ChoiceStream

Pre-shopping online before buying in-store is a common consumer behavior that has grown rapidly over the last few years. According to BIG Research, 89% of consumers are doing this on a regular basis. It's also true that consumers who pre-shop online and buy in-store spend more overall than their counterparts who only shop online or in-store, but not both. Recognizing this, many multi-channel retailers are using the Internet to drive true sales performance. In this new ROBO (research online, buy offline) reality, the retailer's online advertising initiatives and web site activity plays a very important role in influencing the eventual in-store purchase.

Unfortunately, though, the ability to measure the impact of ROBO on revenue has not caught up with consumers' use of this practice. The success of this interplay cannot be measured solely by click-through rates, online conversion rates or online average order size. And because there isn't an established way for retailers to quantify the impact of ROBO behavior, retailers' marketing budgets are often allocated inefficiently, where too much is allocated to programs that don't produce results and not enough to programs that actually work. Once accurate ROBO measurement tools evolve and the marketing mix is optimized for overall company performance, we are going to see even bigger spending differences between the multi-channel and single channel customer.

With a better understanding of multi-channel attribution, there is a new opportunity for retailers to drive growth for their overall business through the use of personalization technology. With retailer's looking more holistically at their online activities, personalization technology has a big role across many consumer touch points and purchase channels, both online and in-store. When a large traditional retailer is able to use all kinds of aggregated consumer data (online, in-store, 3rd party) to provide their consumers personalized product recommendations in email, banner ads, catalogs and direct mail, on the web site and in the store at the point of sale, that retailer has a true 360 degree relationship with their consumers.

This kind of marketing is happening now. The faster the measurement capabilities catch up with the practices, the more productive those marketing programs will be.