Posted on 20 August 2008 by Hurol No Comments

Using behavioural insights for targeted marketing

There is no doubt that you get better results in marketing campaigns that are targeted to those customers and prospects who are interested in your products and services.

It’s why marketers love customer demographics, and information on product holding, past purchases and campaign responses.

But what if you could go beyond this, and use online behavioural insights for your campaigns as well?

Taking it one step further, what if you could build or tailor an analytics solution to capture these behavioural insights – not just from the web, but from offline data as well?

It would place some pretty powerful information at your fingertips.

Instead of putting the behavioural data on your website into the “too hard” basket, organisations need to start asking how this data can help them achieve better ROI on their marketing campaigns.

The first step is to think about the scenarios, or insights, you need.

For example, you might want to capture insights about repeat purchasing behaviour; or the instances when a loyal customer starts browsing in new product areas.

In these scenarios, if you track the customer’s movements and collect the right data, you can then target them with campaigns across all channels – online through dynamic offer targeting, email marketing, direct marketing, and telemarketing.

The second step is to work out what’s required from your analytics or tracking solution. And this step represents a fundamental paradigm shift.

In the past, organisations would simply state, “I need a web analytics solution.”

Now, instead of selection of an out-of-the-box solution and thinking how it would help your business, organisations would benefit more from a solution that is built around those specific scenarios or insights identified as delivering value to the business.

Here’s where it gets contentious. Many of today’s web analytics solutions are not on an open architecture, which makes it incredibly difficult for you to integrate behavioural and offline data.

Seek web analytics solutions with open architectures. Get them to show how they can meet your specific scenarios. Be prepared to build custom tracking mechanisms, which are specifically designed to generate leads for your business.

Once you’ve done this, you can start capitalising on your behavioural insights. Not only are they easily actionable and translate into truly targeted marketing, but they also make the measurement of ROI much easier.

As Akin Arikan says in his excellent book, Multichannel Marketing, there is “no excuse for not using the rich lather of behavioural data from the website as a component for targeting marketing communications.”

So start thinking about it. Your customers will love your intuition.