4 Ways to Market with Behavioral Data
   By John Rizzi

Behavioral data is just what it seems—data that reveals the buying behavior of our customers and prospects. Analyst firms report as much as nine-fold revenue improvements from application of behavioral data. The trick is to make behavioral data actionable and put it to use while it’s fresh. Here’s how.

Start with behavioral data by defining your marketing goals, strategies and tactics. Ideally, you define your strategy and get the data you need to execute it. However, marketers often start with the data they can willingly get from their existing e-mail marketing, transactional records and web analytics.

Once you know what that is, you can align it to one of the following four marketing goals:

1. Increase Repeat Purchases:
Offer cross-sell and up-sell products based on purchase activity (obtainable without web analytics) into purchase and shipment confirmation messages; inform customers of related products and new merchandise arrivals from along the same lines as previously purchased items.

2. Encourage a First-Time Purchase:
Send an alert out about new products in the same categories as recently browsed or searched items; further educate customers about recently browsed/searched products, especially those that may require a longer decision-making process; send user ratings or product reviews and include a compelling offer/incentive to “buy now.”

3. Increase Customer Retention:
Segment your list by e-mail responders and non-responders; segment frequent visitors from visitors whose frequency is declining; target appropriate content and updates to both groups in order to motivate the behavior you want.

4. Find Revenue in Abandoned Shopping Carts:
Send follow-up messages that reinforce the benefits they will receive from their purchase and include a discount and/or another incentive; describe new products similar to the products in their cart (in case they haven’t found the perfect item); remind them of the “limited-time” advantage/offer and reiterate your e-commerce security features and privacy policy.

The key is to start simple. Begin with transaction history, e-mail open and click-through data, and identifiable web browsing details – which gives you the best profile of your customers. Query, analyze, and segment this data into useful audiences to help you organize and track behaviors. Use the content assets, workflow, and messaging infrastructure to publish relevant content based on the new data. Finally, perform proper testing, reporting, and measurement to see what’s working.

---Sources: John Rizzi is president/CEO of e-Dialog(jrizzi@e-dialog.com); MultichannelMerchant.com