If you really want to catch your audience’s attention, cookie-cutter communications just aren’t going to work. Instead, you need to speak to them on a wavelength they understand—one that relates to their experience and relationship with your business. After all, prospects and lifelong customers are going to need different information to sway them to buy.
Behavioral segmentation is the tactic of grouping your consumers based on how they interact with your business, from their engagement with your email communications to the frequency and value of their purchases. Behavioral data segmentation goes beyond traditional demographic segmentation, equipping marketers to better speak to their customers, paving the way for personalized experiences and communications that drive loyalty and conversion.
To achieve effective segmentation, you must have robust, meaningful data that demonstrates and explains customer behaviors. This guide covers the benefits of insightful consumer behavior data, key data sources you can use and practical methods for leveraging data for effective messaging and outreach.
Behavioral data paves the way for precise and effective segmentation along similar customer habits, providing actual insights that reinforce why you group your audience the way you do. Often, it’s easy to assume you know your audience, their interests and their behaviors. However, data can unveil an underlying message you might not expect, uncovering how your assumptions actually play out in practice.
With tangible data to rely on, you’re able to gather an in-depth understanding of your audience’s engagement, including where they engage with your brand, when they buy, what motivates them to buy and what journeys they follow to make a purchase. This understanding informs all other efforts, giving you the tools to tailor messaging to each group for better resonance and engagement.
A clearer picture of your audience ultimately allows you to spend resources on the most efficient and valuable consumer touchpoints, improve personalization and strengthen long-term brand relationships. Whether it’s retargeting customers who have visited your product pages without a purchase or developing a landing page for a specific subset of your audience, behavioral data segmentation sets up informed action.
Gathering the proper data through rigorous audience research is essential for compiling useful insights—the following behaviors are all worth monitoring to achieve effective segmentation.
Engagement metrics include customer behaviors beyond making a purchase—for example, a consumer who visits your website and then clicks through multiple pages or resources. Engagement metrics highlight consumers who are showing interest in your business and can serve as potential leads for future purchases.
Engagement metrics to track include:
Understanding engagement enables you to group your consumers within your audience across similar patterns, such as frequent site visitors, email newsletter readers and even visitors with high bounce rates, allowing for more targeted messaging. Behavioral insights can enable you to send more useful emails to particular audiences, craft strategic landing pages for target audiences and optimize your existing pages for conversion rates.
Purchasing behavior refers to what, when and how often customers buy from you. Knowing your customers’ purchasing decisions and the patterns associated with them gives you context for what messaging gets them to buy, what times of year they buy, what steps have led them to that final “Buy Now” button and ultimately why they’re choosing to buy from you.
These metrics are all useful:
These metrics inform groupings based on similar purchasing decisions and guide which products and promotions you offer to each segment. Targeting the right consumers with the products that are most likely to resonate with them leads to more conversions with greater efficiency and success.
Also known as customer progression, this behavior groups your consumers based on their position in the buyer journey, whether at the top of the funnel or near a purchase. With customers existing at various stages of the buyer journey, you’ll need different messaging to provide each group with the right information to nudge them along.
Metrics for understanding one’s location in the customer journey include:
Keep in mind that the customer journey is rarely linear. It’s a good idea to have a reliable handful of data to understand how customers are interacting with you across multiple channels and develop an accurate picture of where they stand in their journey toward a purchase so you know how to communicate.
Customer interactions with social media posts and shared content offer perspective into what they care about and what content or messaging they are most interested in. Consider what kind of posts you’re seeing the most traffic and engagement with and how you can use those insights to mold future messaging and communications.
Helpful metrics here include:
This information empowers you to tailor your social media ad copy and personalize your outreach to the audiences that are engaging the most. Hyperfocus your content for each platform based on its present audiences, and then capitalize on that engagement by moving consumers down the funnel with related assets and product ads.
Retention behavior reflects customer loyalty, highlighting whether your current customers remain engaged with your business and continue to return for purchases. Identify which of your customers are frequent or long-standing buyers so you can maintain their loyalty, and which are less engaged, so you can target them with strategies to get them to come back.
Monitor these retention metrics:
This information presents new opportunities for promotions or unique communications tailored to groups based on the strength of their relationship to your brand. Your loyal customers should receive targeted communications and promotions that address their demonstrated wants, while your less engaged customers should receive information that reels them back in.
The behavioral data you gather sets the stage for informed groupings along similar habits and levels of engagement. Turn your audience into loyal customers by communicating with them in a manner that makes sense for them.
Segment your audience by taking the following steps.
Strategic application of your consumer behavior data is just as important as the tangible information you collect. Turn insights into action by using your data to sort your segments and use them to accomplish the following:
Taking these steps allows you to maximize the impact of all your efforts. Ultimately, with clearer insights, you accomplish more efficient consumer outreach and increased return on ad spend.
Effective behavioral segmentation relies on the ongoing assessment of the impact of your efforts. Tracking these improvements ensures that you are making the most of the data you collect and gives insight into whether your segments result in more effective campaigns.
Monitor the following metrics to assess whether your segmentation efforts are yielding the success you expect:
Continuously assessing these metrics keeps you nimble and flexible, able to adjust your segments and regroup as necessary. Dialing in your segments lets you tailor communications to the right audiences for maximum impact, while telling you which strategies resonate most with which audiences, guiding your investments.
Strategic and insightful behavioral data yields informed decision-making that empowers businesses to reach their consumers most efficiently and effectively. Gathering detailed consumer behavioral data provides businesses with valuable insights to take action and maximize their marketing resources for better returns.
Start using data for continuous success and open the door with our brand consulting services at VSA Partners. With a full suite of proprietary tools and processes, we help our clients access reliable, actionable data that drives and enriches brand strategy. Using our Promise2Performance® proprietary quantitative research methodology, we help businesses truly understand their audience to identify and prioritize clear segments for maximum impact in messaging and outreach.
Let’s connect. Get in touch with us at VSA to start bolstering your brand strategy.
