Email

Let's begin the conversation about channels with the most important and mature channel in your behavioral marketing world—email. Contrary to the three or four blog posts we all see annually that declare “email is dead,” email still plays a critical role in the behavioral conversation. In fact, for many email is the channel of conversation across the entire marketing spectrum. A well-timed, relevant email probably does more to drive buying behavior than almost any other marketing touch point. Email is highly automated, can be done with an incredible personal touch, and has great economies of scale as a relatively inexpensive but strong-performing marketing channel.

It's important to remember that email is a very mature channel. We've had commercial email marketing in our toolbox for at least 8 to 10 years, which means that our teams and thinking have (hopefully) gotten very good.

But that doesn't mean every email approach is created equal. Many marketers think about using email only in a “batch and blast” type of world. Sending the same message to your entire audience certainly has some application for specific business cases, but it's not the way most successful marketers think about their marketing mix and how to optimize channels.

The beauty of email beyond its scale is to view highly automated email as a conversation. Within the last three to four years, we've seen the concept of nurture marketing rise to the level that it's greatly contributing to our online sales and successful relationships. No longer is a simple marketing email about the same topic as everyone else's received as relevant conversation. And with today's CRM tools powering many channels of interaction with our customers, we can collect unprecedented amounts of data.

Customers view of the exchange value for giving us this information (at a minimum) is that we provide them with an incredibly relevant email experience. Our role is, therefore, to focus on deepening our customer knowledge and being able to support effective sales and service opportunities when our customers need us.

The Power of Automation

One element that makes email such an effective channel is that we're able to effectively segment our customers and deliver clear nurtured journeys toward their desired outcome. Unlike other channels like social networks, in which a personal touch is a virtual requirement, email allows us to map out a three- or four-touch program that hits some really high-level points in a buyer's journey and effectively helps the multichannel process close business.

Consider a clothing retailer. For the last five or six years, most retailers have been focused on driving the maximum amount of traffic to their online stores. Some retailers undertook heavy discounting strategies. Others made the brand—and the selection of products that the brand offered—the differentiating factor.

Many retailers understand exactly how much revenue they can drive by sending a mass specific offer to their audience. They know, for example, that 25 percent of their audience will open a message on any given day, and 10 percent of them will click, which will net them approximately 2 percent conversion rate and roughly $7,000 in revenue. If the revenue target this month is $49,000, then they'll likely send seven campaigns. If one of the campaigns underperforms, there will likely be an eighth campaign, and so on.

This is how many brands end up with decreasing open rates, even lower click rates, and general list fatigue. These negative aspects of high-volume email marketing—specifically, deliverability issues in the form of blacklists and other delivery problems—are the strongest argument against batch-and-blast marketing. Once your lists begin aging and customer interactions decrease, you begin to risk both automated suppression (Hotmail and Google diverting your messages to the SPAM folder) and actual human suppression in the form of opt-outs and SPAM reports, which Internet service providers (ISPs) take incredibly seriously. If we do find ourselves at this point in the process, it takes a heroic effort to repair the deliverability and trust behind our email program.

Another more progressive view of how email supports the customer journey is to think about multitouch nurture programs. We deliver these kinds of campaigns to specific segments of our audience who are displaying actual behaviors over specific periods of time. This type of nurture marketing was pioneered primarily in the B2B space. Marketers understood that effectively selling long-lead, high-dollar items would require them to maintain a conversation with a prospect over time, and be able to modify their marketing and purchase messaging during that buyer's journey.

Silverpop provides a good example of how this nurture marketing has been traditionally used. We would undertake a series of content- and thought leadership-driven exercises that included everything from hundreds of blog posts a year to more than 50 branded events on an annual basis. All this effort focused on discovering new prospects, and understanding where they are in the buying process. Once someone comes into our database, the first line of action is a multitouch nurture program that begins to help us understand if someone is close to purchase or is truly only seeking educational information.

There are countless statistics around how much of the buying cycle is complete before prospects talk to vendors, and in many cases for a deeply considered purchase that number can easily be above 60 percent. So think about that: our customers already know almost everything about our product or solution before ever speaking to us. Clearly this means we'd better have architected an intelligent conversation that highlights our strengths and competitive advantage before someone calls our sales rep to make that purchase.

