Generic sales techniques leave customers feeling undervalued.
The truth is… customers expect a personalized experience from brands.
But it’s not enough to simply stick your customer’s name in the subject line. Buyers want personalized experiences that reflect their core needs and preferences.
This is where customer behavioral analysis comes in.
With a strong grasp of who your potential customers are and how they behave, you can preempt the trends and desires that motivate them to buy.
Armed with a verified list of email contacts and an understanding of what drives them, you can design highly targeted email campaigns that power revenue and improve customer retention.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can use data to create ultra-personalized email experiences.
What’s Customer Behavior Analysis?
Customer behavior analysis centers on identifying your customers and understanding their interactions with your company.
Using both quantitative (numerical) and qualitative (observational) data, you can figure out how and why customers behave the way they do.
This deep analysis of customer behavioral data is crucial to working out what draws them in and what turns them away.
In fact, more than a third of marketers and marketing virtual assistants agree that understanding this data is absolutely essential to effectively reaching and understanding their target audiences.
When you examine each step of the customer experience, you can get actionable insights that tell you who your ideal customer is and how you can net them. This helps you make better sales, marketing, product development, and customer support decisions.
And the benefits are significant.
You get happier, more loyal customers who convert more often and generate higher revenues.
Plus, it’s easier to identify where you need to make improvements.
How To Use Customer Behavior Data for Email Marketing Strategy
If you want to boost conversion rates and improve customer loyalty, you need to offer personalized experiences that are relevant to your customer base.
Here’s how you can use data to create targeted email campaigns that hit the mark with your potential customers.
Remember, your email campaign is only as good as your contact list. If the data is incorrect, you won’t get the reach you need. Verify email addresses on your list with a tool like Breadcrumbs free email verifier to ensure your emails land where they should.
Segmentation
Segmentation means dividing your contact database into groups based on shared characteristics. These might include firmographics, pain points, preferences, and behavior.
When you divide your email contacts using behavioral data, you end up with smaller groups who all act in similar ways. This makes it easier to craft effective, targeted emails that relate to their behaviors.
The result?
Your contacts receive emails that are more relevant to them, addressing their specific needs and preferences. This increases the likelihood of engagement, clickthrough rates, and conversions.
Follow these three steps to segment your email contacts:
- Clean the data: Remove inaccurate or outdated information from your email list with a tool like Breadcrumbs free email verifier.
- Model the data: Analyze customer behavior to get a feel for the different ways customers behave. This helps you understand how you’ll divide your contacts into segments.
- Cluster the data: Group your audience into segments based on the similar behaviors you observe.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics is a highly sophisticated approach to targeting emails. Using advanced technology, it leverages machine learning algorithms to predict future behavior and preferences based on how customers have acted in the past.
The algorithms combine a wealth of customer data sources—from purchase history to website traffic to customer feedback. This helps you forecast trends and predict what customers might do next.
Right now, 51% of marketers harness predictive analytics to foresee customer behavior, while 50% use it to spot trends.
This is incredibly valuable for building relevant, proactive email campaigns. When you understand what customers want and how they’ll act, you can design campaigns that reflect those preferences, improving engagement rates.
For example, your analytics might highlight an upward trend toward super-short emails with promotional codes. Now, you can tailor campaigns so they’re written in this way.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a method of ranking prospects to understand which are the most valuable.
This helps you prioritize leads so you know where to focus your email marketing efforts. It also helps you align your sales and marketing campaigns to target high-value customers and low-hanging fruit first.
By prioritizing valuable customers, you can increase your revenue as these customers buy big-ticket items or spend more per order.
Here’s how to effectively score leads:
- Engagement level: Score prospects based on how much they engage with your marketing emails. Scores can relate to specific engagement behaviors or generic levels of engagement.
- Purchase history: Assign high scores to customers who have bought recently or purchased often.
- Product usage: Look at how customers use your product. Score customers based on how often they use your product and how many features they use.
- Customer journey progress: Give customers who are further down the sales funnel higher scores.
- Demographics: Create an ideal customer profile and score leads based on how closely they match it. Incorporating professional headshots in your customer database can help personalize interactions and build stronger connections.
It’s not easy to score leads manually, though.
Consider using a lead scoring tool to streamline the process and increase accuracy.
For instance, with a tool like Breadcrumbs, you can make data-driven decisions quicker. Its advanced lead scoring capabilities help you analyze customer behavior and preferences at the granular level. This helps you prioritize leads more effectively so you can achieve your marketing goals.
