Offline Conversion Highlighted at NYC Search Engine Strategies

We'd like to express our appreciation to rustybrick (Barry Schwartz) for his excellent,  detailed, finger-numbing coverage of yesterday's SES-NYC session Measuring Offline Sales & Conversions.  Thanks also to Patricia Hursh of SmartSearch Marketing, Jon Schepke from Proceed Interactive, Mike Sack from Inceptor and Misty Locke of Range Search Marketing for sharing their case studies and research bringing to light the "missing value" of offline conversions driven by online promotion.

Via the case studies, session participants were reminded that the offline payoffs of online promotion must be presented in a credible fashion to decision-makers, if those responsible for marketing are to get the dollars necessary to support online spend at the level it deserves (given actual benefits received).  Use of special premiums, landing page coupons,  800 numbers, smart IVR's (like those offered by Database Systems Corp. - thanks Jon) and other tracking tools were mentioned again and again as ways to make the link between online promotion and offline conversion.

We were glad to see that the "human intelligence" (HUMINT for all you spy novel junkies) contributions to lead tracking were noted alongside the electronic ones by Patricia, who reminded us to "Train directors to record and report "lead source".  We've always believed that some of this lead tracking stuff is not rocket science - it just requires the discipline to ask'em where they came from.

According to Barry, Mike Sack of Inceptor summed it up nicely: "You need to track offline conversions, you need to be prepared to spend against ROI metrics that incorporate offline conversions."  Failure to do so will result in curtailment of spending that really gets results - whether these results are easy to track or not.