Mikel Chertudi, senior director, online marketing and demand generation at Omniture, shares three reasons to integrate Web analytics with CRM.
Improve marketing investment
Marketers should deploy a multi-campaign touch/source methodology and analysis, which allows them to define multiple ROI campaign views from which to make marketing investment decisions. I recommend at least three different campaign views that are most important and influential to every closed deal. Equally important, marketers should properly append multiple classifications (metadata) at the tracking code or campaign level, so as to slice and dice the data by these classifications, such with unlimited flexibility in viewing campaign results, including costs, sales, closed deals, lead quantities, ROI and more. Marketers can compare these metrics at multiple levels of campaign metadata hierarchies.
Measure marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline
Marketers should uniquely track different aspects of a campaign. For example, a campaign that drives visitors to the Web site should not be overridden by an on-site promotion of a white paper or product launch, thus losing visibility of which tactic drove them to the Web site. Set up tracking where the multiple attributes of a campaign can be measured to avoid overriding each other. With the [proper] closed loop marketing infrastructure, marketers can prioritize their efforts and dollars, as well as more accurately assess their contribution to the sales pipeline. As opposed to implementing a very expensive and time-consuming data mart and cumbersome reporting interface, I’ve chosen to simplify this, and use my flexible Web analytics solution by integrating it with my SFA/CRM application.
Enable sales intelligence for improved selling context
By integrating the Web analytics solution with a SFA/CRM environment, sales individuals can be provided with one important item – relevance. By understanding the account or a contact’s Web site browsing interests – at a product or service level, such as keywords, product tours, white papers or the time spent in each area of the site and other pertinent visitor patterns – a sales professional can provide much more meaningful context to the sales process. Usually more sales information translates into more deals closing quickly.
