What is behavioral segmentation? Why is it important to your business?
Behavioral segmentation is a way to organize customers into segments based on the actions they take with your website, marketing content, sales team, your brand–really, any interaction they have with your company. Once you organize customers into groups based on the actions they take, you can more effectively target and market to them.
When done correctly, it can seem like marketing magic. It’s something you should be doing and it’s not terribly complicated.
Let’s break it down together.
What is segmentation?
Segmentation has been around forever, both informally and formally. It means dividing customers into smaller groups and speaking to those groups in specific ways. Examples include dividing by location, gender, or age.
When we talk to segments rather than a whole group, we can speak more specifically and therefore have a more personalized conversation.
For example, if you’re a window installation company emailing your US customer base in January, you can segment using location and change the header image to something snowy for your contacts in Minnesota (north) and something sunny for your contacts in Florida (south).
The benefit is that the customer receiving your message feels that it’s personalized to them.
While standard segmentation such as age, location, and gender can be powerful and make customers feel known, behavioral segmentation takes it a step further.
Breaking down behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation in marketing uses data from actions your prospect or customer has taken and allows you to segment those contacts into lists based on those actions.
For example, you can group prospects who visited your website 10 or more times in the month of January but did not purchase. These prospects show high intent and so may be on the cusp of a purchase. You might consider sending this segment a discount code valid through the first week of February to see if their behavior (site visits) can be turned into a purchase with the right incentive.
In the first example, it was the person’s location (Florida or Minnesota) that determined the segment; in the second, it was the person’s behavior. The first is geographical segmentation, while the second is behavioral segmentation.
Behavioral segmentation goes beyond demographic segmentation to help you better understand your audience and give them the right message at the right time.
What are the benefits of behavioral segmentation?
Personalized experiences: At its core, behavioral segmentation lets you create personalized experiences for your prospects and customers. When consumers feel as though a brand understands them, they react more favorably to that brand. This increases brand loyalty and, ultimately, revenue.
Data-driven decisions: Behavioral segmentation allows marketers to make more accurate decisions based on user data since your most (and least) engaged prospects are easy to isolate.
Budget allocation: Behavioral segmentation makes it more clear where to allocate resources. For example, prospects with multiple website hits are likely in-market vs. those with one or two.
How does Insightly Marketing enable behavioral segmentation?
Tracked Custom Events
Tracked custom events allow users to create a custom event and when it’s triggered by a prospect’s actions, the behavior can be used to alter a prospect score or segment audiences and communications.
This can be useful when you’ve got a behavioral tracking use case that isn’t included out-of-the-box with Insightly Marketing For example, if there users are accessing an online portal, you might consider tracking behavioral data from their interaction with the portal. Or, you might want a combination of activities (clicking on an advertisement and visiting a specific website page) to be tracked or segmented for future communication, offers, and outreach.
Forms
No matter the plan you choose in Insightly, you have the option to create multiple forms to support your marketing campaigns. To get granular, create unique forms for each campaign so you can tie every form completion to the action that caused it. Then message those prospects based on the specific offer or asset with which they engaged.
Files
You likely have assets that speak to different phases in the buyer’s journey. Perhaps an article is at the top of your funnel, so you can create a follow-up campaign with industry-specific information for those who read the first article.. If you have a lower-funnel piece, like a pricing guide, your follow-up campaign may include a demo or trial call-to-action.
Redirect Links
Again, there is no practical limit to the number of links you can have in Insightly. If an asset is ungated, meaning there is no form associated with accessing your eBook or article, append a UTM to the link so you can track the exact journey the prospect took to get to it. Then, segment based on that link to continue the conversation in context.
Use behavioral signals within Insightly Marketing
Your marketing team needs a powerful tool to drive leads and create opportunities. Behavioral segmentation is just one of the many features used to drive and nurture leads for your sales team. Insightly Marketing includes this feature, plus offers customizable prospect grading and scoring, an intuitive journey builder, beautifully formatted automated emails, and more.
Insightly marketing is also part of a powerful platform that puts your marketing automation tool in the same suite of products as your CRM and customer service app. This aligns sales, marketing and customer service teams on a single, powerful platform.
