If you’re a marketer, behavioral segmentation is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. The behavioral segmentation tool allows marketers to identify and target their customers based on what they do when they visit their website, rather than who they are or where they come from.
But how can behavioral segmentation help marketers gain a competitive advantage? Let’s take a look at some examples.
Examples of Successful Usage of Behavioral Segmentation
There are many companies, even well-known brands, that have used behavioral segmentation to great effect. To give you the gist of how behavioral segmentation is used, here are some basic examples:
- A travel company can use behavioral segmentation to identify whether a customer is interested in business, pleasure, or family trips. This gives them the chance to tailor their marketing efforts and website presentation based on their information about you, the consumer.
- A clothing retailer can group customers into segments based on what they buy from them – dress clothes vs. casual wear vs. sports apparel, etc. This enables marketers to better understand who buys what so that they can send targeted offers accordingly.
- An eCommerce store selling electronics might want to segment visitors by how much time they spend looking at certain products (i.e. if someone spent more than three minutes looking at an expensive camera lens). That would help the marketer determine how interested the customer is in the product and, if they are at all interested, what other products they might be interested in.
Are you starting to find that behavioral segmentation is an effective and interesting tool? Well, here are some examples of big companies that have used behavioral segmentation.
Amazon Example
One of the most famous examples is Amazon. Amazon has long been known for its use of behavioral data in order to personalize and enhance the customer experience on its website. In fact, they were one of the first companies to really nail this down and make it the main part of their business model.
Thanks to their behavioral data, Amazon is able to recommend products that customers are likely to be interested in based on what they’ve browsed or purchased in the past. Not only does this increase sales for Amazon, but it also creates a more personalized and engaging experience for customers, which keeps them coming back time and time again.
Netflix Example
Netflix is another great example of how behavioral segmentation can be used to great effect. Netflix is known to be one of the first companies to embrace behavioral data and use it to personalize their entire service offering. Netflix uses behavioral data in a variety of ways, including:
- Personalizing what shows or movies are recommended based on user preferences;
- Using historical viewing behavior in order to suggest related TV series’ users might like;
- Tailoring categories for search results, so they only show relevant options.
The behavioral insights that Netflix gained from this helped them grow into an entertainment powerhouse with over 100 million subscribers worldwide!
Facebook Example
Another great example is Facebook. Facebook is popularly known for its ability to target ads extremely effectively because of the wealth of behavioral data it has about users.
Facebook’s ad targeting is based on a combination of demographic information (age, gender, location, etc.), interests (based on what users have liked or engaged with on Facebook), and behavioral data (what pages they’ve visited, what actions they’ve taken on those pages, etc.). This allows them to create very targeted ads that are likely to be relevant to the person seeing them.
Why Should Marketers Use Behavioral Segmentation?
With all the examples that have been given, it’s hopefully starting to become clear why behavioral segmentation is so powerful for marketers. Here are some key reasons:
Behavioral data is extremely accurate and relevant.
As mentioned earlier, behavioral data is based on actual user behavior, which means that it is highly accurate and relevant. This is what makes it a very valuable tool for marketers as they can be confident that the insights gleaned from behavioral data will be applicable to their target audience.
Behavioral data is objective and unbiased.
As behavioral data comes directly from user behavior, it’s not based on assumptions or perceptions. It’s also extremely difficult to game behavioral insights since they are based on actual actions rather than self-reported information (i.e., users can’t fake what pages they’ve visited).
This makes behavioral segmentation much less biased than market research methods like surveys which rely heavily on the opinions of consumers themselves.
Behavioral data is more actionable than other types of insights.
As behavioral segmentation only gives marketers the information they need to make smart marketing decisions, it’s very effective at helping them accomplish their goals. This makes behavioral segmentation much easier and faster for marketers to act on as opposed to market research, where there’s a lot of analysis and interpretation involved (and therefore more room for error).
