Good morning, まさきん here.
In marketing, two concepts come up again and again: targeting marketing and scenario marketing. They’re easy to mix up, so let’s sort out the difference.
The difference between targeting and scenarios
Targeting marketing is the idea of segmenting customers based on attributes, purchase history, interests, and similar data, then tailoring how you reach each segment. In a sense, all marketing boils down to targeting once you dig deep enough. These days, it’s also become fairly common to use what’s called a “lookalike” audience — pulling in users who share traits with a given customer.
Scenario marketing, on the other hand, is built around the customer’s most recent action rather than their attributes. Technically it runs on the same machinery as targeting — the difference is what you use as the trigger condition.
Eight classic delivery scenarios
Behavior-triggered campaigns generally fall into three broad categories: ones tied to the customer lifecycle, ones tied to on-site behavior, and ones tied to the product’s own lifecycle. Let’s look at the representative patterns in each.
Customer lifecycle
- Welcome: Sent right after sign-up. Deliver tips on how to use the service and recommendations while enthusiasm is still high.
- Win-back: A campaign that nudges customers who haven’t engaged in a while to return, typically with a coupon.
- Birthday: An email timed to the customer’s birthday. Pairing it with a coupon is the standard move — the feeling of being treated specially tends to lift both open and click rates.
On-site behavior
- Browse follow-up: A reminder about a product after the customer has viewed it. Since interest is highest right after browsing, this tends to convert well.
- Cart abandonment: A message to customers who added an item to their cart but never completed the purchase.
Product lifecycle
- Cross-sell: Suggesting related products, asking for a review, or encouraging a repeat purchase after a sale.
- Price-drop alert: Letting customers know when a product they were interested in has dropped in price, so they don’t miss the opportunity.
- New product announcement: Letting customers know about a new arrival. Keep sending these consistently in line with the lifecycle, and customers naturally start to remember the rhythm and time their purchases accordingly.
With price-drop alerts, I think timing is everything. Phone carrier switching campaigns might run on a similar mechanism. It’s actually what got me to reconsider my own phone bill, so I’ll drop the link here.
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The quirks I’ve noticed in practice
Of all of these, cart abandonment is the one I personally find most effective. A certain share of customers simply wanted more time to think it over, or were hesitating over payment method, so a little nudge tends to translate directly into results.
Win-back, on the other hand, often doesn’t perform as well, in my experience. I suspect it’s more effective to catch the early signs of disengagement and act before that much distance builds up. A common way to spot those early signs is RFM analysis, which ranks customers by the recency, frequency, and monetary value of their purchases. It’s an old framework, but I still find it a practical foundation for catching “about to go dormant” customers before they actually do.
This applies to scenario marketing as a whole: the audience for any single trigger is inevitably small. So even when click and conversion rates look great for an individual campaign, the small volume makes the short-term impact hard to see. Still, if the scenarios are properly designed, unsubscribe rates stay low, and the daily and weekly accumulation gradually builds into real results.
The eight patterns introduced here were originally organized for e-commerce, but they apply just as well across industries — media sites, lead-generation businesses, recruiting services, you name it. If you think about it, this is really just a systematic way of reproducing the “omotenashi” hospitality that merchants have valued for generations. There’s no need to overthink it: the goal is simply to delight the customer in front of you and earn their affection. Keeping these eight patterns on hand is a useful set of hints for building toward that, one step at a time.
The mechanics themselves are more than a decade old
The ideas introduced here aren’t new. What has changed is that the barrier to actually implementing them has dropped considerably.
Generative AI has made writing campaign copy and personalization much easier than before. Auto-suggested subject lines and preview text, segment-specific copy variations, product-recommendation copy generated from purchase history — a lot of what used to be hand-crafted is now fairly automated. Even the operational side — collecting behavioral data in real time, splitting customers into segments like likely first-time buyers, promising repeat customers, and high-churn-risk customers, and delivering tailored content to each — can now be run by much smaller teams than before. That said, I don’t think you can hand it all over to automation; a final human check on the copy, plus ongoing improvement through A/B testing, still feels essential. The underlying mechanics haven’t changed, but the effort it takes to actually pull it off keeps getting lighter.
I also don’t think you need to build out all eight scenarios at once. Start with the ones that tend to pay off quickly, like cart abandonment and welcome emails, and add the others one at a time as you go. Now that generative AI has cut down the effort of writing copy, this kind of gradual rollout is easier to pull off than ever.
Wrapping up
It’s an old idea, but I think it still forms the foundation of CRM initiatives today. In the end, getting the fundamentals right may matter more than chasing novelty. And come to think of it, the link below might be another example of exactly that kind of outreach.
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