email marketing and into one of the earliest pioneers of behavioral marketing and customer experience.
In 2006, our business was thriving. Email marketing was one of the hottest growth areas for marketers. So it surprised Silverpop's board of directors somewhat when I approached them with the idea that winning in email marketing might not be winning at all. Even back then, email marketing was starting to be overdone. It had been so successful for marketers that inboxes were getting flooded and buyers and customers were turning away from the channel. I told the board that it was the ideal time for us to evolve and cast a more differentiated vision.
We spent the following few quarters seeking out the next big thing. We looked at mobile, content management, and even deeper analytics, but along the way, we stumbled into what became a central part of our future: business-to-business (B2B) marketing automation. As our strategy thinkers were looking into their long-term crystal balls, our sales team was looking for some practical, near-term solutions to better manage leads.
They had found a small set of software providers that sat on top of our sales automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platform to help capture and nurture leads. As the sales execs were reviewing the vendor options, we all realized that the email marketing was at the heart of these new B2B marketing automation solutions and that it was something we should probably do ourselves.
It ended up taking us a long time, with more than a few false starts. But in the end we acquired one of the leading B2B vendors, Vtrenz, and used their expertise to create the platform that ultimately redefined our company and even the marketplace: Engage 8. This revolutionary solution was the world's first marketing platform to combine the individual customer journeys of B2B marketing with the incredible scale and content control of business-to-customer (B2C) email marketing.
As Engage 8 hit the market, everyone agreed that we had developed something truly unique. For the first time, marketers could create individualized dialogs with millions of customers, one at a time, in real time. To be honest, it took a year or two for our customers – and even Silverpop itself – to realize the potential of what we had created.
I will never forget the comment made by one of our larger CPG (consumer packaged goods) customers who themselves offered dozens of highly complex customer journeys across email, social websites, and their website: “Silverpop is the best email marketing company in the world.” Although clearly flattering, it also reminded me that the true potential of our platform was still tied to its reputational roots as a channel-specific delivery tool.
It was time for us to take a bold stand and – like the college student who realized he had picked the wrong subjects – to declare a new major. We needed to focus our energies on behavioral marketing and the true future of the marketing profession: customer experience.
In the years following, behavioral marketing was the center of attention at Silverpop. We created features like progressive profiling, send-time-optimization and, the most important of all, our technology to support any kind of customer activity or behavior in real time, which we called universal behaviors. We drank our own champagne and relaunched Silverpop.com. Our website became one of the most powerful examples of behavioral marketing; as buyers and customers traversed the site, we learned what they were interested in and changed the content to reflect it. Visitors' behaviors also drove and influenced the content we sent them in newsletters. All this was powered by our vision of behavioral marketing and running natively on our Engage 8 platform.
When IBM acquired our company in May of 2014, they cited our behavioral platform and application programming interfaces (APIs) as some of the most compelling reasons to work with us. And now, as part of one of the largest technology companies in the world, we are yet again reinventing what it means to create epic customer experiences.
The future of marketing is being rewritten, and for marketers across the world, there has never been a better time to be in our profession.
The customer revolution that is well underway is about each individual customer having an experience uniquely tailored to his or her needs, interests, and expectations. Audiences, segments, and targets are not going away, but the future of marketing relationships is personal and will reflect and respect each customer's individuality.
Marketers need to interact with customers based on their behaviors. This goes beyond clicks and page visits to include interactions like visiting physical stores, achieving fitness goals, calling customer support, reaching new levels in games, using new product features, installing mobile apps, trialing a software tool, walking by a museum exhibit, posting social comments, reading a blog, and countless others.
Marketers cannot interact with individual customers in batches. But reacting in real time to customer behaviors is just the start. We must also curate content into unique stories for each customer. Analytics must uncover each customer's expectations, preferences, and intent. Ultimately, marketers must define road maps that allow customers to navigate their own unique path at their own pace toward a wide set of individual destinations.
I have had the privilege of working with Dave Walters for over a decade, first as one of Silverpop's most visionary clients and more recently as one of Silverpop's most prolific thought leaders and influencers. The moment he approached me with his idea of a book on behavioral marketing and buyer experiences, I knew he was the right person to translate Silverpop's unique experiences into a story to be shared with marketers across the world. I cannot begin to measure all that I have learned from working with Dave over these many years. I hope each of you reading his book is able to gain as much from his perspective and experiences as I have.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, my wife, who more than holds down the fort while I'm off meeting with marketing teams around the world. She's our True North. And my two daughters, ages seven and five, who only ask Daddy for fun gifts from Melbourne, Australia not Melbourne, Florida. Without all my girls I would lack an understanding of life, love, and the world.
Professionally, those who have formed my views of marketing and technology for the last 20 years, including Hugh MacLeod, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan, Rand Fishkin, Mark Suster, Brad Feld, Tom Tunguz, and Tim Ferris. They think deeply, challenge the norms, share with the world at-scale, and have been responsible for educating a generation of marketers and startup types. We collectively owe them a debt of gratitude that can be repaid by sharing their thinking across social networks and buying their books. The Hughtrain Manifesto, the Thank You Economy and everything ever written on Tom Tunguz's blog could easily be a master-class-in-a-box for digital marketing.
Finally, to my friends and colleagues at Silverpop – particularly Bill Nussey and Bryan Brown – it has been a joy to be part of the journey to move marketing beyond batch-and-blast to behavior-powered interactions. We started as a strong independent company with more than a decade of marketing tech innovation, and our latest journey as part of IBM's Commerce Group will supercharge our ability to help marketers be more successful and fulfilled in their roles. Here's to another decade of innovation.
And I'll end with my favorite Hugh MacLeod cartoon of all time, which reminds us to keep our marketing thinking human-powered and massively relevant to the individual.
THE BEHAVIORAL MARKETING MANIFESTO
When we talk about how industries change and when new thinking emerges, the concept of a manifesto is one that surfaces often. Whether you're a fan of religious figures like Martin Luther and his 95 theses or your thinking leans more toward the business world's Cluetrain Manifesto, outlining a core set of truths can be a powerful way to set the frame of reference for the next phase of the conversation.