That exact dynamic is increasingly more common in e-commerce circles as well. Instead of using a specific lead score level or a demo request like a B2B process would, we look for purchase intent in other behaviors. A common action that many marketers have leveraged successfully is cart abandon. This program is routine among almost any ecommerce retailer of scale precisely because it translates the customer action of almost buying into real revenue.

Think about the last time you considered buying a new product or upgrading an existing service—like I did recently with Comcast. They have a well-timed cart abandon email that understands both the products and services I'm considering. So when I put new cable boxes in my cart to see the monthly pricing totals, they wait a couple of hours and send a reminder that I didn't actually finalize the purchase (as shown in Figure 8.1).

Although there are lots of content and offer strategies you can ply in a cart abandon email, I always counsel my marketers not to begin with a discount. Today's best practices point toward a two- to three-touch nurture campaign that begins within an hour of the abandon with a subtle reminder, and likely doesn't offer a discount until the final contact approximately a week later. As we move to a more stored payment-driven world, it's conceivable that redeeming a cart abandon offer might be limited to placing your thumb on the home button of your iPhone and paying with your card on-file with iTunes. Either way, this is a standard, must-do technique for ecommerce retailers in this day-and-age.

Direct Mail

Of all the channels we discuss in this section, I'm convinced that direct mail might be the most underestimated trick in most marketers' bags. You've likely either grown up (professionally) in a world that was heavily direct mail or you haven't ever tackled it at all. Its inherent complexity (external vendors abound) and cost mean that most marketers don't proactively add this to their channel mix. It also doesn't help that it enjoys a less-than-positive sentiment that always focuses on how expensive it can be.

Although it's true that postage costs are an ever-rising issue, and competing with the noise level and/or the ignore factor within someone's physical mailbox is an equal challenge, reaching out to a highly valued (or qualified) customer as part of a true multichannel buying experience can be very powerful. Just think about how many catalogs you receive in the mail. If that model didn't work, you'd stop getting them in under a month.

So there really are two key use cases for great direct mail. The first is a traditional catalog marketer, which is a role many digital marketers could learn a few key lessons from. For catalogers, the ability to grow a list is uninhibited by pesky little rules like opt-in permissions. Sure you might have to deal with do-not-mail lists, but the penalties take the form of your wasted printing costs—not $10,000 per message fines from the Federal Trade Commission.

When the size of your audience is not limited by outside regulatory influences, the economics of marketing come into play—making three questions rather clear:

1. How big can I get my list?
2. What's my strategy for uncovering active buyers?
3. How much am I willing to spend to drive one average transaction?

You might notice that these questions are not radically different from how the smartest behavioral marketers might view the world: we care about scale, cost, and return. We're numbers driven and are both tracking and acting on customer behaviors at scale. Interestingly, I see some very strong catalog brands take to behavioral marketing very quickly. Because they already think in segments, actions, and cost, converting that from physical catalogs to digital communications is likely easier.

For example, I've spent a fair amount of time with a European holding company that owns multiple brands in a specific Benelux country. Their business consists of multiple market segments such as grocery, home, and baby—much of which they market in very traditional ways (catalog, outdoor, etc.). It'd be as if their country's version of IKEA, Kroger, and Babies “R” Us were all under the same corporate umbrella.

At one point, someone mentioned that the overwhelming majority of households in the country were somewhere on their house lists. Interestingly, they're an absolutely brilliant catalog marketer for all their nongrocery businesses and are perfectly comfortable with SKU variations by zip code, customer lifetime value (CLV), and other deep-stack tactics. So while they adopt behavioral marketing at a slower pace than your average ecommerce startup—because they can afford to grow slow and steady—it's the discipline of their heritage that gives them a huge leg up.

The genesis of the first lesson behavioral marketers can take from great direct mailers is to understand the cost-driven metrics of marketing. Oftentimes it's easy to think of email as free and to, therefore, be willing to blast everything to everyone. However, almost every marketer comes to see how the 80/20 rule comes into play here: that is, at least 80 percent of the interactions and spend come from the top 20 percent of active recipients. I have ecommerce brands who regularly drive 40 percent+ of their email revenue from less than 3 percent of their send volume. So think about how you market more effectively to a smaller audience to drive greater results.

