>Dave Walters
Behavioral Marketing
Behavioral Marketing
Delivering Personalized Experiences at Scale
Dave Walters
Cover image: © CSA Plastock / Corbis
Cover design: John Yardley
Copyright © 2015 by JumboMouse Labs, LLC. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Walters, Dave, 1968-
Behavioral marketing: delivering personalized experiences at scale / Dave Walters.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-119-07657-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-119-07639-1 (ebk) – ISBN 978-1-119-07643-8 (ebk)
1. Internet marketing. 2. Customer relations. 3. Consumers’ preferences. I. Title.
HF5415.1265.W3655 2015
658.8′72–dc23
2015017698
FOREWORD
There is a customer revolution underway.
Buyers today have more information, more access, and more choice than anytime in history. The battleground for customer loyalty has shifted from features, prices, and transactions toward the new landscape of long-term relationships and customer experience. Best-in-class companies like Apple and Lexus have rewritten the rules of customer relationships by leveraging every touch point and every interaction to create a convenient, fun, and even meaningful experience. They have embraced the customer revolution, and they are raising the bar for the rest of us.
Marketing has always been the bridge that connects businesses and customers. However, marketing needs to reinvent itself in this new world of customer experience, moving beyond its roots in the audience/content/publish cycle. The new generation of marketers needs to embrace every customer interaction, digital or offline, no matter how diverse or seemingly short lived. We need to engage with each customer when and where that customer prefers with content that is perfectly tuned and individualized to him or her.
We can expect that, in return, customers will not only make purchases; they will offer their attention, their time, and their loyalty. To make this transition, we marketers must move beyond the day-to-day mechanics of campaign execution and curating content. We have to embrace our origins as storytellers and pull ourselves forward to become the architects of customer experience.
Imagine that marketing is like touring a city. Most of today's marketing does little more than crowd tourists into a small set of the most popular destinations. More advanced marketing is like a tour bus that is taking tourists to more destinations with smaller crowds. However, the sequence is fixed and the experience still fairly generic.
The future of marketing is like having your own private concierge who knows your interests, your budget, and your pace. This guide walks alongside you delivering a completely unique and personal experience perfectly tailored to you.
In the same way, the future of marketing will be built around each customer's unique personal interests. And like an experienced tour guide, marketers learn a customer's interests by asking what they want. But the truly world class tour guides go beyond asking; they watch their customer's behaviors as they visit each leg of their tour to craft a truly epic journey and experience the customer will never forget.
Marketers will be the architects of customer experience, and behavioral marketing will provide the foundation and write the guide book that marketers use to construct and orchestrate epic customer experiences.
But first, a little history…
My first small steps on the journey toward behavioral marketing took place in 2004. At the time, I had just released a book called The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing. I wrote the book to help marketers recognize email marketing's ability to go beyond its roots as a “batch and blast” interruptive advertising channel.
I defined the world of email marketing in three levels, the first being basic personalization. Back then, well over 10 years ago, a large portion of email marketing wasn't even personalizing first names, so Level 1 was a big conceptual step for many marketers. Level 2 led marketers into the world of audiences, segmentation, and customers' stated preferences. And Level 3, the most advanced marketing at that time, pushed marketers into dynamic content, lifecycle campaigns, and analytics for creating even more relevant segments and targets.
In the last section of the The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing, I hinted at a world beyond Level 3 that we are just now embracing 10 years later: that we would be segmenting customers by their past behaviors and even responding to those behaviors in real time. For many marketers, including Silverpop and me, this was the first time the idea of behavioral marketing had surfaced.
But as it turned out, those words would lead to the core vision and strategy that transformed
