Editor’s Note: A B2B adaptive marketing strategy using marketing automation can help you predict and deliver the best message to your prospects, at the perfect time, through the ideal channel with machine learning.

What’s your definition of spam?

If you’re a marketer, your definition of it might be, “marketing messages, specifically emails, sent without permission.”

If you’re a consumer, your definition is probably broader.

To today’s consumers, spam is any message they don’t want. It’s any message that is irrelevant, not useful, or ill-timed.

Research from Litmus has revealed the number one reason people mark a message as spam is because the “brand sent irrelevant or too many emails.” The second reason is “subscriber was no longer interested in the brand.”

As you may know, we’re big proponents of sending the right message to the right customer at the right time. Given the results of that research from Litmus, it seems like more and more consumers like the idea of getting the right message at the right time, too.

In fact, many of them expect it. Sending the wrong message, or sending it at the wrong time, or to the wrong customer, is becoming the new definition of spam. Spam ― to some ― is a message that hasn’t been adapted to them.

If that’s not the outright definition of spam yet, those poorly targeted messages are definitely not good marketing messages. They’re the type of marketing we’d all like to leave behind. Kind of like “email blasts.”

Fortunately, many of us marketers are abandoning that type of marketing. It’s none too soon for our audiences, either.

Five or ten years ago, prospects and customers might have put up with poorly targeted messages. But now, inboxes are fuller. Schedules are more packed. Deadlines are tighter. And the competition is crazy-fierce.

That “goal” of getting the right message to the right person at the right time may no longer be cutting-edge marketing. It may be just plain old necessary … if you want to engage your audience.

All of that is why adaptive marketing is where we’re headed. And while it might be a goal for now ― and you will certainly get a competitive advantage if you implement it ― in a few years, this won’t be so much of an advantage as an entry point.

Your customers will expect the right message delivered to them at the right time. If you don’t deliver, they’ll unsubscribe, unfollow, or stop taking your calls.

This “right message” definition is a good start if we want to define adaptive marketing. But it’s really only a start.

Here are some other core attributes of what we think Marketing 2.0 will be:

1. Adaptive marketing is personalized.

All this personalization we marketers do is adaptive. We’re adapting our messages to each customer.

And, interestingly enough, personalization is the number one thing we collect data for.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Act-On Blog