This is my favourite local wine shop. I shop there all the time. I’m so protective of it that I’m going to keep its identity secret!Let me explain.
Bob knows me.He knows what I like, what I don’t like, what I’ve tried before.What I’ve bought recently. That I like to cook and entertain. The kinds of things I like to cook.My attitude to wine. My price range for normal evenings and for special occasions.Where I live. Where I work. What I do for a living. How many kids I have.
I buy five times more wine from Bob than from WaitroseI tend to leave the shop having spent 30-200% more than I thought I wouldI wouldn’t think of buying my wine anywhere elseIn fact I enjoy buying from Bob. I love the experience that much.
This talk is about increasing the Bob-ishness of your marketing.The more you do it, the more you will sell.This is a direct, linear relationship. Everything you do to become more Bob-like will increase every metric that you’re tracking:More traffic, higher conversion rates, better email opens and click throughs, greater loyalty, repeat purchase, lifetime value… All of them will get boosted from this one simple thing.Plus you’ll get your customer to love you.
The bad news: marketing is far from Bob today. In fact its decidedly un-BobularIf Bob was a marketer instead of the world’s best wine salesman,… I’d walkin and instead of saying “Hey John, how’d you get on with that Riesling?” He’d say, “Hello potential customer. This is a wine shop. We have red wine and white wine and sparkling wine. Some of it is from France.’Instead of saying, “I’ve got a Rioja that your wife is going to rave about.” He’d say, “Buy three cases of Asti and get one free!” (I loathe Asti).Instead of saying etc.
Good news, we’re all well on the way.Everyone in this room is marketing in a far more sophisticated way than the same room of people even three years ago.The history of marketing is a march towards becoming more like Bob.
Today, those of us who are segmenting tend to be basing our segmentation on two things:By Profile – the usual demographic stuff: age, gender, locationAnd By Preference – if they’ve opted in to an email; how they like to be contactedBut what is missing is context. I may be a marketing director, married with 2 kids living in West London. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m in the market to buy a car or shoes or wine right now.
The trend is clear: our segments are getting smaller, more specific, more targeted, better informed.
At Silverpop, we talk about the ultimate destination being The Segment of One.When you’re really talking to each person as an individual.And using the things you know about that individual to have a MUCH more intelligent, relevant interaction.Like Bob would.
As brands the missing dimension is behavioural data: what a consumer does when they interact with you.Essentially, your customers are telling you all about themselves and their needs and interests every time they interact with you.And it turns out the insight you can derive from this data is the BEST guide to personalization of your customer experience.Best here has one definition: the customer experience that gets the best response, the most clicks, the highest revenue.
Let’s look at the kind of data we’re talking about.We’ve already talked about demographics – which we’re using here to mean both profiles and preferences. Still a valuable way to segment.But now we start to add behaviours – in just a few of the big channels here:Email – what did I open? What did I click?The relational stuff that tends to live in CRM – what did I buy? What did you learn from the survey I completed? What does the Loyalty program say about me? On the Web – did I abandon a cart? What products did I search for? What videos did I view?And Offline – did I redeem a voucher? Buy something in a store? Call the call centre?
All this is important as we’re all having to compete with so much noise.The average consumer is exposed to over 30,000 marketing messages a day. To stand out you have to forge a better emotional connection.
Think about this.If you know that I came to your site, searched for Brogues, looked at three pairs, left one pair in the shopping cart and went away…Would you treat me differently than if you knew NOTHING about me?Of course you would. Bob definitely would.And all this data -- all this INSIGHT – is right there, ready to be used. You own it. It’s yours.
Getting started with Behavioural Marketing be as basic as following up Cart Abandonments
The cart abandonment email is a simple, powerful example of the essence of Behavioural Marketing.And it really is a simple idea: You capture the things people do when they interact with you.You apply a few rules to that data.And the rules generate the best interaction for that person at the next point of interaction.Simple.
Let’s refine it a bit.Capture the behaviour.Combine that data with the stuff you already know about that person – the profile & preferences; or past behaviours.Apply the rules.Generate the best interaction – and trigger the most relevant track or series of interactions. (so it’s not just one response at a time – it’s a customer experience path that you designed)Then measure what happens so you can refine all the other steps.Still the same simple idea: capture, apply rules, interact intelligently – but refined a bit more.