Personalization
Email personalization means tailoring email content to meet the reader’s specific needs and preferences.
Personalizing messaging in this way is absolutely crucial—customers want and expect it. In fact, 71% of customers expect personalized experiences from brands.
And this spans across all industries.
For instance, according to Accenture, 75% of banking customers crave personalization and are willing to do business with banks that prioritize it.
Banks can craft highly targeted emails by using behavioral data to uncover their clients’ core financial goals and needs. For example, they can tailor emails to wealth management clients by offering tips on wealth planning and investing options. This data-driven personalization approach fosters stronger relationships and boosts email campaign effectiveness with this specific customer segment.
But it’s not just about meeting customer expectations. Personalization also leads to more sales and happier customers.
28% of marketers agree that personalization boosts conversions, while 50% say it increases revenue.
On top of profitability, personalization improves customer relationships.
More than half of all marketers report that personalized emails enhance the customer experience, and 50% say it helps retain customers.
But remember, personalization goes beyond the subject line.
As Luke Glassford, Marketing Director at Gambit Partners, explains…
“[It’s] more than just including a recipient’s name in the email, it’s about tailoring the content and messaging around individual user behavior, preferences, and predictive analytics.”
If you’re looking for more creative personalization techniques, try these:
- Merge fields: Insert customer-specific details, such as name and location
- Conditional content: Show different content to different users based on their individual attributes
- Behavioral triggers: Send out emails when someone performs a specific action
- Purchase behavior: Offer promotions, recommendations, and advice based on previous purchases
- Customer milestones: Acknowledge important dates, such as customer anniversaries and birthdays
- User preferences: Adjust content according to explicitly stated preferences offered in signup forms/lead generation forms
Remarketing
Remarketing is the process of targeting individuals who previously interacted with your brand.
Most often, you’re targeting customers that didn’t convert, but remarketing can also refer to re-engaging past customers.
It’s effective because you’re targeting people who are already familiar with your brand. Plus, since they’ve already expressed interest, you have a starting point to encourage them to convert by working with that interest or need, incorporating customer experience into brand events.
Remarketing often refers to personalized ads, where customers see ads related to websites they’ve already visited. However, it’s also used in email marketing.
You can use cookies to track browsing habits, analyze social media and website behavior, and explore purchase history to work out how to engage customers based on their previous interests.
Effective remarketing email techniques include:
- Abandoned cart: Remind browsers of items in the cart, often with a one-time deal to encourage conversion
- Browsed but didn’t buy: Remind browsers of the items they were looking at, recommending similar products, and offering one-off promotions
- Inactive customer emails: Contact past customers with targeted offers and personalized recommendations
- Post-purchase upsells: Follow up a purchase with recommendations for complementary products
- Replenishment reminder: Schedule emails to remind users to replenish products they use up
Remarketing works best when conducted across multiple platforms. Don’t just remarket via email—retarget those users with personalized ads and on social media, too.
Benefits of Targeted Email Marketing
Targeted emails appeal directly to the recipient. Rather than bombarding them with irrelevant information, you offer prospects solutions that meet their specific needs and desires.
The result?
Happier customers and higher revenue.
Increased Conversions
Targeted emails lead to higher conversions.
Why? Because you’re not firing out irrelevant, generic solutions.
Personalization at this level aligns your brand with the recipient’s needs and interests at the right time.
By doing this, you’re able to see how potential prospects engage with your emails, leading to better-targeted sales strategies and more direct conversions.
Increased Retention
Well-targeted emails show customers that your brand understands them.
With relevant product recommendations, personalized promotions, and tailored upsells, you’re far more likely to keep customers interested in what you’re offering.
You can also use targeted emails to re-engage lost customers and bring them back into your sales funnel.
Putting Data and Strategy Into Practice
Customer data is invaluable for creating targeted emails that speak directly to your customers buying motivations.
When you understand who your customers are and how they behave, you can segment them into groups and target them with relevant content, recommendations, and promotions. This is pivotal to building meaningful relationships and moving prospects down the funnel.
But, remember, your email marketing campaign is only as strong as your contact list. If it’s full of incorrect email addresses and missing data, your campaigns won’t reach as wide an audience as you anticipate.
Keep your email data clean and prioritize your leads with Breadcrumbs. Book a demo today.