The second lesson direct mail offers is cross-channel activation. As much as we'd love to believe everything happens in digital—and it primarily does for our youngest audience members—the challenge is often more about creating a strong multichannel campaign that performs better than a single channel could alone.

For example, imagine you're a very smart ecommerce marketer who understands CLV deeply, but you're working on making your email program more effective. That lack of email prowess is likely costing you high-dollar opt-outs in the course of your normal marketing efforts. Perhaps you should consider building customer-specific rescue programs that run completely via direct mail. Although we don't want to double-down on annoying a customer post opt-out, a simple follow-up survey sent via postcard might be just what you need to restart the conversation—or at least figure out what you're doing wrong that's costing you subscribers.

Although that's the “save case,” you might also think about direct mail as a great way to deepen your presales relationship in a complicated, long-cycle sales environment. In this day and age, there's probably an equal chance this could be a B2B or B2C scenario.

Sending direct mail offers to luxury automobile buyers is a tried-and-true method for driving existing brand loyalty, new brand consideration, and traffic into retail dealerships. The same scenario works if you're selling health insurance products on behalf of registered agents to employers with more than 500 staff members. Understanding that each employer reviews prices and features in the second quarter to determine their offerings for the next calendar year presents an excellent opportunity for marketing to send a “meeting-maker” campaign designed to identify high-value prospects who are ready to buy. A beautifully well-orchestrated meeting-maker program has the opportunity to drive 5 to 10 times the revenue over the program costs if it features a strong offer and great audience segmentation.

Direct mail can be a great second-channel play in support of a solid digital strategy. Although there are still industries that are direct mail first (think couponing), many of those will likely become digitized over the next three to five years. There's a very clear business-model reason that the United States Postal Service is now delivering packages on Sundays for Amazon: less and less of their revenue will come from postage.

One last item to consider is direct mail's powerful ability to aggressively prospect for new customers without the restrictions that come with phone or email. Although you can buy names for fractions of a penny, the conversion rate into truly loyal customers is normally minuscule. Depending on the product or service you're selling, this type of carpet-bombing prospecting might make sense. If it does, understand its limitations and know that it's probably not sustainable as your only method of customer targeting.

Sales

Although there are literally thousands of books on sales processes, sales strategies, and sale technologies, this section focuses on two very clear behavioral-driven moments:

1. When to invoke sales.
2. How to arm sales with as much data as possible.

Some of this thinking will vary based on your industry or business model, but I'll present the overall concepts in enough depth that it will be easy to apply them to your particular world.

First, let's look at another example based on Silverpop's internal thinking about how sales fits into the ideal behavioral-marketing-driven buying experience. Before we start, one caveat: Silverpop's business is a pure-play software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that relies on a one-to-many, marketing- and content-driven process to fill the top of the prospect funnel. It's different than a traditional services-driven model such as a consultancy that depends on successful projects run by on-site resources that then lead to bigger projects with the same (or similar) customers. I'll focus on the SaaS model as it neatly delineates the roles of marketing, inside sales, and outside sales.

In a world of fully realized behavioral marketing, it's not difficult to define—and even quantify—the roles of the marketing and sales. Marketing's primary function is to produce two key deliverables: leads and content. Marketing is top-of-the-funnel in a pure SaaS world and has the job of delivering an ever-increasing volume of qualified leads to the sales function.

As a result, marketing should be managing a wide variety of programs such as corporate-branded events, external sponsorships, digital advertising (banners, search, etc.), and deeply specific nurture programs by customer and lead type. Behind this lead-driving machine, most solid marketers have a scoring system that exists to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff. When a prospect's score rises high enough from marketing's activities, they're considered a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and passed over to inside sales.

Inside sales' job is to run a progression with the newly minted sales qualified lead (SQL)—which is just a fancy term for what happens when sales takes ownership of the lead from marketing. In most cases, the first effort is to close the business without involving outside sales in order to keep acquisition costs lower. If the marketing function can't close the business directly, then it's inside sales' job to gather additional information (demographic, buying authority, product needs, etc.) in order to power the best possible outcome for outside sales.

