Unlock the Power of Behavioral Marketing Insights

TL;DR:

• Behavioral marketing uses behavioral data to create more relevant marketing for your target audience.
• You can gather data for behavioral marketing insights in a variety of ways, like web analytics, first-party cookies, social media metrics, or interactive experiences — like the product match quiz that Samsoninte created through Jebbit.
• Once you’ve gathered the data, you can unlock behavioral marketing insights through techniques like customer segmentation and predictive analytics.
• See how brands like Amazon, Howes, and NuLeaf Naturals have used behavioral marketing (and in the case of Howes and NuLeaf, personalized experiences created via Jebbit) to learn more about their customers and effectively engage them.

What if you could peer just far enough into the future to see what your customers want to buy before they buy it? Or what if you could read minds just well enough to learn what really interests your customers and what doesn’t?

It sounds fantastical, but smart marketers are doing these very things every day — and they don’t need a crystal ball to do it. Instead, they’re leveraging behavioral marketing insights to make highly informed decisions about the things their customers want now and what they’ll likely need in the future.

Keep reading and we’ll show you how your brand can unlock the power of behavioral marketing insights too.

What Is Behavioral Marketing?

Behavioral marketing is the practice of marketing to your target audience based on customer behavior. That’s the simple definition — but “behavior” is a broad term that encompasses many things. For informed decision-making, you’ll need to dig deep into data to learn as much as you can about your customers’ interests, belief systems, lifestyles, purchase intentions, geolocation, demographics, and much more.

Once you have these insights, you can then pursue a variety of behavioral marketing strategies to engage customers and drive conversions. These include:

• Personalized experiences or product recommendations tailored to the individual
• Remarketing or retargeting ads for users on search engines and social media
• Tailored email marketing campaigns that target narrow audience segments
• Targeted advertising based on demographic and geolocational details

How to Gather the Data You’ll Need for Behavioral Marketing

You want behavioral marketing insights, but how do you get them? It’s a two-step process with data as your starting point. And when it comes to gathering data, there’s a lot to know. Below, we’ll show you ethical practices for gathering data from a variety of essential sources.

Start With Web Analytics

Whether you’re in e-commerce or running a brick-and-mortar business, website analytics are the place to start the data-gathering process. This information will shed light on how visitors interact with your website — like which pages they visit, how long they stay, and the actions they take. All of this will help you to identify the things that interest your audience the most.

Key Data Points to Gather

• Page views will show you what is most engaging to users.
• Traffic sources will reveal where visitors are coming from.
• Clicks, scroll depth, and navigation paths provide insights into engagement.
• Conversions build purchase histories that you can use for repeat sales and cross-sells.

Enable First-Party Cookies on Your Site

First-party cookies are files that are stored on a user’s device so that it can track the user’s online activities. If that sounds invasive to you — well, that’s why most websites today ask for user permission in order to enable tracking via first-party cookies. Not only is this required in order to maintain compliance with data privacy regulations, but it also helps you to maintain transparency and trust among your customer base.

Cookies give you the ability to do two things. First, they allow you to provide a better user experience since they can remember user preferences and information. Second, since they collect information about user preferences and behavior, they are a valuable source of information that you can use to extract behavioral marketing insights.

Key Points of Data to Gather

• Collect zero-party data points like phone numbers, emails, or addresses for personalized marketing via SMS, email, or physical media.
• Gather details on items added to shopping carts for insights into interests and preferences.
• Use browsing history — including number of site visits, pages viewed, and session length — to see which pages and products are most engaging.

Get Insights from Social Media

On social media platforms, people share vast troves of data that you can leverage for insights. Better yet, you can get a mixture of both zero-party data (personal information that users willingly share) and first-party data (details collected via the social media platform). With this information, you can learn a lot about your customers interests and preferences.

Key Points of Data to Gather

• Track likes, shares, comments, and click-throughs to gauge engagement levels in the content you’re sharing.
• Use each platform’s built-in analytics tools to learn about follower demographics and interests.
• Practice social listening to track brand mentions and industry keywords to learn about customer sentiments.

Ask Customers Directly via Surveys, Feedback Forms, and Interactive Experiences

One of the absolute best ways to get more data is also often overlooked. Just ask! Surveys and feedback forms are common ways to get information on consumer behavior, needs, interests, or preferences. However, you can also create other types of interactive experiences — like product finders, personality quizzes, polls, browser games, and more — to gather various details.

Key Data Points to Gather

• Use post-purchase surveys to get insights into customer satisfaction and the purchase experience.
• Send out targeted surveys via email campaigns to get information about user preferences, expectations, and interests.
• Create a product match quiz to learn more about individual customer needs.

Samsonite has a great example of a product match quiz that can engage customers while gathering the kind of data you need for behavioral marketing insights. They created this quiz using Jebbit, and as users go through it, it asks questions about their travel preferences. At the end, it also has an optional form for capturing lead information. This experience offers an easy way for customers to find the ideal luggage, and in the meantime, Samsonite gets an opportunity to collect both lead information and data on their customers’ travel habits.

In terms of results, the product match quiz has delivered. Up to 58% of Samsonite’s website visitors who clicked on the quiz engaged with it, and 60% of users who started it completed it. Half of those who completed the quiz went on to shop recommended products. Throughout it all, Samsonite collected plenty of zero-party data, which they then used to optimize their customer journey via Jebbit’s integration with the Emarsys customer data platform. 

