Turning Your Brick and Mortar into a Click and Mortar

Abstract

I recently read an article about words and terms that evolved exclusively from the American culture. This piece traced the history of American-born verbiage throughout the 1900s and into the year 2000. Not surprisingly, many of the words that appeared in later years were some of the most pervasive buzzwords and terms of our Web-wild culture: e-business, e-commerce, click-and-mortar, among others. It’s daunting, really; no wonder some retailers are confounded by what faces them as they ponder the move from offline to online. You’ve spent millions of dollars implementing a customer relationship management system to better understand your customers: their wants, their desires, their buying habits. You’ve used it to great success to build excellent offline customer relations. You’re now looking for the next big opportunity, the jump into something beyond what you’re currently doing. The truth is that those that do make the jump can be exposed to a tremendous amount of opportunity and increased revenue. Using the data that your customer relationship management (CRM) solution has collected about offline customers and “multichanneling” it, as it’s called, can lead to big profits. Traditional marketers’ eyes light up when they see forecasts predicting that $199 billion will have been spent by consumers online by 2005 (“Online Influencing Offline: The Multichannel Mandate,” Jupiter Communications, June, 2000). The challenge presented to marketers is how to successfully make the jump to promoting their goods in cyberspace. The thing to remember is that a lot of the same rules apply—but on the Web, you have a lot more options. Be aware that Web and offline marketing share some basic truisms. The ultimate goal is to identify your appropriate audiences and market to them accordingly. Get to know your audiences, present them information that is customized to their needs and interests, and deliver it to them in a non-intrusive manner. The Web makes it exceedingly easy to do this, especially with solutions like online profiling, which this chapter will cover in detail.