How behavioral customer profiles drive intention and media engagement

Knowing what drives customers’ intentions and being able to engage with them through various media can make the difference between building up a healthy bottom line and struggling to keep the lights on in your business.

It’s not enough to make predictions based on what you think or hope how customers will behave under any given circumstances. What you need is to harness the power of each behavioral customer profile that you collect and assemble into a database.

Using behavioral data in your marketing campaigns

If you’re not familiar with behavioral data collection, it is a term that refers to all of the activities that occur when a customer interacts with your organization. From visiting the landing page to seeing which specific pages they visit, you can learn a lot about their motivations.

Other behavior includes signing up for your newsletter (in exchange for their email or surface mail address). You can gather a treasure trove of this data as they connect using laptops and desktop computers as well as tablets and smartphones. The kind of device they use and the time of day they use it will tell you more information too.

About behavioral customer profiles

Many business owners have heard of customer profiles. They give you a sense of the demographics of people who do business with you already or who may be primed to buy from you soon. But less have experience with the idea of a behavioral customer profile.

You want to take advantage of behavioral segmentation so you can engage more effectively. As Salesforce notes, a behavioral segmentation “focuses on consumers’ shopping behavior, how they make their decisions, why they choose one product over the other, and how they feel about a product, company, or service.”

When you divide customers into segments according to their activity, you’ll gain insight into which ones are buying because they are loyal to your brand and which are purchasing based on the price and value. You’ll determine when certain types of customers will be most in a mood to buy your services or goods.

For example, is a customer buying swimwear for spring break or summer vacation? Is that customer focused on the latest fashions, or is this a case of someone needing a quick purchase for expedience (they lost their luggage and need to wear something)?

If a customer is old and browsing products for a college student, you may determine it’s a gift from a grandparent to a kid heading off to school for the first time, so you will provide a different marketing experience to account for the different motivations involved.

Examples of behavior from customers that you can focus on to boost engagement and sales

Why is a customer visiting your business to purchase something as prosaic as a toaster? It could mean that individual loves toast and has to have the latest and greatest toaster model on the market. Or, you are dealing with someone who just moved into town and needs to furnish their new home.

These are two very different behaviors that you can capitalize on when you have sufficient data about the customers engaging with your organization.

The more you know about the circumstances of each customer, the easier it is to interpret their behavior to learn more about what is motivating them.

One portion of your demographics might be fashion-oriented, buying new suits every month, while others only do so once per year. Are some customers buying things just for special occasions? You want to distinguish them from people who might buy the same item or service on a more regular basis, such as monthly.

Perhaps there are other facts about these occasional shoppers that you could use to convert them into regular buyers too. The answer might be testing different prices on the infrequent customers to see if the high cost was what kept them from making purchases more often.

But you may not need to offer special promotions at all to your heaviest shoppers. They deserve more attention and hand-holding, so concierge-style engagement might be the most appropriate way to stay connected with them.

Your most loyal customers are like gold in the bank. Identifying them as soon as possible through careful tracking of not just their shopping behavior but also their purchasing history will help you pay more attention to them.

After all, loyal customers could be instrumental in recurring their friends, family, or coworkers to patronize your business too. They are worth much more than the sum total of their purchases. Their behavior will show you that they bring value in being regular consumers as well as role models for others who follow their lead when buying things.

Make the most of each behavioral customer profile with a data warehouse

All of the unique pieces of information that you compile on customers that go into developing a behavioral customer profile for each of them won’t do you much good if your team finds it difficult to access.

A data warehouse solution makes it easy to keep your valuable information freshly updated and available to your employees. If you have limited experience using cloud services or working with large amounts of behavioral customer profiles, try Lytics to explore a better way to make marketing decisions.