There’s a new trend in the marketing arena called “adaptive marketing”. Here’s the thinking. Instead of sending out static, one-dimensional marketing campaigns (such as an email or direct mail blast), businesses take a much more dynamic, real-time approach to their marketing efforts. Currently, most businesses treat their campaigns as discrete efforts and attempt to measure success indicators like open rates, clickthrough rates and eventual conversion (the point at which a lead turns into a confirmed sale). In many businesses, however, the link between a silo campaign and a closed sale is tenuous at best. Are you taking an adaptive approach to marketing? Consider the following questions:
- When you launch an email campaign, can you predict its success based on the behaviours of your audience?
- Do you know how your traditional marketing channels (telemarketing, direct mail, etc.) are contributing to conversion in online channels (such as an email campaign)?
- Are you attempting to build profiles of your prospects and their response behaviours?
- Are you customizing and personalizing follow-up campaigns based on past behaviours?
The vast majority of small business owners are still answering ‘no’ to these questions, and continue to persevere with traditional, disconnected marketing programs that offer no incentive to participate. Adaptive marketing is different. Adaptive marketing recognizes that prospects are more inclined to participate when there is a relationship in place, and promotional communications reflect who they are, their preferences and how they’ve behaved in the past. One great enterprise example of adaptive marketing is Amazon.com. Yes, the company has marketing analytics firepower at its disposal that is outside the reach of most small business owners, but there are lessons to be learned. Amazon gains insight into customer purchase behaviour by intelligently incorporating customer and prospect behaviour into personalized marketing efforts.
For example, when you browse a range of products on Amazon, they are able to leverage predictive analytics to make informed suggestions for follow-up purchases based on affinity and behaviour. Now Amazon isn’t establishing personal relationships with every customer (that would be far too onerous and expensive), but they are recognizing that groups of customers behave similarly and have similar buying habits. The ability to recommend and make suggestions that are relevant and timely communicates the message that Amazon is paying attention: it creates the illusion of intimacy in an online world where anonymity usually reigns.
This is a great example of adaptive marketing, and what does it do? It gets customers and prospects to sit up and pay attention. While you won’t have vast amounts of data analysis at your fingertips, you can take steps to establish a similar level of intimacy that will encourage your customers to participate more actively in their own purchase decision. Here are four steps you can take to get started:
- Reduce Your Customer Universe – Since you don’t have the financial resources or in-house talent to market to everyone, you need to pick and choose the most lucrative customer or business segments – the ones most inclined to build a relationship with you. Adaptive marketing on a small scale is sometimes a fairly manual effort, so you need to ensure that you bite off prospect segments that are manageable and measurable.
- Recognize the Actions Prospects Take – Once you choose your market and segment it carefully, implement a system that will allow you to track behaviour. This can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet that tracks prospects who have previously opened an email marketing message or inquired about a specific product or service on your web site. While not sophisticated, this tracking mechanism can, over time, help you establish behavioural trends that will help you put customers into more targeted groups that you can use for more intimate follow-up campaigns.
- Hail Customers by Name & Behaviour – When sending out additional communications, you can then directly address past behaviour in a way that establishes deeper intimacy. Again, think the Amazon example: “Dear Bruce: As someone who has previously browsed items in our Health & Wellness Store, you might be interested in….”. Prospects are more inclined to engage when relationships in the online universe become personal and targeted: you now have their attention.
- Provoke a Reaction with Content – Using informative content in campaigns – and providing a mechanism to respond to that content – is a vital way to encourage participation. When your prospect starts that dialogue, they are crying out for a response. When you take the time to respond in kind, once again you’re using adaptive marketing to create a feeling of intimacy. This level of engagement can then be factored into additional marketing campaigns since you know the prospect has a greater propensity to engage.
Adaptive marketing isn’t just the domain of industry giants with enterprise budgets. By putting the principles behind it into practice today, you can dramatically improve your one-to-one marketing efforts – even when you’re marketing to many.