Online to Offline - A Small Lesson

We online marketers track everything. When sending emails we track how many were delivered, how many were opened and then what got clicked on in the actual copy. We even follow that click to it's destination and then determine what happened from there. Did you stay on the site? Did she look at more pages? What else did he click on. And on and on.

Most email advertisements are designed to offer a consumer a special offer of some kind and entice them to buy right there online. The email may advertise a discount on a product, a two for one or something similar. The links in that email will usually take the consumer to a special page (we call it a "landing page") where they can read the details of the offer and from there make a purchase. If that purchase does not take place the consumer is usually put back into rotation to receive a followup email enticing them to reconsider taking advantage of the offer.

Measuring the effectiveness of this campaign is easy if the product can only be purchased online. But what about products that can be purchased online or offline, at a third party retailer let's say? Like a book, for example. This is the most difficult task in online marketing, determining what the user did offline after receiving that email or visiting a site.

Case in point. I subscribe to free email delivered reports on geo-political intelligence from Stratfor. If you are a newshound like me you will find this service quite indispensable to understanding the realities behind world events. Obviously, this service is offered to entice me into purchasing a full subscription. If the insights provided were critical to my business I would sign up in a heartbeat, as the cost is quite reasonable. But for my needs, the free service is great and I pay it back by talking it up in places like my blog.

But is Stratfor making any real money off of me? They do send me emails form time to time promoting owner George Friedman's books like The Next Hundred Years and The Next Decade. The offers come in attractive packages of a free copy of one or the other plus some reports, if I sign up for a year and so on. I haven't taken advantage of these offers for reasons already stated. However, unless Borders or Amazon is sharing my name, Stratfor is actually unaware that I have been effectively monetized to the point that I have purchased George Friedman's The Next One Hundred Years at Borders and just recently The Next Decade at Amazon for my Kindle.

This is an example of how online marketing drives offline purchases. But, unless the retailers are sharing my name, Stratfor has no idea that I own these books and thus no way of knowing if their email marketing is working.

Online to offline tracking is always somewhat of a puzzle. But, there are simple methods like offering coupons and even simply asking customers about their purchases. In Stratfor's case, determining whether or not customers have purchased books at offline retail sites may not be vital to their marketing intelligence. But, if it is and they just haven't gotten around to tracking yet, then I am a lesson to them and others. I may not respond to your direct online offers - but I am buying.

Purchase George Friedman's Books at Amazon.com (I am an Amazon Affiliate so I make a couple bucks on each purchase - just disclosin')

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century


The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . and Where We're Going