Usually, when designing targeted offers, you focus on what you know about the prospect. Where do they live? What products do they use? What's their balance? What if you wanted to offer a product only to folks you know nothing about, such as new visitors to your website?

Suppose you had a hot APY offer you wanted to make only to new customers to avoid cannibalizing that cash cow, the passbook savings account. Using cookies, you could avoid showing the offer to online banking users, minimizing their awareness of the product.

Apparently, Citibank is using this approach. In a routine visit to Citibank's website in mid-April using our laptop, we were surprised to see advertisements for its 4.50% e-Savings account dominating the website (click on inset for a closeup). When the high-yield product was announced (NetBanker March 29), many observers believed it was a stealth offer made through a new "Citibank Direct" entity.

But when we returned to the office, the offer had disappeared from the homepage. We had to click on the small "special offers" link to find it listed along with several other offers. Apparently, the cookies on our office PC, which identify us as a Citibank online banking user, triggered the website to load a different homepage. We confirmed this through testing on other PCs.

But before you use this tactic, realize it has significant drawbacks. First, it doesn't work with users who delete or disable cookies, estimated to be as high as 40%. Also, an online banking user visiting from a different location, or with a different browser, will also see your offer.

There is also the risk of your clever marketing being outed to the press and public, which may find the practice deceptive (see SmartMoney, April 2006). Finally, you may be teaching users to game your system, deleting cookies more often, entering different zip codes, and so on. This could hinder your ability to deliver targeted promotions to the customers you DO know something about.

—JB

Note: Citibank isn't shy about putting the offer on Google, where it shows as the top paid result on searches for  "Citibank" (see screenshot right).