Part 1: Why you should be taking advantage of behavioural marketing in 2019.

What actually is behavioural marketing?

This article will cover the top level principles of why you should be factoring behavioural marketing into your strategy for 2019. The last thing we all need is more buzzwords to remember, so let’s just start with what behavioural marketing actually means.

Behavioural marketing is an automated process based on people interacting with your business (on and offline) and the wider industry as a whole. Using this principle, all marketing communications are tailored to be highly relevant - basically more of the right content at the right time. Everyone’s happy.

Businesses are often too concerned with what they want, and not what the customer wants and needs. Apply this concept to your own business, and it’ll be easy to understand how personalised automations and workflows can soon become a key part of your strategy. Our friends at Drip said this and we couldn’t put it better if we tried…

How do you and your customers benefit?

In a nutshell, it means all marketing and engagement activity is based entirely on how your fans and customers engage with your brand. For example, how they interact with you offline in your store, how they’ve searched for products online, which products they’ve actually viewed; the list goes on. With that information, you can then serve targeted ads and communication methods to those customers, purely as a result of their own interests, needs and where they are on their individual purchase journey.

This is a major benefit. Your customers are no longer getting bombarded with emails and adverts that aren’t relevant to them, which ultimately leads to lower engagement rates and shrinks your customer database - all because of irrelevance.

For you, the business, it means ROI is improved as there is less waste and expense in communicating to your audience. The likelihood of a goal or objective being hit is increased as recipients see something we know they’re interested in, which garners loyalty and ding, ding, ding, repeat business!

This may seem like a lot of work to get in place, however, the benefits are well worth the time investment. You can also streamline this process, by using an eCRM tool like Drip, which allows us to hyper-segment customer data and make quick marketing decisions by triggering events based on customer engagement.

What are the key principles of behavioural marketing?

Behavioural marketing is underpinned by the following core principles.

Segmentation - If you’re not already, start segmenting your data or you risk missing out on an incredible amount of opportunity. You can break your customers down into geographic, behavioural, demographic and psychographic groups, or whatever suits your needs. Understanding your customers and their engagement with your business will really help focus your marketing efforts and find opportunities, maximise engagement, improve customer retention, and minimise costs.

Relevancy - Based on how your customer interacts with your business (on and offline. E.g What products and services have they enquired about? What are their interests? What drives them to purchase?

Personalisation - Tailored communication to the customer, which could be based on: their name, their local branch and their contact details (if you’re a retailer), what type of customer you are (trade, retail or a certain category). More significantly - where they are in their journey.

Automation - create workflows and processes that are triggered at the time of your customer interacting with the business. If you’re clever about your automations, there’s less manual intervention required, saving you time and money, plus reducing human error.

This level of detail is often missing when clients come to us, and it explains why they’ve experienced low engagement and unfortunately, a reduction in their customer database. We cover this in more depth in a later article.

Once you know more about your customers, (which we’ll talk about in our next article), you can use this information to personalise your content to them, so they’re getting messaging that you know is specific to them, rather than just assumptions. Yes, you’ll likely be targeting smaller groups, but this means higher engagement, cheaper costs, better measurability and ultimately, a happier customer.

With this added insight, you can then share this information with other platforms and mediums, such as Facebook and Google audiences, to help ensure consistency across different touch points and devices. There are a number of platforms available to amalgamate this information, but having it distributed across all your platforms will reap multiple benefits, allowing you build customer personas and profiles in the long term.