In some cases, inside sales will receive leads that are qualified but not ready to buy. Maybe they're the right industry and company size, but still have six months left on a contract with your competitor. Or maybe they're studying up to understand the next level of service provider that can support their business when growth takes off. Regardless of the reason, this is the magic moment for inside sales to either accelerate the lead to outside sales for full pursuit, or decelerate the lead into a marketing-driven nurture program that's ideally industry- and/or buyer-need based.

This happens frequently in the Silverpop marketing effort. We'll meet a prospect at an event or conference, and they'll just be starting to shop for next year's vendor. They might not be ready to sign on the dotted line next month, but by delivering a well-executed, informative nurture program, we earn the right to be considered during the next buying cycle.

We cannot overstate how critical this point is in your lead process. Everything else in the marketing and sales process should be built to optimize this moment. If too many are decelerating to nurture programs, you need to improve your lead capture sources. If everyone's being passed along to outside sales, it's time to evaluate your inside sales decision-makers and look closely at the lead-to-close percentages.

Figure 8.2 should begin to illuminate how we answer the “when” question for sales—and how we factor for both marketing and demand generation as well. In order to maintain everyone's sanity, I almost always suggest you turn on scoring functionality across your processes. Having an objective number that determines when a lead is passed from marketing to sales (and back, if necessary) has some very important benefits, including these:

• Marketing understands (and can be measured by) the importance of spend versus quality.
• Sales understands the marketing touch points that lead to the high score.
• Executive management can look at a holistic, end-to-end sales process and understand where to make additional investments.
• Trust and confidence are built among the entire leadership team.

  

This helps take emotions and personalities out of the equation. Either marketing is delivering high-quality leads based on a reasonable budget, and sales is closing a logical number of deals or they're not, and you need to hold someone accountable.

Before we discuss what data needs to flow to sales to power the right outcomes, let's look at scoring for a minute. We talk in detail about scoring throughout the book, so a real-life example about how scoring can bring customer understanding to life is helpful here.

One of our customers in the home security space implemented a top-to-bottom scoring model designed to further segment their leads into hot, warm, and cold prospects. Following much historical research on response rates and conversion numbers, they defined six major key attributes in two top-level categories on which to base scores. In almost every case, I'd recommend focusing on their top-two categories: demographic and behavioral. These two elements nicely combine the “who” and “what” actions we're trying to get at.

Within demographic and behavioral, their analysis pointed out three key decision-making elements:

1. Demographic
   1. Home ownership: Given the purchase was a long-term investment, they discovered homeowners bought more often, even though they had a relatively unique value proposition for renters. The values they assigned were a simple 200 for homeowners, and 50 for renters.
   2. Credit score: With thousands of dollars of equipment installed up front and a multiyear contract, it was important to focus on customers who would pay regularly. The values assigned ranged from 300 for excellent to a low of 15 for a sub-600 credit score.
   3. Lead generation source: They had a referral model that involved incentives for both the referrer and referee, and sometimes also featured specific collateral materials for the new prospect. When the collateral was involved, the conversion rate went up significantly so they assigned 200 points to that action, and a low of 25 points to someone who was a simple web or phone lead.
2. Behavioral
   1. Clicks on buy now links: This is one of the very clear buying indicators, and they immediately assigned 200 points to any user who took this action. For clicks on other links within the mail content, they'd assign 100 points to factor for a positive interaction—but not all the way to full-on buying behavior.
   2. Visits to website purchase pages: They had specific scoring moments set for multiple pages on the site, including a landing page that lived at www.example_site.com/buynow, which earned the user 100 points. Any other page visit earned the user 100 points for each page visited.
   3. Opening email: In addition to follow-on actions that indicated buying behavior, they also wanted to positively factor for people who were interacting often with their nurture programs. So for each email open, every user was assigned 15 points.

As you can see, this model actively selects for specific persona-level buyers who are taking purchase-like behaviors.

An absolutely critical overlay to all these event-based scores is the concept of time. The company clearly understood that, more often, buyers convert early and through the middle of a typical buying cycle (90 days in their case). To adequately factor for time, they assigned one-time scores to users at the beginning of a time period—100 for the first three days, 75 for days four to seven, 25 for the first month, and so on down to 90 days.

