Login Book a Demo
Login Book a Demo

Get a free demo

Discover Your Growth Strategy

See Segmentify in Action

Consent(Required)

Shortly after you submit the form, one of our team will contact you to organise a time for your demo. Thank you!

In 2021, a successful marketer should be aware of what their customers actually “do”, along with what makes up their customer base by Behavioural Targeting.

A Must-Be Marketing Strategy

Over the decades, traditional customer segmentation strategies have evolved – and improved – by unlocking new levels of segmentation aspects one after another in addition to the existing ones. Acquiring increased conversion rates and getting successful results while reaching your targeted segments can only be achieved by understanding all these new levels of perspectives. Additionally, the parameters that companies need to measure over a customer’s whole journey do not only consist of the demographic and firmographic – such as company size and industry – attributes anymore. 

In this era of technology, marketers can access a bunch of advanced tools and technologies that all bring us vast amounts of data and insights. This data commonly represents behavioural patterns and provides essential key points to the marketers regarding their audience. As a marketer, you are now allowed to reach an ultimate understanding of your customer base if you successfully learn how to figure out and get these data. It is called behavioural targeting. 

What is Behavioural Segmentation?

Firstly, you need to start small to go big. To optimise your behavioural segmentation, you need to be aware of what behavioural segmentation means in the first place. As the name implies, behavioural segmentation divides your customer base into groups based on their behavioural patterns. However, these behavioural patterns should be identified as precisely as possible to get successful results during the execution of your marketing strategy. To reach the ultimate precision, a brand needs to understand its customers’ relationships only with their company in a detailed and analytical manner. 

While customers make their purchase decisions, each one of them may have their ways to interact with your brand/company. Besides their age, location, tendencies, and preferences, their actions also make up a significant part of your conversion analytics. A sample of a behavioural segmentation can be represented as follows:

By understanding their behavioural patterns and drawing meaningful lines between their borders, you can sketch a scheme to approach each customer group. The next step is to find the optimisation strategy that can boost your behavioural segmentation — in other words, finding the best way to reach them.

How to Reach Out: Behavioural Targeting

A segment without a correct targeting strategy is just a bunch of people with some common traits. You need to figure out how to reach each one of the most accurately. Finding a clear recipe for reaching out to your “behavioural” customer groups comes from a “behavioural” targeting strategy. 

Just like we did in the beginning, let’s start with a quick definition for behavioural targeting. Behavioural targeting is a marketing method used commonly in digital marketing and advertising. The method uses web data relevant to users’ browsing habits and behaviours (i.e. the number of visits and amount of time spent, search terms, pages visited, ads and buttons clicked etc.) and activities. After the interpretation processes, gathered data is then used to display relevant ads and offers to the customers and improve the company’s campaign performance. By successfully executing a behavioural targeting strategy, companies can avoid sending irrelevant and unappealing content to some users and reaching them in their preferred routes.

There are two common types of behavioural targeting: 

1. On-Site Behavioural Targeting

As the name suggests, on-site behavioural targeting happens within a particular website and is generally used for website personalisation. Ads and the relevant content is presented to the users aligned with their previous activity on that site. By doing this, brands can reach site engagement, lower cart abandonment rates and higher browsing times.

2. Network Behavioural Targeting

In network behavioural targeting, a type of data including IP and MAC addresses, cookies, and device-specific IDs is collected across multiple websites on the Internet. Then, the algorithms break down all the data and assign them to specific user segments. After the algorithm has interpreted the data, brands can increase their advertising campaigns’ efficiencies by creating user-specific approaches and displaying customised ads to their behavioural segments.

How to do Behavioural Targeting?

As mentioned above, behavioural targeting is about collecting information about a visitor and delivering relevant content and ads that match this specific person’s profile. There are multiple ways to gather behavioural data to target your audience aligned with their behaviours, and the general name of these behaviours is called “cookies”. The sources of these cookies can include:

The behavioural targeting process generally involves several sequential steps:

1. Gathering the Data: Collect Cookies

When a user visits a new website or creates an account, a cookie is placed on their computer, stored either temporarily on a local memory drive or more permanently on the device’s relevant memories. The collected data generally comprises an individual’s following features:

2. Interpreting the Data: Create a User Profile

Once collected, the data is then analysed, and findings resulting from that process are used to create diverse audience profiles. The profiles are mainly based on the users’ behavioural patterns and the common interactions with that website.

