Behavior Marketing Gone Wild
From what I’ve seen 2006 is shaping up to be the year of behavior marketing being pushed to the next level. Many of the conferences I’ve attended this year have focused on the behavior marketing analytic technologies and the supposed “best practices” of using them. Search marketing was vaulted to the stratosphere out of the ashes of a dead CPM banner model based on the success of a simple behavior marketing relationship. Advertisers predicted that customers would want “x” when they searched for “x”. Users who suffered through the dull pain of non-targeted television commercials actually said out loud “that’s not advertising, that’s what I’m looking for” when they were questioned about the text links that they clicked on. We will look back and say “in the beginning behavior marketing was good.”
But today Web analytic companies have taken the significance of user activity out of the server logs that before never saw the tint of a monitor light into a real time response through a data feed API that can return custom responses to Web sites as well as trigger email campaigns. Some marketers who leverage this technology well will continue to elate customers with the “that’s what I want” feeling but I’m convinced that there will be a growing number of customers who will shut down their computer with a “this fucken thing is stalking me” Behavior Marketing Gone Bad feeling.
So the customer profile built in the analytic platform is the marketer’s drivers seat for the behavior marketing experience. Here we can define a series of user behaviors that will trigger a custom campaign to be executed by email or on the Web. At the 2006 Email Marketing Summit in Chicago, I heard a good presentation on how HP had built a behavior marketing campaign around users who clicked multiple times on a particular product but did not complete checkout. Users who exhibited this behavior were sent promotional email with the same product at a discount. Not much word about customer feedback on this campaign and I imagine it won’t be long before customers realize to mimic this behavior just to get the discounted coupon. HP did say it was the most effective behavior marketing campaign they tried.
At the 2006 Ecomertry Conference in Miami I heard a marketer gasp when a Blue Martini driven site displayed a custom promotion for a free necklace on a dress purchase that came up after a user clicked on the third dress.
At the Future Tends panel of the 2006 LinkShare Symposium 2006 a weary customer shared this example - I want to buy my wife a necklace so I go into the jewelry store and look around for a while. But before I decide to make a purchase I get hungry and go somewhere else to get something to eat. At the bagel store I see them pulling out jewelry on the display rack. I leave because they are stalking me and never go back to the bagel or jewelry store in question.
Many customer’s will feel like the privilege of their business is being abused by these new technologies and leave like fish swimming away from kids throwing rocks. But - if the jewelry store had provided a snack at the right time of day they could have closed the deal.
It’s like a Waldorf School festival I went to last year where the kids were all walking around with trays of iced lattes and slices of pie. Believe me they knew what the parents were looking for.
So keep an eye out for marketing campaigns that pop-up in response to a unique behavior. Come back and share an example if you find one that is particularly bad or good. The best practices for this technology have yet to be written.