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Hyundai Develops Customer Intuition Through On-line Analysis
Hyundai is working hard to develop their customer intuition. They use a lot of IT stuff to keep their ear to the ground to hear approaching customers.
For Hyundai, watching what car shoppers are looking at online is one of the ways it stays in touch with would-be customers. It runs the E-mail polls with a few $600 licenses for the Zoomerang online-survey-management tool. It has invested even more in the technology to establish a “shopper quantification” program that combines outsourced clickstream analysis from Compete Inc. with a custom tool built using Hyperion Solutions Corp.'s Brio business-intelligence software, which tells Hyundai how it's doing with online car-shoppers. The tools let the company know “what's going on in the digital channel to make packaging, pricing, and marketing decisions,” says Paul Whitworth, director of strategic planning and brand development.
The service provides Hyundai with data on shopping activity at more than 30 automotive sites, which is extrapolated to represent overall auto shopping. Hyundai uses that data to measure indicators such as share of shoppers, closing ratios, and cross-brand shopping trends. The custom tool also accumulates and analyzes data from Hyundai's Web site to offer insight into demand for colors, models, options, and other product variations. The two data sources are mapped against each other.
The results have kept Hyundai from making ill-informed decisions. In May, sales were flat compared with April, but Hyundai's custom-analytics tool indicated that demand among shoppers for information on its Sonata sedans was double what it was in April. Further investigation uncovered the source of the disconnect: Hyundai didn't have inventory with the colors and options that shoppers wanted. “In the old days, we'd have said, 'Oh, we don't have enough demand,' so we'd have offered another customer rebate,” Whitworth says. Instead, the company adjusted its dealer inventory to better match what buyers were seeking.
Analysis of the digital behavior of your customers and prospects isn't just for B2C marketers. B2B marketers find understanding the digital “clickstream” of customers and prospects very helpful in optimizing their sales and marketing activities. If you are doing a blog or an email newsletter you should see just what's possible in analysis and tracking. One of the advantages of outsourcing email newsletters and blogs is the analysis of the “clickstream.” An outsourced solution puts content creation together with measured results together in one responsive unit. Results from one newsletter can easily shape and inform the next issue.
Might be worth about three minutes to submit some simple info and get a price quote for an outsourced email newsletter solution.
Information Week on Finding the Customer
Technorati Tags: Zoomerang | Hyperion Solutions | newsletter | Compete, Inc | BeTuitive | car | IT | customer | customer communications | B2B | Hyundai | customer insights | permission marketing | marketing | B2C | blog
August 2, 2005 in award winning blog, award winning magazine, award winning newsletter, Blog Outsourcing, blog publish, Blogging Tools, Blogs, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Intuition, bulk email marketing, business credibility, Business editorial, business magazine, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, Business publications, Business relationships, CMO, company blog, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink
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