Customers expect personalization on your website. In fact, 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized.
To customize each shopper’s unique experience, you need to rely on segmentation, which involves categorizing your customers based on particular characteristics or customer behavior.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the best behavioral segmentation methods to help you better understand and meet your customers’ needs.
We’ll discuss the different types of behavioral segmentation, such as purchase behavior, occasion-based purchases, benefits sought, and customer loyalty. By leveraging these strategies, you can enhance personalization, improve customer satisfaction, and drive more conversions.
Let’s get started!
Behavioral segmentation categorizes your visitors into groups based on a shared, specific behavior pattern like:
The aim of behavioral segmentation is to:
Now that we know what behavioral segmentation is, let’s have a look at why it’s important.
When you understand your customers better, you can provide them with tailored and personalized experiences.
Let’s take a look at how this directly affects your marketing.
Now that we’ve discussed the basics, let’s get into some practical examples of behavioral segments in ecommerce.
Segmenting your customers based on their purchasing behavior can tell you more about their decision-making process. You can understand:
Let’s take a look at this in more detail. You can break purchasing behavior down into some general categories:
Source: Clootrack
Now let’s take a look at this in more detail.
Complex buying behavior: It happens when people are about to make an expensive purchase. They are super involved, and doing a ton of research. Cars, homes, and real estate insurance and pet insurance policies are some examples that come to mind when we think of a complex purchase decision.
Dissonance reducing buying behavior: The buyer involvement here is also very high. They may talk it through with friends and family or read many reviews. But there are fewer choices therefore limited decision making. For example, if a customer is looking for a collapsible table for their camping trip, the key criteria will be the feature of the table in question and the budget for it.
Habitual buying behavior: This is where people buy stuff they use in their regular routine. Think of a toothbrush or carton of milk. Here, involvement is low and they don’t see many differences between the brands they buy from.
Variety-seeking buying behavior: Here, people see a lot of differences between brands and have a lot of options. As such, they regularly switch between different brands. They do with limited involvement, maybe switching after a friend’s recommendations or reading a couple of reviews online. You might have done this with your athletic shoes. There’s always a huge variety of new and better sneakers on the market.
Could-be customers often value different benefits.
Take the example of skincare. Consumers who buy skincare products do so for various reasons. Here are some segmentation examples for the different benefits customers may prioritize:
See how Sephora uses a “Shop by Concern” category to learn what benefits and features are most important to each shopper.
This can help your visitors find what they’re looking for, and you can immediately know your shoppers’ concerns and the benefits they’re after.
You can use this strategy on a popup too. See this example:
It can be tricky to pinpoint exactly where your shopper is in the customer journey. From Instagram to your homepage, your customers engage with your content at different stages across different channels.
It’s important to leverage all customer data across various touchpoints and channels to personalize messages based on their customer journey stage.
For example, you can display a personalized message like the one below for visitors in the Post-Purchase stage.
Usage behavior looks at:
You can create a mind map and then segment your customers based on their usage of your product or service. The main usage segments include:
You can help turn your light users into medium and heavy users by testing different marketing strategies. Some of our fave approaches include offering prize giveaways, offering up interactive content, and offering Birthday treats like a free gift (who doesn’t love a freebie?).
Some occasions are universal, like booking a hotel for New Year‘s Eve. In comparison, others are personal, like buying a monthly gourmet spice subscription box filled with luxe, hard-to-find herbs and spices to keep your cooking game sharp.
In contrast, occasion-based segmentation is a common segmentation approach. This refers to when people decide to buy. Just head to your inbox and take a look at some of the emails you receive. For example, your favorite delivery service sends out coupons or flash sale emails on Fridays—people are more likely to order on the weekends.
Christmas is one of the most popular times to capitalize on occasion-based segmentation. Here’s an example of how to promote your Christmas sale:
Are you accurately capturing how satisfied your customers are at every stage of their journey?
You can jump right in and fix any potential problems or address any concerns if you know how dissatisfied your customers are. In comparison, you can target highly-satisfied customers with up-sells, cross-sells, or loyalty programs.
Here’s what segmentation based on customer satisfaction could look like:
Source: Pointillist
You don’t have to be as high-status as Netflix or Spotify to leverage the power of smart recommendations based on your customers’ interests.
All brands should capitalize on relevant, personalized content, product, or service recommendations. Segmenting your customers in this way is a great way to drive engagement. That’s because people only see the most relevant content to them.
How do you go about this?
With OptiMonk, you can easily track your visitors’ behavior on your website and recommend products based on that behavior.
For example, you can recommend new items by looking at your customer’s “recently viewed products.”
Engagement is a valuable metric for both pre-purchase and post-purchase parts of the customer journey. For example, you can use engagement-based segmentation to discover how involved different prospects behave in your pre-purchase funnel.
In addition, you can uncover how psyched people are after their initial purchase through repeat visits, purchases, or engagement with your content.
Understanding and leveraging customer loyalty, especially focusing on your most loyal customers, can significantly impact your business’s bottom line.
Loyal customers (or VIP customers) are those who repeatedly purchase your products or services, providing a stable revenue stream. By identifying these customers and creating tailored marketing strategies, you can enhance their experience and encourage continued loyalty.
Offering exclusive discounts, early access to new products, or personalized recommendations can make loyal customers feel valued and appreciated.
An example of behavioral segmentation is targeting frequent buyers with loyalty rewards programs. For instance, a coffee shop might offer a free drink after every ten purchases to encourage repeat visits and reward loyal customers.
McDonald’s uses behavioral segmentation by analyzing customer purchase patterns and preferences. They offer different menu items based on regional tastes and create targeted promotions, like special deals during lunch hours for working professionals. Understanding the average customer’s location helps them tailor these offerings more effectively.
The four category characteristics of behavioral segmentation are:
Behavioral segmentation involves categorizing customers based on their behavior, such as purchase history and brand loyalty. Psychographic segmentation, on the other hand, classifies customers based on psychological traits, including lifestyle, values, and interests. Combining both provides a deeper understanding of customers for more effective targeting.
The days of impersonalized marketing campaigns are over. People have their unique reasons for buying.
It’s up to you to decide how to effectively target your customers using demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral segmentation. From the benefits of behavioral segmentation to the 4Ps of segmentation, you now have everything you need to ace marketing segmentation.
Bookmark this article and refer to it regularly as you move forward with your marketing efforts.
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Product updates: January Release 2025