here's a selection of the key concepts I'll be referring to during the rest of the book:
Audience segmentation: The process of splitting your list into many smaller lists based on secondary criteria such as email opens, purchases, or demographic elements.
Automated programs: A setup-once, run-many-times program that sends one or more messages to users based on their behaviors, time in the program, or other measured variable.
Best-friend brand: The process required to become one of the Top 5 trusted brands in your recipient's inbox.
Browse abandon: An automated program that's often a single step and is based on someone visiting a specific site section or stockkeeping unit (SKU).
Cart abandon: An automated program that normally is three steps (typically something like event +1 hour, +2 days, and +4 days) and based on someone placing an item in an online shopping cart but not purchasing it.
Content strategy: The process of creating presale and postpurchase content (think whitepapers or shoe fitting guides) that provide product or company insights to the recipients, and drive a significant source of customer behaviors for the marketer to measure.
Deliverability: The process of managing the delivery of mass email messaging to your recipients via Internet Services Providers (ISPs) like Google or Hotmail.
Triggered message: A one-time automated message that's not sent as part of a multi-user campaign – think of an e-commerce purchase receipt.
Net Promoter® Score: A scoring model in which you ask your recipients if they'd recommend your product or service to a friend, and the results are scored on a 1 to 10 scale.
Web Tracking: The process of installing a unique JavaScript line of code to a website or app to identify known and anonymous users and track their behaviors. Beyond traditional web analytics, this tracking allows a marketer to build automated programs triggered by onsite behaviors, email-only behaviors, other channel behaviors, or a combination of all three.
Behavioral Marketing Campaigns You've Seen in Everyday Life
The other very clear way to define behavioral marketing is to point to individual campaigns you've seen in your own inbox or customer experiences you've had with your favorite brands. Among the most common pure behavioral-driven email campaigns is the trusty cart abandon program. I'll tell the entire story around this example in Chapter 15, but Figure 1.1 is a great example of cart abandon content. It's 100 percent based on my shopping activity, it's time driven based on when I carted the item, and a subsequent communication had a promotional offer as a last resort to get me to buy. If you sell items via the web, this is almost a must-do tactic.
Figure 1.1 Cart Abandon Content
The other triggered message you'll often see if you use a lot of social networks focuses on building your on-site network. When the site wants you to match an address book contact to your on-site network, there's often a message that looks like the Foursquare one in Figure 1.2 – relatively simple and straightforward with a single call to action. Conversely, some apps and brands use triggered email as a means to let you know that one of your contacts (matched from your phone) or your Facebook friends has joined that specific site and you should connect your profiles.
Figure 1.2 Foursquare Message with a Simple Call to Action
Another non-email version of behavioral marketing you've probably seen involves interactive voice response (IVR) systems at your utility companies – in my case, Comcast. When I dial into the 800 number, the system automatically recognizes me by name and confirms the last four digits of my phone number on file. It then offers me the next pay-per-view event by simply selecting a number on the keypad. And if I end up talking with a representative, then the process of confirming my identity is simply a matter of confirming my street address.
This takes into account everything Comcast knows about me from an account perspective, offers me a purchase opportunity, and streamlines my customer service event – all in a single, intuitive flow. By surfacing this knowledge directly into the IVR, they speed the entire experience and even have a chance at booking some bonus increase in revenue.
And finally, let's look at a completely different behavioral marketing tactic that's wrapped in a financial product. Every time I shop at Target, an employee offers me one of their Target Red debit cards – a card product tied to your bank account just like a traditional bank debit card would be, but with a 5 percent discount on everything in the store. How can they afford to do this? Beyond reinforcing Target as your retailer of choice by seeing that red bulls eye logo every time you open your wallet, there's a critical amount of data flowing over that card.
Their ability to identify you as a unique individual – and track all your purchases over time by department, by time of day, and so forth – allows Target to build incredibly specific, data-driven personas they can act on from a marketing perspective. They might send out four different versions of a flyer – baby items, electronics, home furnishings, and toys – and some percentage of the audience is going to get one of these specialty versions if they have sufficient data to show they belong in that segment. The rest will receive a nonspecialized version of the same flyer.
Interestingly enough, I've never signed up for the Target card because I actually choose my bank based on the fact that they have a debit card product that earns me Delta Sky Miles (this will not surprise you in the least by the time you finish this book). At the same time, I do have one from Nordstrom Rack based on the significant value proposition they deliver, including $5 birthday coupons, early access to certain sales, and other benefits like free alterations. I'm willing to exchange the risk of allowing a nonbanking entity link to my bank account in exchange for the solid value proposition they offer. This, by itself, is an excellent behavior that the Nordstrom marketing team can factor into all kinds of audience segmentations they want to turn on.
These examples show that behavioral marketing is all around us every day – and that determining how to integrate it into your marketing approach isn't rocket science. It requires putting yourself in your customer's shoes, and being data driven enough to be able to listen at scale and deliver personalized messages based on what you know.
In fact, I know marketers whose extent of behavioral marketing is to resend every wide-scale email message to the nonopening segment exactly 24 hours after sending the first message, but with a different subject line the second time. If 20 percent of recipients open the first message, then the day-after audience is 80 percent of the original list, and the second version they get (with a new subject line) drives another 8–10 percent of opens that time around.
That's the beginning of an epic behavioral-marketing-driven approach, and if every marketer reading this book looked for one small strategy like that to execute, we'd all be on an awesome improvement path.
Relevance Trumps Privacy under 35 – Every. Single. Time
One of the themes you'll notice throughout the book is the concept of being data driven. This can be a source of concern for marketers, especially as you get into European Union countries with much more restrictive laws, or if you're focusing on a marketer's ability to build a purchase history like the debit cards we discussed earlier can provide. Although there certainly are legal guardrails you need to
