13 Sep 07 The Key to Business Success is in the Data

Today, I watched on CNBC a show called “The Age of Wal-Mart”. The story focused on the successes of Wal-Mart, what they do to be successfull, what data they track, what they know about their customers and more. The story got me to thinking about how a small business coluld use similar technology to get the same data and grow their businesses.

One of the most obvious success technologies Wal-Mart uses is knowing their customer. Here’s what I mean. When you buy from Wal-Mart. they keep you receipt transaction for two years and analyze that data to see what the trends are for a particular product. You could do the same thing in your business if you use a POS (Point of Sale) System in your business and collected the same data.

As importantly Wal-Mart knows alot about how their marketing works. Now grant you, Wal-Mart has tons of money to track this information and pay people to compile and analyze this data, but with a small change in marketing you could do they same by using automated systems.

For example, when you create any marketing material, insted of driving the customer to the phone or the store, drive the customer to a landing page on your website.  This landing page should be specifically tailored to this product and shoudl allow the customer to enter their contact information so you can continue to market to them.

This use of offline marketing drives traffic to an online system that can be connected to free software that tracks all types of data.  This is truly Wal-Martesque.

BY driving customers form an offline ad to an online collection device (webpage) you can use a free product like Google Analytics to track all types of data about your customers.

For example, you can track where your customer lives by using the geographic tracking in Google Analytics.  You can track what they like about your data, how long the customer spends reading your markeeting material and even if they want more information.

Combine this data with the data from your POS system and you’ve got Wal-Mart success. You can fine tune your marketing message, test pricing, test messages, test shipping or coupons and more. You can track the entire process all they way thru the sale.

This is the secret to Wal-Mart’s success and you should use similar systems to increase your businesses chances for success

Dedicated to your success

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.