How Marketers Can Integrate Offline and Online Data to Maximize Omnichannel Marketing ROI

Today’s brands need the ability to bring real-world insights into the digital space in order to communicate more effectively with their current and future customers, while balancing privacy, precision, and performance. That’s why data onboarding—the integration of offline data with online insights—is so important when it comes to maximizing marketing ROI in an omnichannel world.  

The Offline Data Marketers Need to Unlock 

While many of today’s consumers make their purchase decisions online, many interactions still occur in offline environments. Retail customers still visit stores, browse shelves, and make purchases based on immediately available information. That said, even businesses that operate primarily online can generate offline data. This data often sits in silos, which makes it difficult to see the full picture of a brand’s customers and prospects. Likewise, digital companies might store customer information in a customer relationship management system, where it is not immediately available online or connected to any other data sources. 

Other examples of disparate or disconnected offline data sources include: 

• Purchase data 

• Loyalty card information 

• Survey data 

• Research data 

Offline data represents extremely valuable information that marketers can use to build more robust audience profiles for digital campaigns. This offline data, combined with online data, can reveal more detailed information about customer preferences. As industries face disruption and fierce competition, brands must be able to get a clear picture of how people navigate their complete customer journeys, and offline data can fill in the blanks when determining how best to appeal to customers. 

The Benefits of Integrating Offline and Online Data 

Customers don’t wholly exist in digital realms. Brands that only leverage online data are missing out on a significant portion of the buyer journey as well as the potential to reach new customers. The integration of offline and online data provides a more complete version of the story, enabling marketers to craft campaigns that appeal to new target audiences or territories and maximize opportunities for converting potential customers. 

By creating robust audience profiles based on both online and offline data, brands can bolster their marketing efforts and achieve essential business objectives. These activities include: 

• Campaign optimization: Audience profiles represent a central pillar of modern marketing campaigns. Integrated offline and online data can support the creation of accurate audience profiles that enable marketers to optimize campaigns across video, display, social, and mobile platforms. 

• Finding new customers: By using a company’s own online data, marketers are only able to address their existing customers. By combining online and offline data and matching these profiles to other available third-party audience data segments, marketers can find totally new customers in existing markets or new target regions. 

• Omnichannel optimization: Today’s customers expect and demand consistency across communication channels. With data integration, a truly omnichannel experience is no longer a pipedream. Marketers can track interactions and align messaging across devices. 

• Personalization: One-size-fits-all marketing campaigns are a thing of the past. Even across traditional media channels, modern customers want tailored experiences. Data integration supports cohesive messaging and experiences as customers interact with brands. 

• Monetization: Making offline data available as qualified audience profiles within leading global buying platforms represents a key strategy for monetizing offline data. Brands looking for new revenue opportunities can benefit from bringing their offline data into an online environment. 

Getting Started with Offline-Online Data Integration 

Once an organization has uncovered its sources of offline data and defined its marketing goals, it can work with a data onboarding partner to integrate this information with robust online profiles. An effective onboarding partner will implement a mapping methodology to match offline attributes with privacy-compliant online profiles to create audience cohorts. This will help the organization to identify net-new customers.  

This important work enables brands to better understand both their current and future customers. For example, brands can leverage data integration to identify customer segments that exhibit online and offline behaviors similar to their existing customer base. This methodology empowers brands to maximize their marketing efforts and appeal to potential customers who are most likely to convert. 

Ultimately, the integration of offline and online data empowers brands to develop more personalized customer experiences. To learn more about how to maximize your marketing efforts, get in touch with the data onboarding experts at Eyeota today. 

Contact our team at datadesk@eyeota.com for more information about Dun & Bradstreet and Eyeota audience solutions.