How to Unlock Behavioral Marketing Insights

Since your data will be coming in from a variety of sources, the best thing you can do is channel it all into a customer data platform where you can keep it secure and up to date (and where you can more easily analyze it in bulk). From there, you can start unlocking behavioral marketing insights through customer segmentation and predictive analytics. We’ll discuss both below.

Customer Segmentation

While there are many ways to process and analyze customer data, customer segmentation is among the most valuable. It’s the process of dividing your audience into distinct groups based on a set of shared characteristics, including things like demographics, behaviors, interests, or purchase histories. With customer segmentation, you can tailor your marketing messages to target different segments — and that enables you to create highly relevant messaging that resonates with each segment’s specific needs.

With customer segmentation, it gets even better. There are different segmentation models you can use, including:

• Behavioral segmentation, which organizes customers according to online data like purchase behavior or browsing habits
• Demographic segmentation, which sorts customers according to data points like age, gender, location, or income level
• Psychographic segmentation, which groups customers based on more ephemeral qualities like interests, value systems, or lifestyles

In practice, you’ll likely find it useful to segment customers according to more than one segmentation strategy. It’s behavioral marketing 101: The more you can understand about your customers, the better equipped you will be for customer journey optimization, which will ultimately boost your bottom line.

Predictive Analytics

Another great way to put behavioral marketing to work is through predictive analytics. This is the process of using data, algorithms, and machine learning to spot trends and make predictions about how customers will behave in the future or what they might want or need in the future. 

With predictive analytics, you can unlock the following behavioral insights:

• Identify which customers are most likely to make a purchase based on past user behavior patterns so that you can focus digital marketing efforts on those most likely to buy.
• Get insights into churn so that you can identify customers most at risk of leaving your brand. Then, target them with customer retention techniques designed to keep them on board.
• Predict the kinds of products or content that will most appeal to individual customers based on the data you’ve accumulated surrounding their past interactions with your brand.

Predictive analytics is kind of like having a superpower. You can leverage it to anticipate customer needs — and then use it to serve up personalized marketing messages before customers express those needs.

Real-World Examples of Brands Using Behavioral Marketing Insights

Want to see just how big of an impact behavioral marketing insights can make? Many of today’s brands, both big and small, are relying on various behavioral marketing techniques as a way to not only engage customers but also to learn more about them at the same time. Let’s look at some real-world examples of brands leveraging behavioral marketing.

Amazon

The e-commerce giant Amazon is famous for its personalized product recommendations. No matter what page you visit or what you’re shopping for, you’re almost certain to see at least a few of these recommendations whenever you visit. 

If you’re logged in, the homepage will let you pick up shopping where you left off — and you’ll likely also see recommended products related to what you were most recently looking at. On product pages, you’ll find sections like the “Frequently bought together” or “Items you may enjoy.” 

All of these product recommendations share one thing in common: They’re based on the data that Amazon has collected from your purchasing, browsing, and search history. The more you shop on Amazon, the more data they can collect on your browsing habits — and that enables them to serve up hyper-tailored product recommendations. 

The benefits are big for both Amazon and their customers: Amazon reaps the advantages of higher conversion rates, and recommendations make it easy for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Howes

Howes is a highly successful business that makes and markets diesel additives for the agricultural industry. They’re also the very definition of the “ask and you shall receive” side of behavioral marketing. The brand needed deep insights into their customer base — not just their wants and needs but also their agricultural backgrounds. So what did they do to get these insights?

They simply asked. 

It’s a little more complicated than that — but not by much. Howes used Jebbit to create a survey for their customers. They then launched that quiz on social media, where it became a data collection powerhouse. More than half of users who clicked on the quiz engaged with it, which allowed Howes to collect more than 12 million attributes that they can leverage for behavioral targeting, product development, and more. On top of that, they also saw a 250% conversion gain from look-a-like audiences.

NuLeaf Naturals

The product finder quiz that NuLeaf Naturals created through Jebbit is another fantastic example of behavioral marketing insights in action. This quiz asks a series of questions about customers’ wellness habits and experience with CBD products in order to guide them to the ideal NuLeaf Naturals product.

In terms of insights, NuLeaf Naturals got an inside look at health and wellness habits among their customer base, which allows them to create tailored product recommendations based on this information. It has also given NuLeaf valuable insights as to how else they can support customers on their wellness journey. Plus, they got to learn more about customers’ experience with CBD, which lets them know which types of content will be most helpful for their audience.

The quiz was a huge success. Nearly all of the users who saw it engaged with it (99%), and 75% completed it, which resulted in a vast amount of data for NuLeaf to use in future marketing campaigns. Additionally, the brand saw a 20% to 25% reduction in website visitors needing help from a support associate to get a product recommendation.

Jebbit Can Help You Get Behavioral Marketing Insights

Behavioral marketing insights are what will help your brand compete not only today but in the future too. Big data and analytical techniques like customer segmentation and predictive analytics will help you get to know your customers, create the messages they want to see, and show them the products they want to buy. 

As time goes on, behavioral marketing will only get bigger — and you’ll need a partner that can help you collect the zero- and first-party data that you’ll need.

Jebbit is that partner. With our interactive experiences, you can engage, entertain, and educate your customers while gathering the insights you need to market the products they want. To learn more about our platform and how we can help, schedule a strategy call with one of our Experience Experts.