Segmenting customers based on their buying and decision-making patterns is essential to effective, personalized marketing. Human beings are creatures of habit, and those habits show up in the way people purchase products both in-person and online. To help your company streamline marketing tactics here are ten helpful tips for enhancing your behavior-based segmentation.
What Is Behavior-Based Segmentation?
As a method of understanding your target audience, behavior-based segmentation is a way to group customers based on their buying patterns.
The more you and your marketing team understand your customers, the better your marketing campaigns will perform. You can easily monitor growth patterns and significant changes in specific segments. Using this type of data, you can also gauge the value of each segment and watch how they grow or shrink over time.
Behavior-based segmentation allows you to prioritize higher-value customer groups and allocate resources appropriately. Furthermore, customer buying patterns are helpful in predicting future purchases.
Ultimately, customer behavior segmentation gives your marketing team the tools to create highly personalized campaigns that convert.
Tip #1: Use Retargeting Tactics To Upsell
In its most basic form, behavior-based segmentation is used primarily for retargeting purposes.
The process of retargeting is quite simple. When a visitor finds your website but leaves without making a purchase, the collected data can then be used to remarket to that particular lead.
Personalized ads containing content relevant to that lead (for instance, an ad for the product of service they viewed) can then be displayed on other websites, encouraging the lead to come back and complete a purchase.
Tip #2: Use Income-Based Segmentation
Through a good CRM program, businesses can collect valuable customer data that can enhance segmentation. One great way to increase conversions rates is to segment your customers based on their income levels.
You don’t have to be forward or ask customers to give you their financial details. There is a much better way to aggregate this type of information.
Through customer behavior tracking, you can determine what type of devices your customers are using when they visit your website. Whether they are using a smartphone, computer or tablet, you can use this information to create better marketing campaigns.
You can also determine if the user is browsing on an Apple product or a Windows device. An experiment published by the Wall Street Journal showed that Mac users searching for travel accommodations were pushed towards hotels that were approximately 11% more expensive than those PC users were steered toward. According to the study, Apple users tend to spend more money on vacations, hence the higher-priced search results.
Tip #3: Use Detailed Buyer Personas
Behavior-based segmentation works best when you collect as much data as you can about each customer group. To appropriately market to the correct audience, businesses must utilize detailed buyer personas to better understand how customers think.
Use the data collected during customer behavior tracking to hone your existing buyer personas, adding depth and dimension to each one. Precise buyer personas can help the marketing team predict a customer’s next move and market effectively to guide that particular customer to complete a purchase.
Tip #4: Narrow Down Your Groups
While a long list of emails may look good on paper, it may not be the best approach to personalized marketing. People will often sign up for newsletters by accident, or they may realize that they are not interested in your company’s products or services later on. To optimize your email marketing campaigns, take the time to go through your email list and remove inactive recipients.
Some of these users may already be segmented into a customer group. If you narrow the behavior-based segments down to the most active customers, your marketing efforts will have a much greater impact.
Not only will you see better conversion rates, but you will also save money. There is no reason to waste resources on recipients who are not interested in your products or services.
Tip #5: Develop Enticing Promotions
Everyone loves a good deal. Even your best customers, who may have long-standing histories with your company, can appreciate a promotional discount.
One common mistake companies make is not rewarding their best customers. Just sending out small discounts with a welcome email may not be enough. If you want to watch your conversions soar, you need to create enticing deals that are personalized for each customer segment.
One great way to boost conversion using behavior-based segmentation is to utilize abandoned cart promotions. When a customer places items in their online shopping cart but doesn’t complete the purchase, the almost-transaction is labeled as an abandoned cart. It’s important to note that this is not a loss. The customer is at the end stage of the sales funnel. Perhaps the total cost with shipping and taxes was more than they had assumed, or maybe they got pulled away by other pressing matters. In any case, you can remarket to them by offering a discount or even free shipping in an abandoned cart email reminder.
Tip #6: Optimize Your Website
It happens more often than business owners would like to admit. A new lead finds their way onto a website and is interested in the products or services available. However, due to poor web design or a lack of CTAs, the visitor has trouble navigating the site and leaves without making a purchase.
If you are using behavior-based tracking on your website, you will be able to see how web traffic flows throughout the site. You can identify hotspots and issues quickly, and the development team can get to work on fixing those problem areas.
Landing pages with clear CTAs and dynamic web forms are crucial to running an optimized website. If your landing pages aren’t converting and your web forms are left empty, you need to find out why.
Once your website is optimized for user-friendly navigation, you will not only be able to segment your customer better, but you will also see a rise in conversions.
Tip #7: Perfect Your Timing
For more accurate behavior-based segmentation, your timing must be impeccable. Swinging back around to knowing your audience inside and out and ensuring that your messages are being delivered at the right time can lead to huge success for your marketing campaigns.
To figure out when the best time is to market to your customers, start by analyzing the times when your customers visit your website or make purchases. Segmenting customers based on their preferred shopping times can lead to better behavior-based segmentation and higher conversion rates.
Tip #8: Gauge Customer Satisfaction
Are you aware of how satisfied your customers are? You should be. Customer satisfaction goes well beyond surveys. While surveys can provide some data about how your customers feel, it’s generally not enough to come to an accurate consensus.
Behavior-based tracking is the best way to determine just how happy your customers are with your company. Capturing real-time data during every step of the customer journey is more accurate and reliable information than a limited survey.
By segmenting your customers based on their satisfaction rating, you can market more effectively to them. For example, if a group of customers is sitting at a low satisfaction level, you may want to limit upselling tactics while your customer support team reaches out to determine the root of the issue. On the other hand, highly satisfied customers tend to be more open to upselling and enrolling in loyalty programs.
Tip #9: Segment Based On Occasions
Depending on the products and services that your company offers, many customers make purchases based on occasions. Most occasions fall under one of three categories: holidays, recurring-personal and rare-personal.
Businesses tend to see a rise in conversions during universal holidays such as Christmas. Recurring-personal occasions refer to vacations, birthdays, anniversaries and other such events. Rare-personal occasions include events like weddings. These can be the most difficult to predict, but are still highly relevant for use in behavior-based segmentation.
Tip #10: Segment Based On Usage Levels
The final tip for better behavior-based segmentation is to group your customers by their usage level. How often are your customers using your products or services? To answer this question, you need to analyze how often they are buying the same products or using an offered service. From this point, you can break down the data into groups of heavy, average and light users.
Heavy users tend to use your products or services the most. They are sometimes referred to as super users, and they are typically the most loyal and engaged customers for your brand. Average users place orders semi-regularly. They may even only buy based on occasions or special events. Lastly, light users are typically one-time-buyers.
To learn more about audience segmentation and marketing automation, click here to get a demo of SharpSpring today.
Originally published on the SharpSpring blog
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