Technological challenges, lack of experience, privacy concerns, and consumers growing awareness of the value of information make sophisticated targeting both expensive and elusive. But there are companies that have successfully gone online to market themselves and their products to a large audience in new ways that take advantage of the Internet. In particular, these leaders use the Internet simply as a powerful feedback mechanism that utilizes knowledge of consumer behaviors to constantly refine targeted communications with those consumers. As they explore new ways of interacting with customers, companies like Amazon, DoubleClick, Net Perceptions, Personify, and Priceline have learned a number of valuable lessons about what works in electronic marketing. Product and service offers can be used as information-gathering experiments.
New technologies lead to new kinds of customer interaction.
It s hardly rocket science, but successful online marketers have built on these three lessons to create a process for constantly adapting their offers to an evolving marketplace. By continuously experimenting with new offers and capabilities, systematically capturing the results of these real-market tests, and focusing on the rich behavioral information that electronic commerce makes available, they are inventing a new kind of consumer marketing. The online marketing process begins with an offer and uses technology to learn from the various ways that customers interact with and respond to it. Feedback from the learning process is used to shape the next offer. While the principle of learning to find and understand customers remains unchanged, the key to successful e-commerce marketing will be learning to learn from customers more directly via new technologies and learning to capitalize on that understanding much more quickly.