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Artefact Team
Creative Graphic Design
Dublin, Ireland

Data Capture

Remember that for most businesses the most likely source of new business is from existing and past customers. Remember too that the more established your business, the greater will be the proportion of sales accounted for by return visits. Knowing that means that you have an opportunity to create a database that will enable effective, personalised, targeted marketing in the future.

What do you know about the people who surfed into your online business last week? Your answer may range from nothing to a great deal. Here are some things you can do to ensure that you capture the information about your visitors and customers that will sharpen your follow-up marketing efforts:

1. Analyse your traffic. There are a number of ways of doing this ranging from reports that your business site ISP/host may provide, to software packages that you buy and run on your hard drive, to online site traffic analysis services. From the reports thus generated, you can learn a good deal about who has been visiting your site, what pages they've been visiting, where in the world they've come from, what kind of browsers they are using, their e-mail address or the site they surfed in from and more! Much of this information is superfluous and some of it cannot be easily used. For one thing, people who happen upon your site and leave again often don't appreciate being chased after subsequently with your e-mails.

2. Ask visitors for information through a registration system. Some sites, particularly those offering access to information services will ask you to register a few details so that they can build up a profile of their visitors or so that they can match subsequent offers to your particular profile. If you're a 'man between 25 and 45, resident in the USA and interested in fishing' you may find yourself on a list for relevant offers whereas if you're a 'woman between 15 and 35, resident in Canada and interested in skiing', you will find yourself on a different list.

3. Ask for their details on an enquiry form. Enquiry forms are easy to build and there's a wizard for the purpose with any website building package. You can have mandatory as well as optional fields. To take an example, if you want to offer a free brochure or a subscription to a free online newsletter delivered by e-mail, you could ask your visitors to fill out a form on your website. If you are going to send the brochure by mail, it's reasonable (to say the least!) to seek their name and address. You could take the opportunity to ask additional questions relevant to the business you are in and your ability to serve them in the future. You could seek demographic information but only if it's relevant. Remember that most people want ease and convenience and they'll tend to click right out of a forbidding looking form. Generally people do not mind giving out information about themselves within reason if they can see a logic for doing so.

In seeking information it is important to be aware of the need for ethical behaviour and such data protection legislation as may apply in your jurisdiction. Many businesses publish their privacy policies on their sites. The gist of them, in most cases, is a promise not to sell or share in any way the information they give you with anyone else except with your permission.