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“Web-influenced store sales totaled $471 billion last year” Yes, eMarketer’s insights complement findings from a joint research study conducted by Bazaarvoice and Keller Fay Group late last year:

“Sixty-six percent of respondents that had posted feedback online about a product or service had done so at a retailer website for a purchase made offline. ”

From Harvard Business Review:

What does that mean to the web marketers?

Have you measured the return on your emarketing investment by including the offline impact and sales at outlets?

Have you monitored the inbound sales calls increase due to your latest online campaign?

In this blogpost, we will look at the ways to track offline impact from your online activities.

Tracking Offline Conversions resulted from Online Activities:

Unlike in Clickstream tracking, more often it is not financially feasible to track all the sales happening at the offline stores - it may turn out to be very expensive and also time consuming. It may also take such a long time that the data might become obsolete. Hence a sample which is representative of the population is studied.  The below table depicts the maximum no. of samples required for studying the response (in our case no. of orders and/or revenue placed in the offline store that are resulted from online campaigns)

 All you need is a small sample of population to study the impact of your online marketing actitivies.   But, how do we know who purchased offline that was result from an online activity? 

There are basically three different ways how we track these offline conversions -

        1.  Ask the clients to “Register Prodct Online” - Encourage your clients to register their product online by filling a simple form where in you ask them if the purchase was made offline.   Or another way is to keeping a unique product-id for offine products to identify them when they register online as the offline purchased products.   Now, since we know that they purchased offline, we can correlate these clients with their previous clickstream behaviour on the site and see if they had come by result of a specific campaign that you had run recently or they were from a natural web referrer or they not at all visited the site earlier.  Take a random sample from the population to study the offline impact.

      2. Give Coupons Away in your promotions - Give unique coupons to your prospects in the campaign promotions that you are running and ask them to redeem them when they buy online or offline.   This gives marketers a unique opportunity idetify which sales came from offline and online as well as the campaigns that drove these sales. 

You can think of as many technique as you can that can allow you to identify an offline purchase when the users arrive your website after they purchased and just correlate their previous clickstream behaviour.  Some of the similar techniques would be - unique customer service toll-free no. for each campaign, unique promotion codes, separate product bundles etc.,

     3. Survey the clients - Encourage the offline outlets to survey the clients if they had visited your site before they are making the purchase in the outlet and if they had been a result of the online campaign.  Again, we wouldn’t need a whole lot of responses which is not a cost-effective with this methodology but a small random sample would be adequate to study the impact.

Using any of these three methods or a combination of them would allow marketers to measure the offline impact resulted from online activities by the business and would allow to measure the Return on Marketing Investment onilne.

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