March 02, 2001
Article

Online and Offline Sales Data Integration is Number One Internet Marketing Challenge

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Steve Jones, VP Marketing Norm Thompson Outfitters, seemed to sum
up the feelings of most attendees at this week's DMA
Net.marketing conference when he said the 50 year old cataloger
and retailer's main challenge is not so much figuring out how to
do Internet marketing, as much as it is how to report on the
results. Jones said, "Integrating offline and online data is one
of the focal issues for us. If our Spring catalog orders are
down, but Web sales are up, should we cut back on the catalog?
What if the catalog is feeding the Web? No media channel or
marketing event is isolated anymore."

Jones also spoke of the need to "marry customer data" so the
company's opt-in email list, online buyers, catalog buyers and
retail buyers were all in one database where Norm Thompson could
both measure lifetime loyalty, and adjust marketing frequency and
channel to make each individual customer more profitable. But
this is very hard. Like most companies, Norm Thompson has
several databases that don't "speak" to each other.

Nevertheless, that's Jones' goal. As he says, "Gone are the days
when you picked a printer and you picked a database vendor and
you went with it!"



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