3 Principles to Achieve Success With Behavioral Marketing

TL;DR:

• Behavioral marketing leverages customer behavior data to help you understand the offers, marketing messages, and other factors that motivate customers to make a purchase or take other actions.
• With behavioral marketing, you can boost engagement, build loyalty, increase conversions, raise average order values, and more.
• There are three key principles that drive success with behavioral marketing: understanding how to target customers, how to group them into segments based on behaviors, and how to create personalized experiences that entice them to make purchases or perform other actions.
• You can avoid common behavioral marketing mistakes by keeping your data fresh, relying on modern data handling tools, and implementing other strategies to help you better collect and utilize consumer data.
• See how Bliss Cosmetics used personalized experiences that they created through Jebbit as part of a behavioral marketing strategy that enhanced customer engagement while collecting fresh new data to further optimize their personalization strategies.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a crystal ball that gives you deep insights into customer behavior? With such a tool, you’d be able to fully understand the user experience as your customers see it — and thus, you’d know how to deliver exactly the offers and personalized marketing they want, when they want it.

It’s not as far outside the realm of possibility as you might think! Maybe you can’t have a (functioning) crystal ball, but you can implement a behavioral marketing strategy, which is the next best thing.

So how does behavioral marketing work? And what are the advantages? We’ll show you — and then you can use your powerful new insights to build engagement and boost your bottom line.

What Is Behavioral Marketing?

It’s part art, but mostly, behavioral marketing is a science. Specifically, it’s the science of using consumer data to figure out the kinds of advertisements and messaging that audience segments respond to best. 

That’s what makes behavioral marketing so effective. You can leverage information like purchase behavior, browsing details, website search histories, customer preferences, and all kinds of other zero-party and first-party data points to learn exactly what your customer base wants and what motivates them to make a purchase. 

For brands like yours, that means a much greater return on your marketing investment. And for customers? It means an end to irrelevant (and sometimes annoying) advertising. Instead, they reap the benefits of custom marketing messages that they actually enjoy because it was designed with their needs in mind.

What Are the Benefits of Behavioral Marketing?

Behavioral marketing leads to more relevant messaging for your customers — and that comes with a whole host of benefits that both you and your customers will enjoy. Here’s what you’re missing when you’re not implementing a behavioral marketing strategy:

• Increased engagement: Behavioral marketing allows you to personalize according to customer needs and preferences — and that translates to higher engagement levels with your website, social media, and marketing materials.
• Increased customer retention: Engaged customers are happy customers — and they’re also likely to be your most loyal customers. Behavioral marketing leads to increased retention, improved customer satisfaction, and lower churn.
• Opportunities to form relationships: The more you understand about your customers, the better able you will be to form meaningful relationships with them. For example, ecommerce businesses that sell athletic apparel or sporting goods can create custom content to build relationships with sports enthusiasts of all stripes — skiers, weight lifters, basketball players, and so on.
• Increased conversions among the tire-kickers: You’ll always have some customers who are indecisive — and with behavioral marketing, you can target them with custom messages, incentives, and personalized offers that encourage them to stop browsing and start making purchase decisions.
• Increased average order value: Part of behavioral marketing involves tracking customer behavior as they interact with your brand — and that allows you to accumulate data that you can use to recommend additional products related to those that customers have shown interest in. As customers take advantage of the targeted cross-sells and upsells that you’re offering, your average order value will grow.
• Opportunities for remarketing: Behavioral marketing gives you deep insights into user behavior as they interact with your brand’s website and other key touchpoints. Once you’ve gathered behavioral data on site visitors and new customers, you can then target them with remarketing campaigns designed to serve up retargeting ads that encourage these customers to take a specific action.

3 Key Principles Behind Behavioral Marketing Strategies

The wonderful thing about behavioral marketing is that you can apply it to a variety of other types of marketing strategies. Email marketing, targeted advertising, on-site content, and recommendations — these are all marketing tactics that you can enhance with behavioral marketing. The key is to understand not only how behavioral marketing works, but the core principles that make it work. Let’s take a look at them. 

1. Targeting Your Customers

With any behavioral marketing effort, the goal is not to spam out marketing messages to anyone and everyone — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should take a “less is more” approach either. With this type of marketing, it’s all about targeting. 

And when we say “targeting,” we’re talking specifically about behavioral targeting, which refers to the ways you can target customers with specific tactics and messages in order to get them to take a particular action.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that you have a customer who has abandoned their shopping cart. In this context, targeting means a couple of things. First off, you now have an opportunity to target that customer with an email that encourages them to come back and complete the purchase. 

Second — and even more importantly — you can use that email to target this customer with messaging that will entice them to act. But what message will work best? You’ll need to leverage the data you’ve collected on this consumer (or on the consumer’s microsegment) to find out. 

For instance, if your customer has a history of acting only when special offers or discount codes are available, enclose a targeted offer in your abandoned cart email. Meanwhile, other customers may show a history of making large, but infrequent orders — a sign that they may be trying to minimize shipping costs by ordering lots of things all at once. These customers may benefit from emails featuring personalized product recommendations that will help them round out their shopping cart.

2. Behavioral Marketing Segmentation

Targeting sounds tough, right? Especially if you have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of customers, all of whom need to be targeted with different types of messaging. At that level, you’ll get lost in the weeds quickly if you’re focusing on just one customer at a time. Behavioral segmentation is the key to marketing well to larger groups of customers.