And because they clearly understood very few people bought after 90 days, they added what I refer to as a “top-kill” value of –5,000 assigned to the 91st day. This effectively erased virtually all prospects from the model given that the average high score in the model was between 2,500 and 3,000. This is a pretty heavy-handed tactic, but I applauded them for being data-driven enough to know when to expend their resources on another user who is more likely to close.

Once they had mapped out and began tracking all these individual scores, it was time to validate a ranking model. The process of ranking each of these scores against the others is critical in building relevance between each of the prospects—since it helped marketing decide which segments to double-down on in terms of additional content and offers, and highlighted which segments had a low probability of converting.

Their model allowed them to individually rank each customer based on their actual behaviors, and the tiers looked like Figure 8.3.

Finally, they allowed the model to run for four to six weeks, and then calculated conversions based on the scores each user achieved. This generated a conversion rate for each of the ranks shown in Figure 8.3, and in this case, clearly highlighted that the A's and B's were the sweet spot of conversion. It wasn't a surprising result, but imagine the clarity with which they can now market to hot prospects. The brand has unequivocal evidence of which scores predict conversion.

Simply focusing on those most likely to convert earned them thousands more in revenue and invaluable customer insight. And by later separating their highest performing A and B segments into even more granular segments including A+, B+, and B-, they were able to almost triple the conversion rates in each audience group.

And what are their secret weapons in converting the A's and B's at an ever-increasing rate? You're spot-on if you guessed hot leads being dropped directly into inside sales call queues. A fully objective scoring model running behind the scenes, combined with a well-trained inside sales function, was exactly what they needed to take revenue to the next level.

So if invoking sales at the perfect moment is an early step toward greatness, the question then becomes: what data does that salesperson need to close quickly and effectively? Simply throwing names and phone numbers over the proverbial wall will be an exercise in futility—particularly for the prospect. They don't want a call to rehash all the information they've already received and comprehended. And the sales resource doesn't want to dial blindly to what you're claiming is a hot prospect.

This is where a CRM system can serve as an important “connective tissue” system between marketing and sales. With the rise of fully SaaS-driven CRM platforms, it's not difficult to trial a few market leaders—like Microsoft Dynamics or NetSuite or Salesforce—to understand which works best for your business. Whichever option you choose will depend on a ton of different factors, but having technology to support this critical moment is a solid strategy for building toward your ideal future state.

Silverpop marketers are most likely to have all their email and marketing automation data bi-directionally synced with one of the CRM platforms mentioned above. A prospect is a known entity to both platforms, and salespeople's actions are all consolidated such that marketing and sales each have their own segmented but shared view of the customer relationship. For example, the Silverpop platform would hold all the campaign-level resources and response rates, and any new record-level data appending would probably be done in CRM.

The most critical set of data is what we call “customer insight”—simply a list of every campaign sent to the prospect. This allows sales to take a quick spin through everything a prospect has received to power a much more intelligent conversation. They now understand which whitepapers they've read, what pricing has been communicated, and so forth. That level of detail might power a call script something like this:

Hi Bryan, this is Jenny from Company X calling and I wanted to follow-up with you regarding our solutions. I know we've shared a few important whitepapers with you in the last three months—especially the one on buyer segmentation—and I'd like to see if you're ready to schedule a demo to see the platform in action? As you know from our Company Y case study, we have some great automotive industry solutions that could really drive your business. I've also got a handful of 30-day trial invites, and I'd be glad to share one with you.

Jenny has a clear understanding of multiple data points that keep this conversation productive and fast-paced:

1. She knows Bryan is an approved prospect with a score high enough to get him into her call queue.
2. She can see the exact whitepapers Bryan has received.
3. The next step in their ideal customer journey is a demo, which is Jenny's desired outcome during this call.
4. Jenny knows the industry segment of Bryan's company, and also knows he's consumed content related to it.
5. Jenny also knows Bryan's company has been approved to receive the free trial offer.

This type of cross-channel orchestration gives buyers subtle yet powerful indications you're paying attention and honing your marketing efforts. Even a subconscious advantage at this critical juncture is enough to tip the scales to conversion. Many times a highly informed, successful interaction is what pulls the buying moment forward to now.

