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It is no secret that marketing is vital for every business’s survival. As an entrepreneur or a marketer, you probably have a marketing strategy in place. But, is that enough? The field of marketing is dynamic. A strategy that worked today might become obsolete tomorrow.
As marketing is evolving, shouldn’t you change the way you interact with your audience and market your product/ service too? Keeping up with the trends can increase conversion rate and lead to more revenue.
Getting Started with Behavioral Analytics
One such marketing aspect that successful businesses use is user behavior analysis. User analysis is often considered as the amount of time customers spend on a website, the pages they visit, etc.
But is it just that? The data that you get from Google Analytics and similar tools is about the number of active users, number of sessions, and various other metrics. Is this data enough for you to understand the user’s journey, challenges, and expectations? It is NOT.
When the main aim of your business is to drive growth, behavioral analytics is the go-to solution. This helps you understand what your users are doing on your website, app or social media channels?
Keep reading to know what is behavioral analytics and how to use it to improve your business.
What is Behavioral Analytics?
Behavioral analytics is a way of analyzing how a user interacts or behaves while using applications and websites. This data goes beyond metrics such as page views, recurring visitors, and others. You can use this data to understand how user behavior impacts conversions & revenue.
How Behavioral Analytics Can Make a Difference?
Most of the product, analysis and marketing teams constantly have one question: “How customers are using the product, if at all?” This question would not be left unanswered anymore, thanks to behavioral analytics. By using this method, you can get answers to:
- What are the users doing on my website?
- Where are they getting stuck?
- Why are they getting stuck?
- What can you do to solve this problem?
- How do users react to upgrades or feature changes?
- Do users find the website/ app as simple as you thought it is?
- How is the user journey?
- What can your team do to improve it?
Once you have answers to these questions, you will be one step closer in meeting your customer expectations. And, this will lead to:
- More customers
- A better conversion rate
- More revenue for your business
Essentials of Behavioral Marketing
To make sure behavioral marketing works for you, you need accurate real-time data. This data will help you move away from push marketing tactics to a new approach that focuses on audience. The following are a few are essentials to make the most of behavioral marketing; while adopting an audience-centric approach:
A. Creating powerful marketing strategies
Amazon is one such brand that tops the list of using behavioral data that actually works. One of the ways this brand works towards gathering real-time consumer insights is to find out previous customer purchases. Based on this data, it recommends relevant items to the customer.
For example, if you have added a mobile phone to your cart, Amazon will recommend buying mobile cover, screen-guard, etc with it.
B. Creating personalized content
Let’s consider the same brand. Every time you open the homepage on the Amazon app you are very likely to see a few new elements. This e-commerce company has almost 30 million mobile users. How is that each one sees a different version? Thanks to personalized content.
What is content personalization?
People visiting your website or using your app have different intentions. Some of them want to make a purchase, some want to read customer reviews while some would want to work with you.
Despite having so many types of visitors, websites often offer the same kind of content to all; thus, making it boring. This is where personalized content can come to rescue.
Amazon uses cookies that track and store user’s shopping habits. This data includes previous searches, page views, saved items, etc.
It later uses this data to offer a personalized experience to every user. Understanding user expectations and then personalizing their journey will increase conversions.
C. Creating behavioral cohorts
To create a personalized journey for your customers, you first need to segment them. And this goes beyond categorizing them based on age, gender, location, etc,. You can create personality types by gathering data from the following questions:
- Which type of products are your customers most interested in?
- What offers are most appealing?
- At what point are they likely to convert?
- How much do they tend to spend on items?
By creating behavioral cohorts based on this, you can target and market to the right audience.
Tips to Improve Your Marketing Strategy with Behavioral Analytics
1. Create and send personalized emails
- Types of products purchased
- Products left abandoned in shopping cart
- Products recently viewed by customers
2. Create customized landing pages for referral traffic
3. Analyze exit reports
Steps to Get Started with Behavioral Analytics for Your Business
Now that you have understood what is behavioral analytics, how it can positively affect your business and its essentials, let’s move on to how to use it. The following are a few steps that will help you get started with behavioral marketing.
Step 1: Define analytics goals for your business
What is the overall goal of your website or mobile application? Do you want users to subscribe, make a purchase and increase revenue? If your main goal it to increase revenue, then your KPIs will be:
- Increasing the conversion rate
- Improving the retention rate for paying customers
Once you have your key performance metrics in place, focus on how you can achieve it. It is important to define your goals to ensure you are sending the right events to the right project. You can use this data to track your KPIs.
Step 2: Map out behavior paths that coincide with your business goals
Here, you need to identify customer actions that can help meet your business goals. For instance, an e-commerce website’s goal can be getting an order confirmation. This path will look like:
Search → Browse Products → Add to Shopping Cart → Checkout → Confirm order
These key customer interactions will help you decide the kind of events to log in with behavioral analytics.
Step 3: Create a tracking plan
Based on the presumed user flow, your team will be able to decide which events they need to track. Make sure you do not track all data, as too much data makes it difficult to find important details. Only track events and users that is useful to meet your KPIs.
Step 4: Decide which channels you need to measure
If your product is available both on a website and mobile app, do you want to unify this data or keep it separate? Experts often recommend to keep this data separate.
This will help you understand how the user journey varies based on the platform, and how you can improve it.
Step 5: Start tracking your events
Now that you know your goals and which events to use, it is time to start tracking. It is not necessary to track every action possible. But, make sure you do not miss out on events that are aligned with your business goals.
Step 6: Do not forget to set user and event properties
To get deeper insights about user behavior, consider setting user and event properties. User properties refers to personal attributes such as name, gender, age, and others. Whereas, event property tells you the amount of time a user spent, exact actions, and much more.
Step 7: Check if user behavior events are tracked properly
Once you have started tracking events, you need to verify if you’ve instrumented everything. After you have verified, it is now time to start sending data live.
Step 8: Start analyzing user behavior
You are finally at the end of the behavioral analytics process. And it is time to start digging into customer behavior. This includes creating behavioral cohorts, calculating user retention, measuring the impact of new feature releases and much more.
