of positions for web analyticsThis development can also be substantiated with figures from surveys that Zumstein and his research team have repeatedly conducted in recent years among 740 companies, primarily SMEs. As recently as 2011, 79 percent of the companies surveyed financed fewer than 30 full-time positions for web analytics. Five years later, this rate was only 37 percent. By contrast, the number of "web analysts" or "digital analysts" working full time doubled during this time period. And while in 2011 only one in twenty companies had its own "analytics team," by 2016 that figure had risen to 32 percent. Darius Zumstein: "Practically all major corporations and many e-commerce companies such as Amazon, Zalando, Digitec, Galaxus, Brack and Le Shop now have multi-person analytics teams, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago.Presentation on the topic of "Data-driven MarketingAt the upcoming Swiss Online Marketing & Swiss eBusiness Expo (SOM), Darius Zumstein will give a presentation entitled "Data-driven marketing: Measuring and controlling digital success with data", in which he will explain, among other things, the very latest figures and developments in the strong growth of digital business in Switzerland (see box). The recording and analysis of clicks and swipes in apps thanks to digital analytics are naturally part of this.