Tying marketing and sales together around key customer behaviors is not always easy. However, it's one of the most powerful strategies you can employ if both groups actively sell your products or services. The cost of a phone call can be an expensive touch point, but by making sure that person is perfectly armed with all the previous contact details and any available offers creates a perfect buying opportunity for your prospect. The rep can dynamically deal with any product and/or company objections, and will have the opportunity to overtly ask for the sale. And sometimes that's all it takes—a well-orchestrated digital nurture process followed by an educated closing call.

Call Center

Although we've talked in-depth about how to integrate inside sales into your behavioral marketing efforts, it's important to factor for the times when you have less control over the entire process—namely, inbound call centers scenarios. Many of the same dynamics—including how to arm your reps with the maximum customer information—apply here, but in this case we need to take a fundamentally more progressive view of the call center's role.

There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when call centers were outsourced to other places on the globe in order to cut costs. As customers' experiences degraded, they became increasingly dissatisfied and vocal—just as the rise of social media began. Remember the short-lived NBC sitcom Outsourced that ran for one season in 2010? If an aspect of marketing is so pervasive as to be lampooned in a sitcom, you know it's bad.

Old school marketers only ever saw call centers as a necessary (and really expensive) evil—something they had to offer to customers to keep them out of retail locations, and be able to deal with the scale of thousands of customers. Although there were some technology improvements over the years, the average cost per call never got much below approximately $7.50 with a decently trained U.S.-based call center. And when you extrapolate those costs over thousands or millions of customers, you can imagine how fast the costs get out of hand.

I worked internally for a market-leading package delivery company whose business operated at a scale few industries could match—imagine something on the order of 12 to 15 million packages a day. Each time a driver attempted delivery at a commercial address and no one was present to sign, they'd leave a small notice with the phone number and website information to schedule the next delivery attempt. Most times, though, the customer would simply call the main 800 number and have to navigate the interactive voice response (IVR) system to find the right call center rep. There was also a large volume of website home-page visits where package recipients were trying to solve the same problem.

The steady state of the daily volume ran around 20,000 calls into the call center. It slowly crept up over time, and when it reached about 50,000 calls per day, we'd deploy a full set of on-site assets including home page banners and customized landing pages. Within hours, it would drive the volume back down to ∼20,000 calls a day, and the process would begin again. In that example, you can imagine the cost-savings impact of 30,000 fewer calls in the call center per day.

With that level of savings available, it's not surprising that companies of all shapes and sizes ended up shipping the call center overseas. The opportunity to cut out 66 percent of the cost was just too tempting for executives looking to wring every penny of cost out of the business.

Yet because the customer experience suffered greatly, there was a great deal of pressure on companies to return call centers to the United States. Unfortunately for many—but fortunate for the call center industry—the Great Recession of 2008 began to displace workers at large scale. And one of the emerging jobs for the hardest hit areas like rural North Carolina became U.S.-based call center representatives.

A few interesting things happened about the time these functions began to come back stateside. As mentioned previously, it took place just as social media was becoming more widely used—giving customers a much louder voice and larger audience to complain about a brand's shortcomings. Before Facebook, the biggest risk might be someone who wrote a letter to the editor that then actually got published—which was clearly not enough risk to modify any given company's subpar behavior.

At about the same time, the Recession decimated many consumers' spending power, prompting even more competition for every dollar spent. However, the smartest marketers realized that quality service could be a differentiator. Sure, everyone was going to have to be price-aggressive to retain their share of spend; but the ability to have a more personal customer interaction with a call center rep became a distinguishing factor.

We often see this in the travel industry; specifically, in how companies like Delta Air Lines and Hilton Hotels doubled down on their best customers with dedicated call center reps. But this also was a time when many manufacturer brands saw an opportunity to develop customer-facing relationships they'd previously left to the retail channels where they began. Many brands like Dyson, Graco, and Hoover were introducing (or expanding) their product registration and product warranty registration events to begin to build a customer database that could be both marketed or sold to in the future.

These “new-school” marketers began looking at every customer touch point as an opportunity to deepen the relationship. It's very powerful for a child-car-seat company like Graco to understand the age of my two daughters. The product registration event helps them comply with customer notification laws in the event of recall, but it also gives them some great clues about when my girls should be moving from convertible car seats to booster seats. And those critical data points—captured by a well-trained call center rep during a simple product registration call—could easily become the data behind the decision points on when to kick off dynamic marketing programs.

