Are you targeting the right customers?

Retailers are placing greater importance on knowing their customer than ever before. While it is hard enough for regular brick and mortar retailers to target customers accurately, online retailers need to be even more specific in their need to decipher not only what kind of customer they are, but also to what kind of marketing they will respond to. According to Imad Mouline, CTO at Gomez Inc, web retailers must know how the customer reached their site, along with details of what their connection set up, including browser, ISP, operating system etc.

“You can’t just rely on Internet statistics that say, for example, that Internet Explorer has 85% of market share,” Mouline says. “You have to know if that’s really your customers.” The core audience of a consumer electronics retailer, for example, might tend toward a different browser, he says. Another way in which a site’s audience might differ from broader browser use statistics is when it has a large international component. For example, Mouline says, Gomez data across several verticals shows that in Germany, Firefox browsers might make up 50% or more of a site’s user base.