Behavioural Segmentation - Examples and Insights

The frequency with which someone engages with your online assets. 

The intensity with which they engage.

The collective pages visited.

These are all examples of customer behaviours that if we measure and understand, can lead to better nurturing opportunities for a more personalised experience, an increase in conversions and, ultimately, more revenue for your business.

What is behavioural segmentation?

As its name suggests, behavioural segmentation divides prospects or customers according to behaviour patterns as they interact online with your brand. 

Behavioural Segmentation lives alongside Basic Segmentation and can be used in conjunction with each other to confirm conclusions and:- 

• Targeting your audience more narrowly and accurately for your website and marketing
• Addressing the specific interests of individuals in future marketing communications
• Customising messaging to resonate more deeply
• Delivering a more personalised experience
• Uncovering opportunities to optimise a buyer’s journey
• Increasing conversions
• An opportunity to adapt your products/services to meet the needs of specific groups.

Basic Segmentation looks at your customer’s basic attributes and general engagement (location, company size, site visits, form fills….. etc.)  Behavioural Segmentation however is a more detailed analysis of customer behaviours: browsing habits, recent engagement + frequency, purchasing patterns, and other online / offline activity. 

Customer behaviours are strong signals of the customer’s purchase intent or buying journey stage; giving you an opportunity to influence early and move them to the next purchase step. 

ActiveDEMAND, from Lead Intuition, performs behavioural segmentation on the fly, dynamically as the prospect engages with your assets.

Behavioural segmentation examples 

We’ve discussed before customer behaviours to pay attention to in a previous article, so we won’t do so again here.  However, it’s certainly worth exploring a couple fairly specific behavioural segmentation examples to give you some additional context as to what’s achievable with this approach.

Example #1:  Seizing the moment of high-momentum site users

Let’s say you have a prospect in your database who opens your newsletters on a regular basis, but other than that has no other unsolicited engagement.  Then out of the blue they visit your website 5 times in the last week with multiple page view sessions of considerable time length.

This is a sign of increased interest.  They are possibly considering a purchase.

Depending on your own company processes you could:-

1. Put the contact in a new drip campaign (automatically) that is specific to the interest they have shown and nurture them further, or
2. Hand them over to sales who can look at the contact history in the database before they call.  A warm call for the cold-calling salesperson!  However, sales intervention too early can disrupt a prospect.  Equally, if you don't act, you can lose the moment and the prospect moves on.  Timing is everything.

Typically, we would take action a) Place them automatically in a new nurture campaign.  This could be something like pointing them to an on-topic download or some kind of special pricing offer.  If they download the asset, then pass the lead over to Sales.  If they sign up for the offer and purchase, then a thank you or book a discovery sales invitation call email would also be appropriate.

Example #2:  Same initial interest, but different results

Let’s say two prospects clicked a link on LinkedIn leading to your website and they downloaded the same whitepaper. You have required them to provide their email details to send them the email.

They both receive the autoresponder email, click the link and check it out.

• Subsequently, the pages on your website that they look at are different. One looks at Product A, the other looks at Product B. One looks at particular case studies, the other at product references. One looks at blog posts, the other at different posts.  

• Both started off at the same point, but took different paths and exhibited different interests/behaviours.  By using simple segmentation filters, we can now use those behaviours and put each prospect in different nurturing campaigns relevant to their interests.

You can do the same thing in your emails. Let’s say one clicks on a certain link in one of the emails in your automated follow-up email series. The other ignores that link the first time, yet clicks the link in the subsequent email.

Using these additional behavioural signals you can send more finely-tuned customised emails or even split your automation altogether. From there, you repeat the process as many times as makes sense.

Everyone in your database should have been put through not one segmentation filter, but at least two, three or more. The deeper your segmentation goes, then the more likely it will open up a multitude of options for connecting with your audience members in more meaningful ways.

Don't stop there, Use Dynamic Content

Another way for getting ROI from your behavioural segmentation is using dynamic content. This is content on your website that dynamically changes based on the behavioural criteria you establish.  For example, let’s say you wanted to show a different message to different site visitors, based on their:-

• Market sector
• Employer (for Account Based Marketing)
• Geographical location,
• The referral source of their visit. 

In other words, any condition you can think of – new vs. returning visitor, target URL, previous pages visited, UTM parameters, etc can be used to adapt your website content for each visitor.  All it takes is to set up simple segmentation filters.

This enables you to target at a granular level, increase engagement and ultimately conversions

Try using it on web forms too

Multi-step forms with conditional logic can be a great way for getting greater website customer/visitor insight, segmentation and optimisation. Depending on how someone answers certain questions, you can then ask them more relevant, targeted questions based on their previous answers.

This helps you to create different segments of the individuals submitting forms and gives you the ability to follow up with them differently from one another.  The entire form is not shown until they answer one question, they then get a second question relevant to the previous answer - and so on. This means they are more likely to answer the questions as the form is more relevant to them. They are less likely to abort the questionnaire if they only have to answer relevant questions.

Conclusion

Customer segmentation is a foundational aspect of good marketing.  By adding behavioural segmentation to your marketing toolkit, you take segmentation to a new level, enabling you to target your audiences more specifically and with greater precision. And therefore make more conversions!

Too many companies treat everyone in their audience the same, be it on the website or in email campaigns.  This limits their overall marketing impact and website appeal.  Everything in this article is possible using ActiveDEMAND. The affordable, scalable and easy to use marketing automation platform.  If your software can’t segment your customer data in real time, it’s time to turn your attention to ActiveDEMAND from Lead Intuition.  Schedule a demo to find out more