Your eCommerce marketing strategy requires you to have significant data about your customers. Basic metrics like page visits and conversions might not be telling the whole story. To get deeper insight into how your customers shop, your data needs to be qualitative to help you understand the psychology behind your customer’s behavior.
This is where behavioral analytics come in. Nuanced patterns in customer behavior drive purchase decisions, and it can help boost your strategy to gain a better understanding of these elements of the customer journey. For example, traditional analytics might show you that 70% of potential customers abandon their carts before making a purchase. But behavioral analysis can show you where exactly customers are hitting a pain point, and what’s causing that friction to occur.
Let’s dive into some of the benefits of using behavioral analytics to your advantage to level-up your marketing strategy and grow commerce revenue.
The Benefits of Behavioral Marketing
Improve the Customer Experience
Understanding your customers better will inevitably result in a better experience. One way to improve the customer experience is through deep personalization. Research shows that over 70% of customers expect a personalized shopping experience, and behavioral analysis can help you accomplish this. One example of how behavioral data can help form your strategy is through a data-driven loyalty program. Loyalty programs provide businesses with lots of zero-party data that can help you create a strategy that is highly informed and optimized. Through personalized experiences, customers can find the products they’re looking for more easily, which means more conversions and higher customer satisfaction.
Attract and Maintain Customer Base
Targeted marketing can help re-engage customers who aren’t ready to make a purchase just yet. With behavioral analytics, you can learn more about what is causing potential customers to hesitate. With a better understanding of why your customers are struggling to make a purchase decision, you can use that information to send an abandoned cart recovery email to win them back, offer incentives, or alternative product recommendations that might better suit their needs. These are all just a few more ways to improve the customer experience which will in turn increase trust and loyalty with your brand.
Before you get started building your behavioral marketing strategy, there are many things to consider to keep your customer data organized and easy to manage.
Best Practices for Your Behavioral Analysis Strategy
Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool
The best way to manage customer data is to use tools that are specifically designed to do so. Tools such as Hubspot or Zoho are great for retailers looking to make the most out of customer data. They can make it easy to collect, organize, and use customer information to form better marketing strategies and automate labor intensive tasks like personalized product recommendations and upselling. A CRM combined with other tools can help you get ahead of tired data driven strategies. Customer feedback tools, for example, can help you learn more about your customers by simply asking for their thoughts on how your business can improve.
Use Behavioral Segments
Going beyond demographic segmentation can help you learn even more about a very specific group of customers. You can create more granular segments using your CRM or even your eCommerce platform depending on what functionality is available to you. Tools such as Google Analytics and Experian can help you build segments based on whatever metrics you choose, so you can discover buying behaviors based on more than just demographics.
Be Transparent About Data Collection
The most important thing to consider when collecting more data from your customers is making sure they know when you’re doing so, and what you plan to do with their information. Data privacy regulations are constantly evolving to protect users more, which is great for user safety but presents a challenge for data-driven marketing teams who rely on customer data to build their strategy. The best data is given voluntarily, so if you’re looking for more information from your customers about their preferences, you can simply ask! You can even provide incentives for their feedback to encourage responses, be sure to be clear about what will happen with their data after it’s collected.
Final Thoughts
Now that you’re ready to get started with your first behavioral marketing campaign, you’ll want to make sure that your eCommerce platform is ready to tackle the incoming flow of customer data. You’ll likely be integrating new tools that will need to communicate seamlessly with your back-end systems in order to execute data-focused marketing campaigns, so your eCommerce platform should be highly flexible and connective.
If you’re on the market for an eCommerce platform that’s built to scale with you, marketAgility is an award-winning enterprise eCommerce platform with composable commerce capability, so you can pick and choose only the tools that suit your business needs and help you grow. Schedule a consultation to learn more about how Virid can help you discover your eCommerce site’s true potential.