The key for inserting behavioral marketing into your inbound call center begins with the right sizing of your thinking on that overall touch point. Do you see it as an opportunity to deepen your customer relationship? Are you willing to train a small group in your call center to go beyond the basics? Could you cross-sell or cross-market other solutions to your customers?

If not, stop now and do nothing. The best next move is to assign a business analyst to do an ROI model for the entire channel, but, honestly, next year is probably fine in terms of timing. When you prove the business case, then begin slowly with rep training and data collection goals.

On the other hand, if you can highly value the touch point—and build a back-of-the-napkin business case that shows tens of thousands of dollars in cost savings—then it's time to get down to business! You'll begin saving money almost immediately on a per-call basis, and you can aggressively benchmark your data collection goals. Also, you'll want to factor a call center touch into your attribution models so you can understand how often that role contributes to closing business.

You might wonder why I'm so quick to write off behavioral marketing in an inbound call center without a 100 percent commitment. It has nothing to do with the cost savings or revenue upside, both of which are very strong in call centers. It's more about a marketer's capacity to execute.

If you're not absolutely committed to something as complex as reengineering a call center, it's a mistake to even begin the exercise. As a marketer, you'll need to work very closely with a much broader group of internal stakeholders and have built extensive trust in your ability to deliver. Most successful projects in this space are spearheaded by a VP or someone in a higher role—someone who has a virtually direct reporting line authority to key resources in hiring, training, and operations.

Social Networks

If an inbound call center is the optional place to take on behavioral marketing, then social networks are the other end of the spectrum: that is, you don't have a choice, and most of your competitors are already doing it. Although there are literally millions of words written annually on social media marketing and strategy, we're going to focus on how to make three to five key decisions about behavioral marketing and your strategy. Although they're fantastic examples of success in this area, what works for Starbucks, Arby's, and Delta Air Lines is not likely to be the best strategy for you.

It's critical to remember one important point regarding social channels: these channels require more human touch than any other pure marketing channel (excluding sales and the call center). Authenticity and a specific brand voice are not optional components. No matter how automated our listening tools that slice-and-dice user behaviors can become, the moment of person-to-person interaction had better be filled with context and continuity. If we're willing to excuse a brand's occasional dynamic email slip-up, there's zero room for error with Twitter replies or Facebook comments.

I see first-hand the effort it takes to manage social networks well among my customers. In general, marketers should spend about 30 hours per month per social network in order to truly win. Therefore, if one person at your company is running Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as 50 percent of their job, it's safe to say things are not exactly optimized. There's likely a lot of cross-posting that might make activity numbers look great, but the next level of interactions is probably a pretty grim story. If you're not dialing interactions specifically for each audience, you could be doing much better. We'll talk more in-depth about voice later, but let's look at the three key issues you need to address as the basis for a great behavioral-driven social strategy:

1. Marketing versus listening
2. Brand versus customer support
3. Customer/prospect demographics versus existing networks

Brand or Support

Once we're past the “why,” then it's time to figure out the “how” behind social media—and what types of behaviors are the true golden moments to focus on. To begin, this requires a fundamental understanding of your business—and what your customer is trying to achieve when they interact with you in social channels. Do they need reassurance that your brand of clothing most closely fits their lifestyle, or do they need you to rebook an airplane seat on a just-cancelled flight? These very different needs require a truly unique approach.

If you're a brand marketer whose job is to create buying preference over time through social interactions, then having a marketer managing your social feed is ideal. Keeping active audiences aware of new products, delivering new content, interacting with current and future customers are all great reasons to dive into your social networks of choice. Your goal should be to support your customer's information needs and to build more raving fans. You should be personally engaging in most discussions about your brand in a subtle, nonsales way. Be the conversation.

If, on the other hand, you're in the airline business, then your social channels are really just an extension of your customer support function. In this case, you need to have someone with call center skills and great social media awareness. You'll want to think through 24-hour coverage, and you should probably add the individual user's initials to the end of each tweet to keep conversations personalized and coordinated. (See the example from Delta Air Lines in Figure 8.4 showing both a tweet itself, and the background referring the two initials back to a first name and last initial, which beautifully humanizes the interaction.) From a behavior perspective, you should be focused on reducing customers' pain points. Many days that will be connecting flight information, weather updates, and destination details, but sometimes it's just thanking them for their business.

