The essence of behavioral targeting is seeing things from the customer's perspective. What are they hoping to achieve online? What are they looking for? Which information and offers will be most useful to them? To get these questions right, make sure your customer has a seat at the table. Appoint a customer advocate tasked with evaluating every aspect of the experience you deliver through the customer's eyes, and give the person the authority to demand better when you're falling short.

When each channel, agency, and sales and marketing team operates independently, you end up with a customer experience that's less than the sum of its parts: individually targeted elements that add up to a disjointed mess. Targeted ads lead to generic website content. Clickstream data and account history records remain in separate silos.

Take the example of one large financial services firm. The company's marketing campaigns have won accolades for their design and execution. Closer inspection, though, reveals that customers are constantly bombarded with mail and email from the firm's marketing, sales, services and operations business units -- anywhere from 20 to 100 communications in a short time period, including both regulated mandatory messaging and marketing. Sure, each message was beautifully (and expensively) designed, but most of the marketing pieces were not particularly relevant to the recipient, and the overall volume made for the kind of annoying, overwhelming customer experience we're all too familiar with ("not you again!").

Now put a customer advocate on the case. The advocate analyzes the firm's communications from the perspective of a specific customer segment, assesses the relevancy of the marketing messages being considered and recommends that regulatory communications be bundled wherever possible. The firm lowers communication costs (fewer pieces, fewer mailings), improves marketing (better targeting) and fundamentally and continuously improves customer experience.