For marketers, behavioral insights are not only interesting, but also key to understanding your audience, beyond demographics and geography.
To understand the behaviors of your audience, you can implement behavioral segmentation, an analysis that groups leads and customers into different segments based on how they behave.
Behavioral targeting is a part of behavioral marketing, a set of methods for collecting and analyzing consumer behavior data to segment and target audiences with laser precision.
What is behavioral segmentation?
Behavioral segmentation is a type of analysis that classifies prospects and customers into segments based on their behaviors when interacting with a business.
With behavioral segmentation, you can gain a more complete understanding of your audience’s motivations and needs, resulting in better tailoring of products and services to your customers.
Behavioral segmentation is interesting because it intersects with psychology: when we think about how someone behaves and why, we naturally think about their psychological motivations.
However, behavioral segmentation is different from psychographic segmentation.
Psychographic segmentation has its roots in lifestyles, interests, values, and even personality traits. Behavioral segmentation is about how a customer interacts with a brand and its products or services.
For example, you can segment people based on behaviors on your web page, such as clicks, page views, social shares, and media views.
Why Marketers Need Behavioral Segmentation
Marketers need behavioral segmentation to understand how prospects and customers are likely to use the company’s products and services and their level of engagement. Behavioral segmentation also fosters cross-functional collaboration between marketing and product teams, helping them align messaging.
- Identify compromised users. Behavioral segmentation helps marketers identify the most engaged users. It would be a waste of marketing time and budget trying to attract potential customers. By analyzing behaviors like opens and clicks, marketers can reduce the noise and allocate efforts to engage users who are already interested and likely to convert.
- Personalize user experiences with the brand. Providing personalized experiences will go a long way toward branding. Behavioral segmentation helps to understand the needs of the audience, which allows you to personalize messages in order to make relevant offers.
- Client retention. Behavioral segmentation helps companies retain customers because marketers know how to personalize the experience for different users. Tailoring experiences so users feel their needs are prioritized increases customer loyalty.
Four Types of Behavioral Segmentation
- Shopping behaviour. Observe a customer’s purchasing behavior and transaction history. This provides insight into how and why you decide to convert, as well as which stages of the buyer’s journey are going smoothly, while the prospect may hit a small bump along the way. It also gives you an idea of which behaviors can accurately predict a conversion.
- sought benefits. Identify what your customers are looking to get out of your product or service: of all its features, which ones do they need the most to solve the challenges they are experiencing? What specific benefits do they get from your product, and which of those benefits are most important to them? Determine which of those benefits are most influencing your decision to use your product/service.
- Stage of the buyer’s journey. Knowing which stage of the customer journey drives the most conversions or which stage prospects abandon most often is beneficial information when predicting behavior and segmenting customers based on those behaviors. However, it is important to note that using stages of the customer journey in behavioral segmentation can be difficult because there are many stages, and within those stages are multiple touchpoints that contribute to behavior or the decision to stay in a stage. or move to a new stage of the customer journey. That’s why it’s recommended to use a platform like your CRM or an AI/Machine Learning tool – they record and track all interactions throughout the buyer’s journey to ensure you get a complete view of buyer’s journey behavior data. your client.
- Use. Behavioral segmentation allows you to segment your customers based on how they actually use the product or service, how often they use it, how long they use it in a single session, or which features they use the most. For example, if you sell software, you may choose to further segment your customers into more specific usage categories, for example, frequent users vs. average users vs. light users. Then, messages from frequent users could highlight advanced features and upsell campaigns, while low-use messages could encourage more usage by discussing key program features or how to use them.
Behavioral Segmentation Examples
Chance
Was it a specific occasion that influenced your customer’s decision to convert? It’s a buying decision based on time of day or even stage of life.
Occasion-based behavioral targeting can help target your messaging to a specific time during the year when certain audiences engage with your brand.
For example, if you have an online greeting card service, you might get repeat customers during the holiday season every year. For those customers, your fourth quarter message might be to extend the Christmas sales.
Customer loyalty
Customer loyalty provides a strong insight into customer behavior: loyalty is directly related to a customer’s habits, actions, needs, usage, and timing of actions.
To use customer loyalty by segmenting customers based on behavior, consider:
- What parts of the buyer’s journey are so great that they lead to loyalty?
- How do you currently keep loyal customers feeling delighted?
- Which prospects are most likely to become loyal?
- What attributes do your loyal customers share?
Commitment
Engagement refers to the type and frequency of interactions you see from certain customers.
These interactions may include page views, clicks, and social media activity. You can segment your customers based on high engagement vs. average engagement vs. occasional engagement.
Highly engaged people are those who have incorporated your brand into their lives on a regular basis. Average users can interact with your brand or product/service quite regularly, but they may not take advantage of its full potential and capabilities. Occasional users may interact with your brand or product/service randomly based on their specific needs.