Thanks to an unprecedented rise in multichannel customer journeys, it’s more important than ever that brands understand the impact their online marketing efforts have on their offline sales (and vice versa).

For some marketers, being unable to measure this effectively is a source of frustration – they know that there is a relationship between their online activity and in-store sales, but they can’t analyse, quantify and increase it. The danger is activity that is influencing conversions and pushing consumers down the sales funnel might be stopped, as its ROI simply isn’t being tracked, resulting in a dip in sales.

Making the connection

However, it’s not all doom and gloom! There are ways that brands can join their online and offline marketing activity and sales. The first step is to capture data to bridge the gap between user activity on your website or digital platforms, with sales made in store. This can be achieved in a number of ways:

1. Email address

Been asked recently in-store if you are happy for your receipt to be emailed to you after a purchase? As well as increasing their email database, the brand is probably trying to match up your offline purchase to the email address that you may well have used to sign into their website to browse a few days before. Clever, eh?

2. Online discount codes

Discount codes or vouchers that are promoted exclusively online but redeemable in-store provide another opportunity to match those visiting your digital spaces with conversions offline.

3. Postcode

Another piece of information that can be collected for the purposes of joining online and offline activity is your postcode. Often requested for delivery, brands can match this up to a store locator function online, for example, and see the correlation between site users and in-store purchases.

This online/offline insight will not only help you build a clearer picture of the extent to which your online marketing and offline sales are influenced by one another, but it also gives you some valuable information about the typical customer journeys that your consumers take to purchase with you.

For instance, perhaps you’ve noticed that your emails don’t seem to see many online conversions after their send, but then thanks to capturing addresses in store, you can see that your customers are being driven to purchase offline a couple of days after they receive them.

As a brand, once you can see the links, you can not only justify continued marketing spend on these channels or campaigns, but you can also take steps to maximize conversions. For example, if you can see that many users will browse online for a discount code, which they then redeem in your store, you can put more budget and marketing effort into this digital channel, despite the fact that you don’t see online sales from it.

This more accurate way of measuring your marketing activity will give you the confidence to make future budget decisions based on data and facts, rather than guess work.