Where does the data marketers use come from? Since we're such a digital world, you may think collecting data only happens online, and we'll talk about online data in our next video. But there's plenty of useful customer data that can be found offline too which can help give you a complete picture of who your customers are and how they behave. While the customer journey is shifting more and more online, there's still a significant part of that journey that happens in a physical location, whether it be a store purchase or engaging in a service. In fact, according to Statista, only 14.1% of retail sales in 2019 were made online, which means that 86% of customer purchases are happening in a physical location. Additionally, a report by Google shows that very few people do their purchasing wholly online or wholly offline, but use a mix of both. They either do research online and buy offline, or do research offline and buy online. This is why it's crucial to engage with both offline data and online data to truly understand customer behavior and use those insights to influence your marketing approach. What do we mean when we say offline data? It's simply data you gather about a customer that isn't through an online channel. This could be information collected through a physical contact form, signing up for a loyalty program, filling out a survey, or giving customer feedback. Offline data can also be tracked through point of sale information, when your customers make a purchase. You learn what product they bought, the date, any amount they spent. Point of sales data is often referred to as POS. Offline data can also include call center tracking or focus group participation as well. You can also track in-store visits and behavior through Wi-Fi logins, app usage in the store, and Beacons, which are little devices placed in the store that communicate with smartphones through Bluetooth signals. Let's look at an example of a bookstore. On a Wednesday afternoon, a customer stops by, browses around and comes to the counter with two bestsellers they want to purchase. The bookseller asks if they want to sign up for a frequent buyer card and the customer gives their name and address to the bookseller who enters them into their POS database. They also give their email address to sign up for the newsletter. The customer pays for their books and is on their way. This is the type of transaction that happens all the time. But now, the bookstore has all of this new data to help them better understand who's shopping at their store, not just a name but where their customer lives, their shopping habits, and sometimes age and gender. Offline data is typically rich with demographic information about customers, and it's often information that you may not be able to collect online. Offline data can also show how much each customer purchased, which can help determine their lifetime value, what they purchased, and when. The bookstore can now better understand its customer demographic, which will help with marketing efforts. The bookstore can also understand what times of the week are busiest, which will help them at staffing. It will also help them understand what inventory to keep in stock in order to increase sales. Now, because they have a name and email address attached to the purchase, they can target customers with book recommendations. And since they've collected this information directly from their customer, they can ensure that it's accurate and represents their current customer base. Since it was given directly to them, it mitigates any privacy concerns as well. All of the insights you can gather from this offline data can help you tailor your marketing strategy, better target your customer base, and see the context of your customers journey. But collecting offline data at point of sale isn't the only place where you can obtain it. Businesses can purchase third party data from companies who collect offline insights. This could include demographic information, purchasing behavior, and even information on offline media consumption that can help businesses gain further insights into their customers' behaviors. You've probably heard of the Nielsen TV ratings or heard of someone who has a Nielsen box. Nielsen is a company that monitors media consumption across a variety of devices, including TVs and smartphones. Comscore is a similar company that also tracks media consumption across devices. This is another type of offline behavior. Businesses can then purchase their data to better understand customer behavior around media engagement, including when they watch and what they watch. The better you can understand your customer, the better you can target them with advertising for your product or service. There are many other third party data sets you can buy. There are data from supermarket loyalty cards and credit card transactions, for instance, that provide information on the purchases of different products and brands. There are industry specific data like data for the pharmaceutical sector or data on car sales, etcetera. While most brands have access to their own sales data, these third party datasets help them with competitive analysis as they give them some insights into the sales for other brands as well. Now that we've gone over offline data, in our next video, we'll talk about online data, how to collect it and what insights you can get from it.