3. Defining the Groups: Slice the Behavioural Segments

Visitors are divided into groups aligned with their specific behavioural patterns related to a particular page or a whole network if the whole network has been tracked. For instance, frequent visitors are put into one group, bulk shoppers put into another, and lost customers are grouped into another one.

4. Making Use of the Relevant Information: Use the Data for Conversion

After dividing the customer base into behavioural segments, your customers will only see ad materials and content based on their past behaviours when they wander around a website or network. This not only helps to add a personalised touch to your campaigns but also increases the chance of more effective responses and conversions.

How Can Segmentify Help to Optimise Behavioural Segmentation?

Aforementioned earlier, behavioural targeting is generally attributed to website personalisation, and no one can deny the power of personalisation while doing any business in this era of technology. Therefore, treating each website visitor as a separate and unique entity and engaging with them in a more complex interaction according to their behaviours plays a crucial role in today’s industry. So, by interpreting a visitor’s intention in real-time using behavioural targeting, it becomes possible to respond to each intention in a personalised manner. 

At Segmentify, we offer companies the most intelligent personalisation engine on the market to implement their behavioural targeting strategies. Our tools help businesses to grow with efficiency and bring tailor-made solutions and approaches suitable for any industry. Here are some personalisation techniques for behavioural targeting that you will be able to try while working with Segmentify:

No matter how these years and technology change marketing practices, you will always need properly segmented customers as a professional. Since day one, targeting the right audience after a successful customer segmentation has been a crucial cornerstone of any marketing strategy. Segmentation shortly helps marketers reach specific groups of people with similar interests, needs, and pain points. After reading this article, you will have all the critical facts about customer segmentation in addition to five of the most effective segmentation strategies to use while creating your marketing strategy in 2021.

Customer Segmentation 101

Four main segmentation strategies create the foundation of the customer segmentation concept:

Demographic Segmentation: Dividing customers according to certain traits such as age, gender, occupation, nationality, religion etc.

Geographic Segmentation: Segmenting customers based on the locations they live, work, shop etc.

Psychographic Segmentation: Grouping customers based on their psychological traits such as beliefs, attitudes, interests, preferences etc.

Behavioural Segmentation: Segmenting customers based on the actions they take when interacting with a particular company.

Although the foundation of customer segmentation stays the same, the building blocks that embody themselves are constantly evolving. The methods have become more modern and adequate to meet the demands of the digital era. Companies change their segmentation strategies to use and interpret their aggregated customer data and analytics. Therefore, among these four fundamental segmentation strategies, behavioural segmentation methods are the ones that give the companies what they are looking for in 2021.

Here is in-depth information about five of the most effective behavioural segmentation types that you should consider to enhance your marketing strategy in this digital era.

1. Purchasing Behavior

Segmenting customers through their purchasing behaviours is a common and probably the most widely used behavioural segmentation method. By grouping customers according to their purchase habits and transaction histories, companies can predict the most likely behaviours to lead a purchase. This method usually subcategories the behaviours of the customers into four categories:

Complex: In this behavioural pattern, the customer is highly involved in their decision-making process since it is quite complex and essential. The purchase process generally lasts long, and it includes a lot of product research. The products that are compared usually have significant vital differences.

Variety-Seeking: The variety-seeking consumer behaviour emerges from the low risked decision processes in daily life. The consequences of the purchase decision are not very impactful on the end user’s daily routine. That leaves some room for variety-seeking and different purchase behaviours through a repetitive purchasing process.

Dissonance-Reducing: The scenario here is similar to the complex customer behaviour. The decision is still important, but the compared products do not have significant differences between their features. The products or companies are generally very similar, so customers typically prefer the one with the lowest price.

Habitual: This behavioural pattern generally results from personalised preferences or brand loyalty. The compared products are generally similar in features, and the decisions are not complex or require high involvement.

2. Spending Habits

Segmenting your audience by spending their money can give you many monetary tips to develop your business. The segments of this method can be represented as:

  1. Shopping modality: Buy online vs in-store.
  2. Coupon usage: Always use coupons vs rarely use coupons.
  3. Payment method: Whether they use a credit card vs don’t have a credit card.
  4. Highly promotional: Prefer full-price or sale.

By understanding how your customers prefer to spend their money, getting the answers of where they spend and when they spend can boost a marketer’s strategy in and out. It optimises the existing resources and capital a brand currently has while keeping customer awareness and engagement on top.

