Behavioral Marketing: What It Is and How To Use It for Higher ROI

How many minutes of exercise did you get last week? How many servings of vegetables? Research shows your answers aren’t reliable: Social desirability bias is the tendency to exaggerate preferred behaviors, and it’s just one of the factors known to distort self-reported data.

Researchers account for reporting bias by analyzing survey results alongside data gathered through experimentation and observation. Marketers receive a similar way with behavioral marketing. Behavioral marketing strategies focus on what customers do—not what they declare they’re going to do—to assist you better comprehend your customers and run more effective marketing campaigns. 

What is behavioral marketing?

Behavioral marketing is the habit of assembly information about customer behavior, analyzing it, and using these findings to serve current and potential customers with more relevant marketing messages. It can assist you personalize your customer encounter, boost conversion rates, and enhance profitability on fund (ROI) on marketing spend.

Types of data used in behavioral marketing

ordinary types of customer behavioral data include:

• First-event data. First-event data refers to information captured on digital marketing channels you own, like your website or a mobile app. It includes information from site visitors (e.g., clicks, views, purchase history, and on-site search history) and data from history interactions with your business, like service calls or in-store transactions.

• Second-event data. Second-event data comes from business-to-business data-sharing partnerships. A running apparel business and a sports drink business might consent to distribute information about purchases, for example.

• Third-event data. Businesses purchase third-event data from data aggregators or other customer data providers, like a search engine or social media platform. It includes browsing history, search history, and information related to online purchasing behavior. 

Types of behavioral marketing

• Product recommendations
• Email marketing
• Targeted ads

Behavioral marketing can provide granular, real-period data about what motivates your customer base. Here are behavioral marketing tactics that could assist to boost sales:

Product recommendations

Use behavioral marketing data to propose personalized product suggestions. Product recommendation tools can simplify the procedure by integrating with your online store, analyzing behavioral data to identify products that an person customer might desire or require, and automatically targeting them with messages like “Suggested for you” or “view your personalized recommendations.” 

You can also use personalized suggestions to target customers as they shop. Two popular strategies are upselling and cross-selling, which analyze session data and cart contents and invite customers to add complementary or higher-tier items to their orders. Apps like Frequently Bought Together use behavioral data to recommend products customers are likely to discover fascinating.

A beauty business might recommend that a customer upgrade their morning skin worry set to the more expensive day and night package, for example. Or, an apparel business might recommend a three-pack of dress socks to leave with a recent pair of oxfords.

Email marketing

Email marketing campaigns can use behavioral data to deliver targeted messaging. receive abandoned cart emails: You configure a marketing automation platform to pursue up with customers who add a product to their cart but don’t complete a purchase.

You can also monitor user engagement with emails to determine what relevant content looks like for a customer. For instance, a pet supply business might incentivize email sign ups with an introductory promo code, and then send a welcome email that includes links to four resources: a navigator for recent puppy owners, a list of tips to minimize cat-litter tracking, an piece on canine chew toy safety, and a navigator to enrichment activities for gerbils, ferrets, and mice. 

The business can then automatically tailor subsequent emails based on user clicks. A customer who visits the recent puppy navigator receives articles and product suggestions designed for aspiring puppy owners, and a customer who selects the tiny-animal alternative receives your monthly rodent-concentrated dispatch.

Targeted ads

Some ad vendors, including Google and Facebook, let you make ads for specific user groups and serve them based on behavioral criteria, like search, browsing, and purchase history. 

Retargeting ads, for example, serve users with content featuring products they’ve already viewed online. A business installs cookies on its site that attach to a visitor’s browser. When the user moves on to other sites, the installed cookies inform ad platforms like Google Ads to promote products from recently visited pages. 

Search engine marketing (SEM)—which is the habit of paying to rank highly for strategic keywords—is also a form of behavioral marketing. Search behavior is a valuable data point for marketers because it can indicate customer intent to buy products. A cutting-edge headphones brand can pay to appear at the top of the search engine results page for high-intent searches like “best noise-canceling headphones.”

