From Clicks to Bricks in Testing, Tracking, and Marketing

Often people ask how they can apply online testing and tracking principles to a business environment where the customers are split between a bricks and mortar shop and an online presence (be it eBay, or a proprietary web site and shopping cart solution.) The online part is something covered here in great detail, but the principles also apply to offline sales.

In other words, it is as important to track and test in the bricks and mortar world as it is in the clicks and bricks environment. Luckily, while the parameters might change, the general rules remain the same:

• track everything under unique identifiers (mailing list, flyer drop, passing trade, advertising, etc.)
• keep up to date records
• note change, and the effects of change

What is vital, and worth stressing, is that in the offline world, retailers can only measure what is explicitly tracked. Anything that isn’t tracked, can’t later be backtracked in the same way that it can often be on the Internet.

In other words, there’s no big activity log on a computer somewhere, with armfuls of statistics. Any statistic that needs to be kept, has to be manually tallied, tracked, and processed in order to be able to draw any conclusions.

For example : how does a retailer find out whether, for their business, a money off voucher is more powerful than buy-one-get-one-free offers?

They need to be in a position to identify the source of every prospect and customer, ensure that the target market is roughly equivalent, and that the delivery medium (i.e. advert, mail-shot, flyer, etc.) is also equivalent.

To make this easy to implement, it might be a good idea to devise a coding standard that identifies each offer in a way that is both easy to track and easy to identify (and, if telephone order are expected, easy to say and record!) Example coding could be :

• PP AA NNN

The above might be deployed as PP (product ID), AA (advertising medium), NNN (numerical ID), and result in identifiers such as:

• BR MA 001 (Bread, Magazine Advert, first iteration)
• BR NA 001 (Bread, News Advert, first iteration)
• etc.

Businesses might need more, or less, complex identifiers following their product range, advertising avenues, and so on. It can be expanded, but this entails making sure that the old and new schemes remain compatible.

A final thought – always make sure that voucher based offers require that the voucher itself is handed in, that way additional tracking (different voucher colors by location, for example) can be built into the scheme. For those who are true ‘clicks and bricks’ operations : put vouchers in the delivery package, marketing and tracking rolled into one!