Behavioural Targeting to Optimise Behavioural Segmentation

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:

• Active loyals

• Big spenders

• Loyals at risk

• Richie riches

• Bulk shoppers

• Sleeping opportunists

• Churn candidates

• Lost customers

• One-time shoppers

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:

• Websites

• Mobile apps

• CRM systems

• Other marketing automation systems

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:

• User login information (for registered users)
  
• IP address and geolocation
  
• Recency of visit
  
• Interaction with elements of the site
  
• Content read
  
• Sections of the page regularly visited by a user etc.

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:

• Gift Popups and Notification Bars

• Discount Pop-ups

• Personalised Push Notifications

• Personalised Recommendations

• Push Coupons

• Winback Pop-ups

• Engagement Scenarios for each behavioural segment