Now turbo-charge it.Capture that behaviour FROM ANY CHANNEL at all. Email, web, mobile, in-store, CRM… you name itCombine it with everything you know – again from ALL past interactions, profile data, preference data…Apply your rulesGenerate a PERSONALISED interaction and a MULTI -CHANNEL track that Then measure it all and store the learning to make your rules and your customer experience paths better and better and better
Now you’ve arrived.Because now your marketing is doing what Bob does every day, without even thinking about it.But Bob has a few hundred customers. What if you’ve got a few million?How do you apply the kind of personalisedbehavioural marketing we’ve just seen?
There are 5 big questions to answer.
This will vary a lot by business and channel and customer.Some behaviors will be gold dust for driving uplift [the abandoned cart for instance]. Others won’t move the dial at all [If I buy a gift for my niece today, that doesn’t make me more likely to buy another tomorrow]You won’t know in advance which bevaviours matter the most to your business.The key is to get in there and start finding out.Start with best guesses and hunches. Apply them. See what happens. repeat.
Remember all the sources of behavioural data you’ve got.Pick the most likely – the ones that feel like good predictors of intention – and start working with those.Experiment with a small chunk of your database. Do A/B tests. Start learning.
Second question: how do you capture all that data and turn it into insight?Well the obvious thing is that you need a single place to store it all…
A central experience databaseFed by all channels and touchpointsA place to associate all that behaviours across all those places, with the individual.
So you’ve captured all that behaviour data.Third question: how do you turn it into insight?Because data is just effluent. It’s just noise. Unless you can extract some reliable, relevant insight from it.
You turn data into insight using a few tools:Rules – simple logic that says, ‘If you see this behaviour or combination of behaviours, do this.” Good rules are the key to effective behavioural marketing. [There are vendors out there with all kinds of fancy algorithms that claim to not be rules based. In my experience, they all tend to have rules inside that somebody wrote. And I’d rather let the marketer write the rules instead of hiding the in a black box algorithm…]Analysis – taking the data and deciding what it means. If we see that a person responds to emails that are sent between 5 and 7pm but ignores emails sent from 9 to 5, we can draw conclusions.That’s simple analysis.Scoring – giving specific behaviours a score, so you can add up different behaviours and trip an action.Opening an email – 5 points; Visiting a web page – 5 points; Putting something in a shopping basket: 80 points…Triggers – the things that are invoked by the rules, analysis and scoring… When these things happen, do this.
Next question – how do you scale this up?It’s a lot easier for B2B scales.I spent a lot of my career in B2B marketing and I’ve used the marketing automation tools that work fine at these scales.But B2C behavioural marketing has to scale to millions of customers. And Billions of interactions. This really is big data.
It’s nice to have email driven by insight from previous emailIt’s great to have your email driven by insight from email, web, mobile app, CRM, PoS, etc.But it’s hugely powerful to have ALL interactions powered by ALL insight from ALL channelsThat’s the end game of behavioural marketing.And to do that you need a platform built to work this way.
Here’s the big picture.WhatBehavioural Marketing looks like to a geek like me.On the left: all the channels where a customer can interact with you. Email, web, mobile, whatever.In the middle, the Engage database, the rules and scoring engine, the relational tables that tie it all together.And on the right, the channels where you’ll interact next. So a behaviour that happened in an email can inform what web page you serve up to me.And a form I complete on Facebook triggers a dynamic email that seems like it was written for me – because it was.Essentially what you’re looking at is the Brain of Bob.
So as you become a behavioural marketer these are the 5 big questions you’ll need to answer for yourself:Which behaviors matter most?How do we capture and learn from them?How do we turn this insight into action?How do we do it at scale?How do we do it across all channels?
So behavioural marketing can be super-sophisticated – but it can also start with baby steps.What I would urge everyone in this room to do is to take the next steps on this road. Little by little.To do that you needA platform that can do the simple really wellThen scale up one step at a time to the whole visionTaking in any data – APIDriving any channel interaction - APIHandling any scale
For me, the right platform combines the best of two worlds:Email platforms and Marketing Automation platforms.You need to be able to do all the cool new behavioural things that the MA vendors bring: But you need to be able to do it at the scales of the biggest, baddest email platforms or services.Not surprisingly, this is exactly where Silverpop sits. Where MA and traditional email providers meet.
Back to Bob.All the things we’ve talked about are really just examples of being more Bob-like on a massive scale.Being that personal, informed brand that doesn’t treat every customer like a new person who just walked in off the street.Treating each one like the valued individual that they areGo forth and become Bob.