Live From Seattle: It’s an E-Buyer’s Market

Quickly disappearing are the days when Sally the e-consumer would enter the words “frying pan” into a search engine and be rewarded–and discouraged-with 2,000 hits.

Fingerhut Companies CEO Will Lansing told a luncheon crowd at the Direct Marketing Association net.marketing Conference & Exhibition yesterday that the next time Sally goes surfing for a frying pan, she better come back with a handful of relevant offers or Sally may just go back to the mall.

Lansing said the future of successful e-retailing lies in understanding that the Internet is fast becoming a buyer’s market and that marketers need to intimately know their customers–their wants, needs and expectations–and provide relevant, targeted offers that are attractive to those consumers.

“More and more in the Web enhanced world, retailers will find the right product in the network and bring back offers to the consumer as a broker,” Lansing said.

To determine what offers are relevant to the consumer Lansing encouraged marketers to capitalize on and use the following guidelines when collecting data:

* Never ask a customer to tell you something they have already told you such as name, address or credit card number

* Be observant. Watch consumers and note everything you have occasion to observe such as purchase patterns and behavioral data

* Watch what like consumers do and apply those buying behaviors to similar customers. For example, if one consumer buys a camera along with a package of batteries, and another consumer purchases only a camera, offer that consumer a package of batteries

Lansing added that the ability to know and capture all this data has been made ever easier because of the falling costs of digital storage, new innovative technologies that have made it easier to capture customer data–such as collaborative filtering technology–and the falling cost of computer processing to manipulate data to the marketer’s advantage.