I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently about the data that one of our clients, Health Force, has been collecting on its website.  Health Force is a national travel nursing and allied health staffing company.  R.O.Why! Marketing, your friendly neighborhood Cincinnati marketing firm, has been working with Health Force for over 4 years, delivering a range of interactive marketing solutions, including a new website earlier this year.

The website displays travel assignments that are available across the country, and allows visitors to search these jobs, apply online, and also register with their skill sets to receive automatic job notifications in their area of expertise.

We're now 6 months into the new site, and they've collected a lot of data.  Names, email addresses, disciplines, specialties, etc., and also data like the time they last visited and logged in.  Programmers and tech folks think about databases and architectures and linking tables, and how complicated it can be to get it all out.  Marketers, on the other hand, think about what they can do with this data.

With the data we now have available, we can send email marketing messages that invite people back to the site based on the date of their last visit.  Health Force WebsiteHealth Force can call them to talk about jobs they've seen on the site and that they qualify for.  We can also understand what jobs get the most searches and inquiries, and provide that data back to the company to better target future job opportunities.

The site looks beautiful and does a great job of brand development, but how about we build the brand at the cash register too?  Let's talk with visitors as individuals, using what we know to deliver custom experiences.

The creative is important to be sure, but a website should talk to you on a personal level at every opportunity.  The technology has been around for years to deliver 1:1 marketing quite well, but it all starts with the data.  Collecting it is important.  Knowing what you'll do with it and mapping out a deliberate plan is something entirely different.