How to identify the most significant behavioral signals

Lars Lofgren, co-founder and chief growth officer of act marketing agency Stone Press, stresses the importance of knowing the behavioral data points that drive worth for your business. 

“When I ponder of actions that are really significant, there are really only two that matter,” Lars says. The first, he says, is whether a person has previously purchased within your category: “If you’re selling hiking shoes, you desire someone who’s bought another hiking product. They’ve just shown that they’re very receptive.” Even better? Lars recommends looking for people who have bought in your category very recently and asking: “How do I get them to buy something else?”

Of course, Lars cautions: It’s really challenging to benevolent of get that concentrated buyer segment. So you can broaden your lens with the second signal, which is about broader search behavior. According to Lars, anyone doing a product search is demonstrating high intent. That’s why he pays special attention to searches for specific product types and reviews. The buyer conducting these searches has already decided to purchase something. They’re not looking for persuasion—they’re in the funnel and actively searching. “If I can somehow get my marketing in front of those people, then away we leave,” Lars says.

Tips for using behavioral marketing

• Use behavioral data to segment audiences
• Personalize, personalize, personalize
• Be transparent about tracking
• Use specialized software

These tips can assist you design and run effective marketing campaigns:

Use behavioral data to segment audiences

You can borrowing behavioral data to segment both prospects and current customers into specific spectators groups based on the intent they signal with their actions. Then, you can target them with marketing messages tailored to that intent. This is known as behavioral targeting. 

While demographic targeting makes broad assumptions about customers based on factors like age or geographic location, behavioral targeting responds to specific customer actions, like clicking a “discover more” button or enrolling in a free webinar. You can even merge behavioral and demographic data to make hyper-specific customer groups and target them with niche content.

Personalize, personalize, personalize

Behavioral data improves your understanding of customers, which can assist you personalize the customer encounter and boost satisfaction. Research shows that personalization is a key driver of satisfaction and loyalty: 71% of consumers expect personalization, which they define as brand experiences that make them “feel special” or demonstrate a business’s commitment to connection-building. Additionally, 78% of consumers declare that personalization makes them more likely to repurchase from a business and that it increases the likelihood they’ll recommend a business to others. 

Personalization work could encompass serving tailored product recommendations, marketing messages, targeted promotions, and post-purchase pursue-ups. You can use AI marketing tools to back these efforts, but just make sure to keep a human in the loop to ensure that your content is both accurate and appropriate.

Be transparent about tracking

Asking customers for their consent to track behavioral data and explaining how you schedule to use it can assist you construct and maintain depend with them. Disclosure is also mandatory for businesses with customers in the European Union and an increasing number of US states. 

construct depend and maintain lawful operation by greeting recent site visitors with a privacy and preferences pop-up window that informs them of their information-sharing options. 

Use specialized software

Marketing automation software can maximize the worth of behavioral data and simplify the work of running behaviorally targeted campaigns. Here are a few types to consider: 

• Segmentation tools. Tools like Shopify segmentation can automatically segment customers based on user behavior and demographic data, letting you make distinct groups like repeat clients or high-worth customers. They can also analyze behavioral patterns and uncover factors linked to purchasing behavior.

• Customer connection management tools. Use a customer connection management (CRM) structure to collect customer behavior data, store it, and harness it for targeting and personalization. 

• Artificial intelligence (AI) tools. AI-powered personalization softwarecan automate behavioral marketing processes like data collection and sentiment analysis. You can then use that data to automate personalized product recommendations and upsells.

• Customer feedback tools. Feedback tools streamline and automate the procedure of collecting feedback, helping you assess the impacts of your behavioral marketing efforts. Some tools can also analyze feedback and integrate with your CRM to store information about customer preferences, which you can use to enhance your personalization efforts.