The tracking abilities in the digital realm are now immense. Those who have run email campaigns see a glimpse of the possibilities. We know who opens our emails, when and if they clicked on any of the enclosed links. Handy stuff.

It gets better. As a real-world example, last month I did our first DM and email campaign with personal urls included, to promote an educational workshop in Auckland for digital print and mailing providers. A small list to around 500. The purl tools provided by www.boingnet.com included slick reporting and charting, telling me response rates, when each person visited their own purl landing page etc. But to improve things, I decided to add in my own getclicky.com analytics, which unlike Google, provide me visitor feedback in real time.

With either the boingnet or clicky automated alerts, I could now call up the person minutes after they arrived at their purl page, since I setup filters and special email alerts to my mobile phone. It’s interesting when you phone people at this point. They say, “what a co-incidence. I was just now visiting your website”.

This is obviously very good from a marketing and sales perspective. In sales, good timing and follow-up is everything.

But I’ve always been unsure of what to tell them as to why it happened. Should I tell the truth and say “actually, my system told me you were on my site”. Some people I’ve told are surprised and others annoyed, or both. They’re simply not aware that they can be tracked like this. For us older people, thoughts of Big Brother arise, from George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984.

Back to reality. The other ‘handy’ and very powerful marketing idea I got from this is that I can now use this same visitor data obtained off the purl sites to track these people or companies when they visit my main website too. It’s made easy since most are on broadband these days and have a static IP address, which my clicky analytics allows me to tag with the company and/or visitors name. It’s not a perfect system, but would be correct around 90% of the time. Traditionally to track someone to the individual meant them logging into my website at some stage and picking up a ‘cookie’ or similar. Easier perhaps if you’ve an ecommerce site established.

I suspect most of the high-end ‘digital marketing systems’ available today do all this much better than my cheap package put together in an evening. But regardless of the tools chosen, the bottom line is I now know which of the clients/prospects in my database is visiting my website on a day to day basis, in response to various marketing efforts, be they online or offline. Good warm sales leads for sure.

Now we have the power, how do we use it?

But knowing about all this and the business potential, how do we best promote it as an industry?

Firstly, do software vendors do a proper job of telling marketers and business owners what’s possible and the underlying business benefits? This is powerful stuff and if utilized well, could easily double many a company’s sales and growth potential, quite quickly.

Secondly, do we have any responsibility to tell customers who receive our direct mailers or email communications, then visit our website that they are being tracked this meticulously? We know who they are, what they do on our site, how long spent on each page. Every click is tracked. Remember these are somewhat casual visitors or clients. They’ve not yet logged into our site with the intention of buying stuff.

Yet this tracking technology helps the business out in many ways. For example over time it can tell us which products or areas are of most interest and perhaps give early warnings of items we should or shouldn’t stock. The savings could be huge. Those in the retail or fashion markets especially. We can see which of our web pages have a high bounce rates and may need to be modified either by design or an improved offer.

There’s good science behind all this that can turn things around for many companies large and small. Anyone who has read the works of Bryan Eisenberg will know what we mean. But at what point does good marketing science cross over to an invasion of privacy?

My guess is that until the wider public learns that such things are happening, there won’t be a problem. After all, it’s good for business.

ps. This article to appear in the upcoming issue of www.DIRECTMAG.net.au

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