[wire] stone

Are you baffled by bounce rates?  Pained by unexplained exits and dropped shopping carts?  Frustrated by low conversions?  You’re not alone, and there are many reasons for these issues. Most commonly, your consumer is responding to irrelevant content, out-of-context offers, or hard-to-use interfaces. And as more customers become accustomed to tightly focused information that is directly relevant to what they want and need at any moment in time, the harder it is to make sure your message gets through.

Very often, the root issue of the “irrelevant content” problem will be the approach you’ve taken to audience segmentation and targeting. In a world where increasingly tech-savvy consumers expect personalization, traditional methods of targeting – particularly demographic attributes – are simply insufficient. You need to know more. A lot more.  And then, you need a way to use everything you know to serve your customers information that will encourage the behavior you want: repeat visits, more time on your site, and more purchases.

Understanding consumers based on their membership in behavioral segments is a powerful step toward unlocking the personalized 1:1 marketing capabilities that will help you get results. By tracking customer behavior on your site, and correlating it to other data you have (or can easily obtain) about those customers, you can develop many more specific segments that do a much better job of telling you who you are selling to and what they may want.  These segments are also much better predictors of future purchase behavior, which is exactly what you want.

For example, if you use just demographic attributes, you might know that you are selling your product primarily to 40-50 year old women. You might also know that they are primarily married, with children. But that’s a pretty broad group.  Maybe you’ve added some preference/attitude information, so perhaps you know that they are interested in the environment and try to purchase “green” products.  So far, so good, but still pretty broad. Behavioral targeting takes this to a whole new level.  With it, you can know a host of great things:

+ Whether they’ve visited your site before, and what their visit patterns were

+ Products & campaigns they’ve viewed, and what their responses were

+ Whether (and what) they’ve purchased from you in the past

+ If they’ve purchased, you can connect all their behaviors to a profile and target further

Armed with this information, you can begin to develop detailed behavior segments that provide a much clearer picture of your audience in all its variety.  This will help you to offer content, promotions, product offers, recommendations, and other information that is relevant and contextual, and encourages purchases.

Tags: purchase-behavior, retail

Wiretap home »