How Behavioral Segmentation Can Push Your Clients to the Next Level

By Sean Brooks on Sep 30, 2021

Consumers are bombarded with marketing campaigns every day. So, it’s natural that they tune out what isn’t relevant or applicable to them. This means that if you’re targeting your clients’ audiences with generic content, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to engage them.

Talking to an audience directly and focusing on what they like and are interested in is your best bet to win them over. In fact, 83% of consumers say they are willing to share their data to create a more personalized buying experience. But how do you make it happen?

Enter behavioral segmentation. Instead of focusing on the demographics of an audience, behavioral segmentation is about dividing consumers into groups based on their online habits and behaviors. Once divided, you can target these groups with messaging based on those behaviors.

Below we highlight some of the benefits and types of behavioral segmentation, and how a white label digital marketing agency can offer you the support and expertise you need to scale your agency.

Benefits of Behavioral Segmentation

When you divide a client’s audience into smaller segments, you create a better buying experience, increase the chance of conversions and use your agency’s time more efficiently. Here are some of the benefits behavioral segmentation can have on your client’s marketing.

Create Personalized Experiences

Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when a company offers a tailored experience, proving the days of mass messaging are over. With behavioral segmentation, you identify a prospect’s needs, wants or interests and provide them with relevant offers and buying suggestions that they are more likely to take up.

Don’t believe us? Campaign Monitor reported that marketers who used segmented campaigns in email marketing saw a 760% increase in revenue.

Use Cost-Effective Strategies

Behavioral segmentation helps you make the most out of your clients’ marketing budgets. One way to do this is through retargeting  paid ads to users who have already visited your client’s website. Retargeting uses cookies (pieces of data) stored by the web browser to remember the users who visited your client’s site. For example, if a user read an article on your client’s website but didn’t click subscribe, you can use those cookies to target them with ads featuring articles or pieces of content that are similar to the one they read.

No matter how you segment an audience, you’re targeting people who have already indicated that they’re interested in your client’s brand by previously visiting their site. One CRM software company found that customers who see retargeted ads are 70% more likely to convert on a website.

It’s important to note that Google announced it will no longer support the use of third-party cookies (data collected from third-party websites) to track users and Google Ads will no longer allow advertisers to use this third-party data for ads targeting. This change isn’t set to take effect until 2023, but you may want to start focusing your retargeting efforts on first-party cookies (data collected from their own website).

If paid advertising isn’t something your agency handles, white label digital marketing services can help. These services provide the knowledge, expertise and recommendations needed to help you and your clients grow!

Build Better Customer Relationships

The purpose of behavioral segmentation is to use data to recognize and anticipate a customer’s needs. When you do this efficiently, you create a stronger relationship with that customer. This is vital for customer retention,  InMoment’s 2018 US Retail CX Trends Report found almost 50% of customers say they’ve left a brand (they were loyal to) for a competitor that was better at meeting their needs.

Fortunately, Salesforce’s annual study found that 99% of marketers overwhelmingly believe that personalization helps advance customer relationships. Behavioral segmentation helps you create more personalized content that speaks to an audience and pushes them toward making a purchase.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to create personalized marketing campaigns. According to Campaign Monitor, “Personalizing your email campaigns is a proven way to increase your open and click-through rates and can have a measurable impact on your ROI and revenue.”

Four Types of Behavioral Segmentation

To better understand behavioral segmentation, we are breaking down some of the different types of online behaviors to segment an audience. Whether you have a client working to start a business from home or a more established organization, understanding these customer behaviors will help them market to their customers more effectively.

1. Purchasing Behavior

Segmenting an audience by purchasing and spending habits looks at the what, when, how and why:

• What are customers buying?
• When are they buying it?
• How often are they buying it?
• Why or for what purpose?

For example, an online shoe store might create a segmented group of everyone who purchased boots and then target that group with a marketing campaign promoting an upcoming boot sale on their website. Another example of this is anticipating seasonal trends. That online shoe store might see an increase in children’s shoes purchased during the back-to-school season. Anticipating this need and segmenting the buyers who have previously purchased children’s shoes and targeting them with a specific marketing campaign increases the chance of a repeat purchase.

77% of customers expect businesses to offer products that cater to their personal tastes, so creating these targeted campaigns shows the audience that your client is listening to their wants and needs.

2. Customer Engagement and Usage

Customer engagement and usage focus on how customers interact with a brand, such as how often they purchase or visit a website. An example of this could be re-engaging customers who haven’t made a purchase in over 12 months by offering them a special discount.

Usage behavior can also be an indicator of customer loyalty. Customers who consistently engage with your client’s website find value in its content, which shows loyalty to the brand.

3. Customer Journey

Behavioral segmentation based on the customer journey allows you to create communications and personalize experiences to increase conversions at every stage. When you know and understand your client’s customers better, you have the knowledge to create a more targeted value proposition and a greater chance that offer will convince them to purchase. It also helps you discover stages where customers are not moving forward, so you can improve marketing efforts in those areas.

4. Customer Interests

Customer interest segmentation analyzes customer purchases and uses that data to share related products, cross-sell, up-sell and create personalized content. For example, from one confirmed purchase or interaction, you can make an educated guess regarding related interests to encourage further engagement. Netflix is a prime example of this, keeping subscribers watching with suggested content and recommendations based on previous behavioral interest.

Umbrella Can Help

Behavioral segmentation helps you understand your clients’ customers better to enhance their experience and potentially connect with new customers. To do this, your agency needs to have the services in place to reach them. Umbrella’s white label digital marketing services can give your agency the support it needs. Contact us today to find out how we can scale your agency and grow your client’s businesses.