Defining Your Now

Of all the steps in this—or any—transformation, the first is typically the hardest. That's not because the task is so monumental; it's because you need to break out of a previous way of thinking, regardless of how successful your trusted approach has been. It also takes time and some serious consideration to decide to replace your lens on the world, which is an analogy I don't use flippantly. In order to drive meaningful, long-lasting, epic change in your marketing, you absolutely must change your fundamental outlook. The burning questions is no longer “How big is my list?” It's now, “What's the best offer for that high-value segment?”

You'll hear this many times throughout the book, but now is the moment when you need to clearly understand your business at a very deep level. If we're going to revamp marketing's view of the customer, you'd better have a lot of insight on their needs and wants. You must appreciate fully what you customers want to buy from you—and what they feel would be a stretch for your current brand-level relationship.

For example, many people buy different styles of shoes from radically different retail outlets for lots of reasons. The Mom who defines almost all household-spending dynamics is a study in contrast by herself. She may buy her work and dress shoes from Zappos because of their great customer service and return policies, her kids' shoes from Nordstrom based on immediate availability and wide selection, and her own athletic shoes from a local specialty sporting goods retailer like Modell's or Dick's based on aggressive pricing on her preferred brand. Knowing what she expects from a shoe seller is a complicated matrix of price, availability, brands, and shopping preferences.

To truly understand where you lie today, look at your marketing on two specific axes: today's success rate and how personalized you are. Said simply, you need to baseline your marketing performance against your direct competitors (or proxies in other industries); and you need to be very honest about how well you communicate with individuals. If your results are middle-of-the-pack in revenue, and all your campaigns are batch-and-blast messages where everyone gets the same message, then you've got some serious work to do—but also, some nice potential upside in your results.

Conversely, if you're a market-leading brand like Nike that excels at personalized messaging based on products owned or known hobbies like running, your effort is going to be more subtle—and may not have a huge immediate upside. You may have to work harder to achieve eye-popping results, but you will already be feeling the benefits of more personalized marketing.

Once you've honestly assessed your current results—and for most a 1 to 10 scale is the most relevant measuring stick—then take an equally critical look at your personalization. Again, assigning yourself a 1 to 10 score is probably a great way to quantify your current and future state. The litmus test here should be how many microsegments are you actively marketing to.

To define this specifically, ask yourself, How often do I send a customized message to a subset of my overall list? For example, give yourself major credit for cart-abandon email campaigns, but subtract a point or two if you blast out a sale email every Thursday. There's certainly a time and place for that sale email, but for the purposes of quantifying your effort, you need to have at least one great behavior-driven email to offset that blasting technique.

So, in essence, you'll end up with a scorecard for your email efforts. Although it might not be something as complex as you'd assemble for your customer-facing efforts, having a quantified measure of your “now” state is an important first step and allows you to measure improvement over time.

Tackling Channels One at a Time

A large portion of this chapter will focus on a single channel: email. It's the most widely used, affordable tactic in most marketers' arsenal. When you're mapping out the implications of behavioral marketing, it's best to initially take a channel-by-channel view, and then build that into an overall score. Because each channel has its own dynamics, it's important we don't confuse the tactics with a channel's natural rules.

For example, your customer support function by definition is going to be highly personalized and dynamic because you're dealing with an individual customer's very specific issues. In this case, your behavioral marketing goals might be more focused on building a killer Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) model into your follow-up process.

It's also important to note that not every marketer is going to tackle every channel. Either you don't have one in play (no brick-and-mortar stores), or you're resource-constrained and can't boil the ocean this year. So thinking about each channel separately and scoring them the same way allows us to aggregate the scores by channel into an overall behavioral marketing quotient.

Building Your Behavioral Marketing Quotient

Although it sounds daunting, the beauty of quantifying the smaller parts of your effort is that you can simply add them together to get the larger score. This is also important in determining how to improve. For example, a marketer might quantify four of the channels (email, direct mail, social, and call center) to arrive at an overall quotient of 24 (assuming they're equally weighted in importance).

Your goal may then be to get to 30 by the end of that calendar year. You can undertake changes in any of the channels, and the individual score improvement will lift the overall quotient. This is especially vital early in the process when there are many gains to be had. Measuring this lift over time by channel is also an important step in quantifying your efforts.

A word of caution: many marketers tend to be oversharers, and they can't help but want to publicize every new method and campaign. This isn't necessarily bad; it's just that the first steps on this journey should probably focus more on self discovery and honest assessments.

Although these scores and quotients might be the type of data a marketing director could use as a construct with their managers and staff, they aren't necessarily the kind of key performance indicators (KPIs) I'd be socializing up to my senior vice president. We'll come back to the topic of managing both up and down your executive chain in the next chapter, but suffice to say you'll want to perfect the methodology and populate a couple of solid quarters of data before you go shouting about it from the proverbial mountaintop.

