customers. In New York, for instance, the Department of Motor Vehicles makes its records public, enabling online auto brokerages to search the database for people who have expiring car leases.
As the range of products sold over the Net expands beyond computers, books and music, retailers have to shift their marketing tactics. Event-based businesses - such as those that focus on things like births, weddings and graduations - have to make contact with potential customers before those dates come around. BeforeYouMove.com, a startup that offers an online change-of-address service and aggregates moving-related services through partnerships, has a highly scattered target market. In a twist, this online company looks to offline direct marketing to meet their goals.
"Big insurance companies send out hundreds of millions of pieces of mail to policy holders every year, so we take the real estate on the back of their envelopes advertising our change-of-address service," says Richard Libby, CEO of Before You Move. "The game in the real world is getting in front of as many people as we can on a premove basis."
Scott Heiferman, founder and CEO of I-Traffic, an interactive agency in New York, says that his work is diversifying quickly. In a promotion for Beyond.com, which sells software online, e-mail has effectively extended their marketing campaign for tax-preparation software. "The goal is not necessarily to get someone to buy tax software on Jan. 15," says Heiferman. "But the e-mail reminder on March 15 is very useful."
And when Web sites aggregate enough users and partners that they can begin to effectively mine their own database of customers, new marketing opportunities will emerge. Eileen Hicken Gittens, CEO of Personify, a San Francisco-based company that builds marketing solutions for Web sites, says even the most homogenous set of consumers actually has various preferences that e-commerce companies must learn to track. "We work with ComputerLiteracy.com," says Gittens. "They have two segments buying the same books in very different ways - one segment uses the search engine, the other browses. It's not a question of databases; it's a question of who's on the site."
It's hard to predict how marketing practices on the Web will develop. Marketers talk about the importance of creative and strategic work, but the factor that will prove most influential on the Web is marketers' sense of propriety about consumer privacy.
Marketers currently walk on eggshells when it comes to consumer-privacy issues, but as more businesses set up shop on the Internet, the rules will change, and marketing methods will change with them.
"Someday, companies in affinity-related businesses will share a base level of common consumer information," says Gittens. "It's about what consumers get in return for information they give away about themselves."
