Introduction

The right message to the right person at the right time-- that was the gist of it.

It was about five years ago that technology companies and networks started to show us the theoretical potential of behavioral marketing. Wouldn't it be great to eliminate the waste from your online media plan so that outbound messages were getting to people just as they were entering the market for your product?

And behavioral marketing promised a whole lot in addition to reduced media waste:

• Enticing people who had abandoned their shopping cart on an e-commerce site to come back and complete the purchase 
• Giving segment-appropriate messages to loyalists, switchers and competitive product users
• Cross-selling and up-selling on the fly with all sorts of neat-o collaborative filtering applications

Remember all this stuff? This happened before we learned that it's a bit more complicated than flipping a switch. There's all that creative that needs to be developed for the scenarios described above. Then there's the notion of working out the intimate differences in behavior that separate a loyalist from a price-sensitive switcher. Don't even get me started on collaborative filtering.

Indeed, there's a significant gap between the theoretical and what actually happens in practice when you work with a behavioral marketing company.

That's why I wanted to write a bit today about some of the things you can do quickly and easily with behavioral marketing companies to get results, without having to lock yourself in your office for three days to define behavioral segments for all your prospective customers.

First, let's talk about some basic purchase funnel stuff.

Author notes: Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.