Behavioral Targeting: An Advance Strategy to Your Sales

In the past, businesses are busy spreading the word about their products and services through billboards, television, print and radio ads, as well as flyers. While we cannot disregard the value of these strategies, the problem here is that you are promoting to the mass market with a little hope that your target audience would stumble upon it.

Today, the digital revolution has changed the rules of the game. You now have a choice to not rely on demographics only. Targeting the right audience is made more strategic, accurate and efficient using their own behavior.

Behavioral Targeting Can Boost Your Marketing Automation

That great thing about behavioral targeting is that it’s data-driven. Unlike in traditional marketing where the same message is sent to the mass audience, behavioral targeting uses the information about customer’s behavior to show messages that would to appeal to them. Here, you create proper customer segmentation and user profiles based on behavioral information provided by your a) data analytics b) browsing and search history c) cookies and applications and d) IP addresses.

If your business is doing email marketing automation, behavioral targeting allows you to send targeted emails based on actions taken by prospects and customers. Correct data is essential to win this. Some of these include:

the number of site visits
website activity
frequent and recent purchases
preferred product categories
email engagement
social media activity

These kinds of information are useful if you perform behavioral marketing with these marketing basics:

Define the main purpose of your behavioral targeting
Use the right data
Track the actions of your customers
Create proper customer segmentation
Measure the right metrics

Once you know about these, using behavioral targeting for your marketing automation campaign will be a walk in the park. To help you further, here are some of the proven behavioral marketing strategies you can try to boost your conversion rates.

5 Common Behavioral Targeting Strategies to Increase ROI

Location: Where is your customer located?

There are different ways location can be useful in targeting customers. One, people from different places have different needs. The simplest example to explain this is with the weather. If you are a clothing brand, it is commonsensical to send emails offering jackets and cardigans to those located in a colder region.

Another way is to know their location and send them discount vouchers which they can present in your physical stores near them. The accessibility of your store and the discount are great motivations to convince them to make a visit.

Device: What are they using to access your site?

People behave differently on devices. Navigating a page on the desktop is different from navigating a page on the mobile phone. By knowing this, you can design a higher converting page based on device. For instance, you can send a simpler and mobile-friendly email to customers who often access their emails on their smartphones.

Channel: What’s the traffic source?

By reviewing your data analytics, you would know where your customers are coming from. Are they coming from Facebook, email, or organic search? Use this information to guide you how to interact with your customers.

If the traffic source of your customer is email, you can send them an email with a signup form or links to your content offers such as blog posts, ebooks, and downable FAQs to push them down the sales funnel. If they are coming from Facebook, you can create a lead ad with autofill form to collect their contact information and then send them emails to nurture them further. You can also show them a pop-up Facebook sharing button to encourage them to share your page on their timeline.

Website Activity: What pages do they visit? What kinds of content do they consume?

Knowing which specific pages customers visit on your site allows you to determine what interests them. For instance, a visitor who frequents to a women’s shoes category might be looking for a specific shoe design that matches her budget. You can email this visitor with a list of shoe recommendations or a discount code to entice her to make a purchase.

If you have a blog post or landing pages of downloadable ebooks, you can check which type of content visitors consume to guide on what kind of content to email them.

Transactions: What are their past transactions with you?

Segment your customers based on their past transactions to group those who are candidates for repeat business, customers who will more likely spread the word about you, and visitors who are on the verge of converting.

You can segment them based on the frequency of their purchase, average order value, availed product or service category, and so on. From here, you can personalize your interaction with them. Remember, since customers transact with your differently, you must also interact with them differently.

Behavioral targeting shouldn’t be hard to nail, especially with helpful tools you can use. Your marketing automation software and data analytics are some of them.

Forget about sending the same message to everyone else. Know your customers. Learn how their actions. And interact based on how they behave. Use behavioral targeting to find that needle in a haystack.

Author Bio:

Kimberly Maceda is a Content Writer for ActiveTrail. She comes up with brilliant content about email marketing and marketing automation to keep customers updated with the trends. For Kimmy, it’s Bring Your Dog to Work Day almost every day.