Improve conversions with Behavioral Marketing

Shoppers today are more receptive to an experience that is tailored to their interests. A study shows that they are likely to shop with brands that offer personalized recommendations. Orchestrating a customer-centric experience right from the awareness stage makes your prospects feel valued. It triggers them to interact with your brand more and increases the chances of a sale.

A representation of conversion rate optimization

Behavioral marketing has reinvented how businesses connect with prospects through advertisements, promotion, and other forms of content marketing. This elevates the buying journey by offering relevant content to the right set of audiences. We explore what behavioral marketing is, and how it helps you better connect with your prospects.

Behavioral marketing is the process of collecting historical behavior data and serving consumers with content that increases awareness and promotes your business solutions. With behavioral marketing, you can capture the prospect’s intent on the website and other digital channels. This helps you understand the intent of your prospects and personalize campaigns that reach them at the right time.

Advantages of Behavioral Marketing

The goal of your marketing campaign is to raise awareness, promote your business and capture your prospect’s attention. When you factor in behavior analytics and customer-centric data, you deliver campaigns with better messaging.

Behavioral marketing helps you supercharge your marketing efforts and offer more value to your customers by:

Increasing prospect engagement

Well-targeted ads outperform general ads. P&G saw its sales grow by 7.5% despite a budget cut when it narrowed its focus on its segment. Behavioral marketing enables you to attract prospects during the consideration or purchase phase. Your campaign gets traction only when your prospects are paying their full attention.

Behavioral marketing helps you narrow down the window that gives maximum conversion. By analyzing historical traffic, you can target your campaign right when your prospects go past the awareness phase.

Improving brand recall and loyalty

Nearly 61% of customers today find financial rewards while 58% find programs highly tailored to their needs an enticing incentive to buy. Understanding your prospects better lets you tailor campaigns that appeal to their wants and need. When you combine these insights and their search intent, you can tailor campaigns that appear right where your prospects are looking.

This is a great way to capture prospects when you don't have content ranking on the first page of the search engine results.

Enhancing targeted segmentation

Behavioral marketing helps you uncover a mix of data sets pertaining to your prospect’s activities, likes, and interests. With deeper insights, you can segment your target audience better. Through granular segmentation, you can run campaigns that your prospects connect with and consume.

Segmentation also helps you understand your prospect’s evolving needs through the journey. This makes it easier to identify cross-sell opportunities that result in better-targeted decision-making.

Integrating a unified consumer view

Your prospects send signals through their interactions and other activities like pages they viewed, content they downloaded, and more. They engage with you over different channels - through ads, your website, social media, third-party review sites.

Behavioral marketing helps you stitch all the data together and complete your prospect's profile. This helps you identify prospects across different channels, understand their interaction history, and drive personalized conversations.

Ensuring a frictionless experience for customers

With behavioral marketing, there is the question of where to draw the line. Prospects receive personalized emails, see targeted discovery ads, and more. But once your prospects become customers, the content you send them should align with their post-purchase journey. Now, this doesn’t mean you should stop selling but instead focus on how you can turn them into repeat customers.

Consumers are discouraged when they see ads of the product they bought after they complete the purchase. This negatively impacts the relationship they have with your business. Behavioral marketing helps you shift your strategy based on the stage of your sales funnel. The focus shifts to a post-purchase campaign, turning one-time buyers into repeat customers.

How to make behavioral marketing work?

With behavioral marketing, the goal is to create a personalized experience without being invasive. When applied right, marketers know the type of content, channel, and format to create the greatest impact on key segments.

Take Uber Eats, a food delivery business for example. Based on customer trends, Uber Eats perceived a demand for burgers in Brooklyn, New York City. What did the team do with this insight? Instead of building a new burger joint, it teamed up with a local outlet Gerizim Cafe to start a virtual kitchen, The Brooklyn Burger Factory. The cafe had the ingredients and the workforce to meet the demand. With this move, Uber Eats logged over 75 orders for gourmet burgers per day. The Brooklyn Burger Factory became a hit with revenue that was 28 times that of Gerizim Cafe.

Leveraging customer signals can help brands create a personalized experience without having to appear invasive. Uber Eats transformed the user experience by nitpicking emerging trends like - geolocation, order frequency, and most ordered food.

Similarly, by assessing these trends, you can elevate customer experience with behavioral marketing by:

Boosting usage through personalized promotions and coupons
Catering to native shoppers with localized offers
Guiding shoppers to try new offerings though personalized recommendations
Promoting holiday-specific ads to increase sales
Expanding services through partnerships with other businesses
Cross-selling/upselling to existing customers

A successful marketing campaign is a balance of the right message for the right audience. With behavioral marketing, you can integrate customer insights that reveal prospect intent and tailor relevant messages that speak to your target audience.

Weaving customer insights into your marketing strategy can help you segment your prospects better based on their interests and needs. You can tailor a delightful experience through personalized content, advertisements, and promotions.

Another example is Teapigs -- a premium UK-based tea brand. The brand stays on top of its customers’ buying patterns. Based on their customers’ past purchases, Teapigs remind shoppers about replenishing the stocks. According to Shoppop, back-in-stock notifications can help triple your sales.

Transform selling through behavioral marketing

Understanding customer insights takes you a step closer to creating a magical experience. This helps you uncover what your prospect thinks and what makes them act the way they do.

Behavioral marketing lets your prospects take precedence, the story is about them and their experience. It helps you align your selling strategy by matching your prospect’s intent with their need (your solution). For example, e-commerce businesses can bring back shoppers by sending them cart abandonment emails tied with promo codes, low stock, or back-in-stock emails.

Behavioral marketing becomes instrumental in helping businesses turn customers into repeat buyers through cross-selling strategies.

Acquiring the right data

Behavioral marketing lets your prospects take precedence, the story is about them and their experience. With powerful storytelling, you can amplify your business reach and generate more leads through your campaigns.

So what kind of data can help you elevate your marketing strategy? Let's take a look

Content consumed

One of the direct buying signals your prospects give you is the type of content they access. By observing the pages they visit and the ads they interact with, you know what stage of the journey your prospect is at. This helps you to target them with suitable marketing collateral and nurture them.

Geo-location

Understanding where your users are from helps you market better. You can personalize content and run promotions based on geo-specific holidays. Burton, a fashion retailer personalizes the shopping experience based on the weather.

Subscription history

This is the stage where you enhance the experience of your customers. If they have purchased from you in the past, create a post-purchase experience to build loyalty and retain them. Once the time is right, you can retarget them with new products or upsell. Harry's, a personal grooming products manufacturer, sends a how-to email to those who purchased a shaving kit recently.

An email illustrating post-purchase instructions

Device information

When you know the device they access, it is easier to determine what campaigns will yield better conversions. For example - consumers who use their mobile devices to access your website will benefit from a mobile app.

Demographics + Psychographics

While demographics uncover top-level characteristics of your prospects, psychographics gives you deeper insights. This includes your prospect’s personality and lifestyle choices, their interests, their preferred communication channels, and more.