Recruiting an IT Consultant

Web Strategy and ROI: Accountability on the Internet

More than ever, companies need to weave the Web into their business strategies, says Andrew Eklund, founder and CEO of Minneapolis-based Ciceron, an Internet marketing strategy and services firm. “We as consumers spend nearly half our time with media on the Internet, which means television, print, radio, direct mail, and those other vehicles get chopped up for the other 50 or 60 percent,” he says. Even so, he adds, companies still routinely earmark less than 10 percent of their marketing dollars for online activity. “It’s a vastly under-funded channel compared to what consumers are actually doing.”

The good news, though, is that those who devote more dollars to developing their virtual presence stand to be rewarded with useful information about their customers. The reason: There’s virtually nothing on a well-designed Web site that can’t be measured down to the last click. Eklund offers the basic example of a four-step online shopping cart or lead-generation process. “If by step three, you see that 60 percent of your customers have left the process, you’re able to look at usability and do testing to find out what it is about that particular page that’s causing people to bail,” he says.

Eklund refers to this kind of information as “actionable customer intelligence.” Unlike print, television, or radio advertising, online marketers are able to track customer behavior with previously unattainable precision. “The customer is screaming at you every single day: what they want, how they want to do business, and what they expect from you. It’s all sitting there in the data,” he says.

Those who devise solutions that account for their customers’ needs, he adds, will better align their marketing and advertising expenses to consumer behavior. “You’re stripping waste out of the process,” he says. “And just in terms of plain dollars and cents, that online marketing channel is most likely going to give you the lowest cost per lead and the lowest cost per transaction.”

Many of Symphony Information’s clients are afflicted with a common ailment: data redundancy. “Over time, they’ve built, say, seven different systems, these silos of data—one for their accounting, one for their manufacturing, one for prospective customers, and one for favorite customers they send birthday cards to,” Capistrant says. “Someone built an Excel spreadsheet for one, another someone keeps on their Outlook contact manager, one is a database built by someone with some tech skills, and the accounting package is an off-the-shelf solution. So you have all these redundant data systems and, when someone calls, the key problem is that the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing.”