What About Your Organization?

Although assessing your own channel-level marketing performance is the first (and most important) step, it'd be foolish to ignore the bigger construct in which you'll be working. Having a realistic but aggressive view of your company's readiness to think more about behaviors than traditional marketing tactics is an important baseline to articulate.

I'd suggest you use the same 1 to 10 scoring basis you have used for your channels, and then update that metric over the next two to three years. Give your organization credit for improvements, but also be critical of cutbacks that lead to fewer customer-driven choices and less personalization. You might not know every detail of each corner of the business, but keep a general idea of how things are going.

Although it's important to recognize your company's overall orientation toward behavioral marketing, I'd caution marketers to rarely use this as an excuse for not being aggressive in your own programs. Sure, some industries (and specific companies) may have regulations and rules that forbid retaining deep customer information for marketing purposes: for instance, alcohol companies who are prohibited from marketing to under-21 users. But don't fall into the trap of the “this is how we do business” mentality passed down from higher-ups. If this is the case, then it only highlights the upside potential of you bringing this level of thinking to your company.

Technology Is Absolutely Your Friend

There are many ways to reorient a company around behavioral marketing, but one of the most critical moments often involves either new or upgraded technology that comes into the marketer's area of responsibility. Many times, that early-stage email platform your predecessor bought simply runs out of steam as your lists become bigger and your desires become more behavioral. Or maybe you're using a brand-new CRM to more closely orchestrate the customer touchpoints between sales and marketing—an epic moment for any growing company.

The bottom line is that your technology stack is one of your most powerful allies in becoming a true behavioral marketer. If you have deployed a rock-solid marketing automation platform, you can almost manage the entire effort out of the marketing department without relying on others within your company.

If you execute your business more significantly on mobile platforms (think inside an app) than on a traditional website, your analytics software must provide key insights into your customer's mobile behaviors. You must gather data on information such as number of logins, overall session times, task-completion stats, and other key measures related to your specific business. I work with a huge number of businesses whose primary tasks are completed in the mobile app, but who track all the behaviors and activity metrics in the marketing automation platform. This allows them to easily trigger email-based reminders and manage an aggressive re-engagement campaign for users who stop using the app.

Finally, you'll need to take a proactive role in the technology selection process within your marketing and IT functions. If you're a director or vice president, you may be the main stakeholder for any purchasing event, which means that it's your job to articulate the business value, define your requirements, and select vendors. Leaving these tasks to others in your organization—particularly IT—is a recipe for disaster.

Oddly enough, the worst-case scenario is not that you have no marketing technology to help you execute. It's normally easier to make a case to license a good software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool for a reasonable cost if you can prove the return on investment (ROI) quickly. Rather, the situation to avoid above all else is getting an overly complicated, difficult-to-use system as part of a larger technology purchase.

I've seen this happen repeatedly for the last 15 years. Normally it's the large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors like Oracle or SAP who will throw in a marketing module for little or no cost while the company spends millions on accounting or finance solutions. If you can't operate and enhance the technology stack at the pace marketing requires (which is normally warp speed compared to finance), then you're in a very tough spot. The business can point to this big investment in marketing, but it's difficult to show consistent revenue lift.

This is exactly why you need to be marketing's number-one advocate for highly usable SaaS-based technologies. Spend time getting to know peers in your industry and understand which vendors have rock-solid solutions for your common use cases. And don't think you have the luxury of making too many wrong decisions; you likely have one shot to get the technology stack right or you're going to be one of two things: really frustrated at work or starting a new job.

Conclusion

Overall, the question of behavioral marketing readiness is an incredibly personal topic, and I'd encourage marketers to be as aggressive as possible when painting the future vision. As a group, we're incredibly aspirational and have the capacity to lead the discussion because we're an integral part of the customer and revenue equations. If we as marketers don't lead this conversation, who will? Normally not finance or IT or sales: it truly belongs in the marketing function.

The next chapter of marketing is ready for us to write it. As Bill Nussey emphasizes in the book's Foreword, the world has changed. Our customers expect much more from us than just offering products for sale. They want education. They want postpurchase support. They want discounts. They want brand experiences. It's marketing's job to deliver all this, and leaving the “how” for others to decide is a critical error.

So get out there and start building your internal relationships. Be a vocal advocate for upgrading your marketing technology stack because you clearly understand how much more you'll be able to accomplish with your staff of three. Build ROI cases based on data from industry analysts and comparable customer case studies. Engage and lead these conversations across your organization, and I promise you'll reap the benefits after you execute well.

So now that you have a framework for understanding your current state, the next task is to think through the elements you'll need to build success into your plan. The great behavioral marketers concentrate on three key areas of focus: roles, people, and technology systems. So let's dive in…