3. Status of Shoppers

The status of the shoppers is another way to segment your market in behavioural patterns. There are several categories to subgroup your audience. The most common examples are:

  1. Non-shoppers
  2. Ex-shoppers
  3. Potential shoppers
  4. First-time shoppers
  5. Regular shoppers

The strategy you will develop as a marketer for each user group needs to have critical characteristics according to the different needs and tendencies of the group participants. For example, you want non-shoppers to know you, notice you. Therefore, your strategy towards that group’s participants should be proactive and initiative. On the other hand, the appropriate approach towards the ex-shoppers should be more case-specific. The process may require various research and analyses since you need to figure out what makes them leave you, why they need another alternative and the strategy that made your competitor move forward. When you deal with the segment of first-time shoppers, the required strategy should be to make them stick with you. You want them to come back, so you create opportunities they never want to miss. The segments you will begin using this method can range from returning visitors, leads, lapsed customers, repeat customers, VIP customers etc.

4. Stage of Customer Journey

A customer’s brand journey is generally summarised as follows.

Awareness: In this phase, shoppers are segmented through their earlier interactions with a brand. The newly discovered brand and its actions may vary a lot. However, by interpreting the initial activities of the customers and segmenting the audience aligned with this information, brands may easily decide which customers are worth the relationship with, which are not.

Engagement: This phase includes the customers who want to learn more and more about the brand, its services, and its values. Segmenting customers according to their engagement levels and how they react according to those levels help brands which strategies, products or campaigns are worth keeping, bring conversion, and make customers stick to them.

Evaluation/Consideration: After a successful engagement process, here comes the throttle neck of every purchasing activity. In this phase, customers are carefully considering their purchase decisions. So breaking down this phase can significantly help brands figure out which paths lead to a successful purchase.

Purchase/Conversion: By segmenting shoppers according to how they purchase products or services, brands can measure all of their sales channels’ efficacy.

Post Purchase: Even if the purchase is successfully made, your brand is not entirely done. Tracking the post-purchase behaviours of the customers may help you create post-purchase behaviour-based segments and develop strategies according to those groups. After-sale loyalty efforts can be optimised efficiently by using this segmentation method.

During this journey, marketers can collect a vast amount of data. Each of these phases has specific characteristics in terms of traffic, efficacy on operation, cost-consumption etc. Interpreting these data helps marketers to create consumer-specific and journey-specific marketing strategies and increase conversion in every stage. Furthermore, identifying the phases that need more progress and creating new conversion perspectives becomes more manageable with this method. For instance, according to the exact phrase that the consumers are in, a brand can manage the budget it allocates to the advertisements and differentiate the messages and notifications it will rationally send to its customers.

5. Customer Loyalty

Loyalty-based segmentation divides customers according to their loyalty levels. It is essential to identify loyal customers because they generate the most significant part of your revenue. In addition to generating repeat revenue for your business, improving average order value benefits loyal customers.

To reach a more significant point while approaching them – and make the other segments more like them – this method can mix with different technical approaches such as customer journey and user status. Integrating aggregated customer data coming from other segmentation methods could be helpful while interpreting the loyalty of the customers. Dividing your customer base into groups of loyalty levels can be added up to as an additional step to your marketing strategy to bring a significant improvement to overall conversion rates.

After identifying your audiences loyalty borderlines and their specific needs, consider these follow to enhance their progress to the next better level:

Marketing executives always need to be awake and widen their perspectives to the customers’ journey, from the top on down. No matter how strong the way is, balancing all valuable points in any strategy is crucial. In segmentation, the rules are the same. These methods are generally used in a mixed and supportive manner to make more effective strategies. Correct segmentation and the actions taken towards is a holistic destination to reach during marketing a product, a brand or a campaign.

How Segmentify Supports

There is an excellent way to segment online shoppers efficiently. Segmentify is the most intelligent way with its personalised engine to help you segment your audience and reach your customers in real-time. Segmentify analyses the customers and segments them automatically with AI-based algorithms and determines how to get the most out of each customer segment.

Segmentify’s Behavioural Targeting solution calculates the most important metrics for each segment to harness the power of segmentation to the full extent with advanced metrics like:

To learn more about segmentation and how an easy-integrated Behavioural Targeting is, schedule a live demo and examine your results guaranteed 14-day free trial with Segmentify now!

Our website uses cookies

Our websites use cookies. By continuing, we assume your permission to deploy cookies as detailed in our Privacy Policy.

Accept all