With behavioral segmentation, instead of breaking customers into segments based on demographic data, you’ll break them into segments based on their behavior. Here are some of the types of behavioral segmentation that you can use:

• Customer needs: Customers all have different needs. Consider the customers who might frequent a car dealership. Some will value super low gas mileage and vehicles that can safely traverse long distances. Others will be less concerned about gas mileage and more with passenger space because they have three kids and two dogs to ferry around each day. That’s what segmentation based on customer needs is all about — breaking down your customers according to their usage behavior, unique needs, and preferences.
• Purchase behavior: Create these segments among existing customers who have already made a purchase. Segmentation based on buying behavior helps you predict when, what, and how much customers in each segment are likely to purchase.
• Timing: Some customers purchase certain things for particular seasons or for a holiday like Christmas or birthdays, while other customers buy the same things at the same times each month — you get the idea. Timing-based or occasion-based segmentation breaks up potential customers into groups based on when they’re likely to make certain purchases.
• The customer journey: Customers behave differently at different customer journey stages. On top of that, touchpoints along the journey can prove to be hang-ups that prevent customers from completing the journey. Segmenting customers according to the stages of the customer journey, and even according to the touchpoints they’ve encountered at each stage, can help you learn how to help your customers progress through to the end.

Now that you understand how behavioral segmentation works, it’s easy to see how it makes targeting so much easier. Behavioral segmentation allows you to target consumers within each segment with messaging that appeals specifically to them.

3. Hyper-Personalization

Segmentation shows you who you’re marketing to (the members of each of your behavioral segments). Targeting tells you why (you’re marketing to these people to entice them to take specific actions, like completing a checkout). Next comes personalization, which addresses the “what” part of the equation. What will you be marketing to each behavioral segment to get them to complete the desired action?

We can’t answer that question for you, but we can tell you that you’ll find your own answers among the customer data that you’ve collected. Dive into your behavioral segments to discover what your customers want and when they want it. Then craft a personalized experience designed with these needs in mind. 

From there, you can target customers with different types of behavioral marketing messaging like email campaigns, relevant content on social media or your website, pop-up offers, and more.

Common Behavioral Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Behavioral marketing is a lot of work — and you certainly don’t want your team’s hard work to go to waste! That’s why we’re going to show you how to avoid a few critical mistakes.

• Don’t let data get stale: Data freshness is paramount. Consumer behavior changes all the time — and you can stay on top of those changes by making it a policy to be constantly collecting and updating your data stores with new, up-to-date information.
• Don’t rely on dated technology: If you’re managing your marketing campaigns well, you’ll be collecting vast volumes of data—and manual processes or outdated software won’t be enough. Invest in modern CRM platforms and marketing automation to help you properly collect, store, and analyze information.
• Don’t ignore customer pain points: Many marketers make the mistake of focusing so heavily on customer motivations that they forget to keep an eye out for customer barriers. Stay vigilant for behavior patterns that can indicate problems or pain points that could be preventing customers from making a purchase or taking another desired action.
• Don’t cast your net too broadly: For decades, the primary goal of most marketers was to attract as much attention as possible — and for that reason, it’s tempting to keep messaging generalized. However, it’s important to remember that the entire point of behavioral marketing is to really zero in on narrow customer segments so that you can speak to specific needs and pain points.
• Don’t skimp on consumer research: Website data and social media analytics are great — and easy sources of data to access — but to really understand the overall customer experience, you need in-depth information from things like customer reviews, feedback forms, surveys, quizzes, and other sources of zero-party data.

How Jebbit Can Help You Ramp Up Behavioral Marketing

To do behavioral marketing well, you’re going to need a tool that does it all. That’s where Jebbit comes in. To understand just how powerful Jebbit solutions can be, let’s examine things through the lens of some experiences that the cosmetics company Bliss recently created using Jebbit.

At the outset of this project, Bliss had one major goal: to enhance interactions with consumers in an effort to build engagement. That led them to Jebbit, where they created the “Vitamin C Knowledge Quiz” and the “Product Recommendation Skincare Quiz.” Both of these quizzes were designed to leverage behavioral marketing techniques by creating fun, engaging — and most importantly, targeted — personalized experiences for customers who are interested in new products or who want to learn how they can add vitamin C to their skincare routine.

In terms of engagement, these quizzes were a huge success. Customers happily participated, to the point that Bliss saw a 34% increase in lead capture rates and 25 times more swipes on Instagram. The increased engagement helped build better relationships with customers while providing them with awesome personalized recommendations.

The behavioral marketing genius behind this campaign doesn’t stop there though. As Bliss engaged their customers with these quizzes, they also got to collect volumes of data from the people interacting with the quizzes — and that is data that Bliss used to get even better insights into their customers. Throughout, Bliss collected zer- party data from people engaging with the experiences, which they then channeled to Jebbit’s partner Klaviyo in order to enrich customer segmentation information.

And then what happened? Bliss used both the data and the improved customer segmentation models to optimize their email marketing with even more personalization — and that led to a 167% increase in email open rates.

Make Jebbit Your Go-To Behavioral Marketing Tool

Behavioral marketing is the science of using customer data to better understand behavior patterns so that you can leverage that information to build customer loyalty, boost conversion rates, and improve the overall customer experience from start to finish. To do it well, you’ll need to learn how to effectively target your customers, use customer data to build strong behavioral data profiles, and then use those profiles to deliver the types of personalized offers and messages that your target audience craves.

Through it all, Jebbit can help you streamline this process. Create quizzes, surveys, and other interactive experiences that allow you to engage customers, to build brand loyalty, and to deliver personalized recommendations — all while you collect the zero-party data you need to further optimize your behavioral marketing efforts.

To learn more about how you can leverage Jebbit to enhance both engagement and your data collection efforts, schedule a session with one of our strategy experts.