Your business is probably somewhere in the middle—and that is when it becomes challenging. The best marketers I work with build strong networks across their companies in which they delegate issues, and generally default to a more brand-driven social approach. They want to encourage interactions and conversations with both customers and prospects, but they have a clear plan to deal with complaints and scheduling issues.

One of the clearest points of delineation can be specific customer behaviors that you optimize your social channels to handle. One recent example is the rise of Twitter's advertising product called Lead Generation Cards. By reducing a user's action to a single “submit” click to opt-in to an email list, contest, or other program, Lead Generation Cards provide a low-effort way to get user-level information (typically email address and Twitter username) pumped directly into your marketing database so you can continue the conversation across other channels.

Some of the most progressive marketers also use a combination of outside vendors and API technology to understand user sentiment at-scale. Technology certainly exists to keep a running tally on whether someone has a positive, neutral, or negative opinion of you and/or your products, which can then be used to deliver dynamic content across other channels like email.

Regardless of which flavor of social you implement, you'll need to remain flexible in how you view the channel. Today's awareness-building efforts should migrate into deeper customer understanding goals over the next 12 to 18 months. Finding the right balance between service, support, and sales—all executed with a consistent, authentic voice—is a long-term goal that requires lots of different tactics along the way.

Mobile Applications

Finally let's look at the channel that likely has the most growth potential over the next 12 to 18 months: mobile applications.

To begin, ask yourself the fundamental question about this emerging channel. Do you view mobile apps as a necessary evil—something you contract out to a third party, check off your to-do list, and forget about shortly thereafter? Or is your mobile app a vital and integrated component of your marketing program? If you're like most organizations, you probably fall into the former category. It's no wonder, then, that app analytics and marketing platform Localytics reports that 20 percent of apps are used only once—and about 60 percent opened less than 10 times.

With mobile engagement on the rise, and technological advances enabling businesses to integrate apps deeper into their overall marketing strategy than ever before, it's time restart the conversation about mobile apps. Specifically, how can you move your app to a 2.0 version that delivers continued value to your customers and provides a superior mobile (and overall) experience?

Take one of my favorite apps: digital music service Spotify. This app keeps me engaged and coming back for more by allowing me to discover new artists and download specific albums or tracks for offline listening during my frequent travels. In addition, in-app inbox messages notify me what friends are listening to, exposing me to more great new music.

The awesome experience continues onto the desktop app, which syncs my preferences seamlessly between devices. And of course Spotify takes all this data and uses a really smart recommendation algorithm to highlight more music suggestions in its emails, which I almost always open because they're so relevant.

If you're still on the fence about whether moving your mobile app functionality beyond “find the nearest store location” is worth your time and resources, consider these three benefits:

1. Gain a new data source: What actions are contacts taking in your mobile app? Where are your customers right now? And how often do they come to your store? Apps can be rich sources of data that—with the right integrations back into your dynamic marketing tools—can enhance your knowledge of individual customers.
2. Send push notifications: According to the business intelligence firm Aberdeen Group, using mobile touch points—such as personalized push notifications—can increase conversion rates by 8.5 percent. Used strategically, these notifications can help you deliver timely, relevant information or offers linked to a customer's location and behaviors.
3. Access to a new inbox: The mobile app inbox delivers an all-new destination for marketers to reach—one that sports a new set of benefits (as in the Spotify example mentioned earlier). Beyond the fact that permission for sending is typically contained in your terms and conditions of usage (and doesn't provide a traditional email-like opt-out function), in-app inboxes allow marketers to send time-constrained offers and single-use promotional codes to specific users in a true one-to-one manner. Yet because permission is different, marketers need to show restraint in using this new channel.

Taking the time to build and update apps to offer content and value that entices customers to download and repeatedly interact with them—as well as accept push notifications—allows marketers to tap into a whole new way of more strongly engaging their customers.

By taking steps to improve your in-app experience—and making these improvements a key objective for your marketing team—you'll be on the path to better understanding the behaviors that are manifesting themselves in the mobile app world and using this knowledge to create a more seamless, rewarding customer experience.