It probably won’t be news to you that it helps to account for different customer demographics when you are looking to both attract and retain shoppers for your ecommerce store. After all, there has been a big emphasis in recent years on harnessing key details about site visitors in order to provide a more personalised experience to these potential buyers.
But how much do you know about behavioural targeting? By this, we’re referring to using the actual actions of your site visitors – such as how they navigate your store, what they choose to buy, and how they pay – as a means of helping to determine the next action they take.
Remember to account for both behaviours and motivations in your shoppers
If you want to get serious about behavioural targeting as a merchant – and we can safely say it’ll probably be one of the key factors helping to determine many e-tail stores’ success and failure in years to come – it’s not just the actual customer behaviours you will need to think about.
Sure, you will need to consider what behaviours to target, such as the specific pages of your site that a given visitor goes to, how frequently they browse your store in general, and what purchases they may have made from what product categories in the past.
But we also urge you to focus on what causes a customer to take that step from browsing to buying. Is it a product recommendation? Perhaps it’s a money-off voucher? Naturally, the exact prompts that are particularly effective can differ from one visitor to the next.
Nor is it even just browsing sessions or purchases that a merchant can track as far as customer behaviour is concerned. Are you, for example, keeping an eye on your shoppers’ engagement with your marketing emails, or the customer support requests they might send to you? Even any product reviews they might submit on your site, and what products they return or exchange, can all form invaluable information for your behavioural targeting.
So, what solid steps can you start to take?
One powerful way of helping to ensure your visitors receive a truly personalised experience, is segmenting them based on how they behave on your site. Leading platforms like Shopify, for instance, enable you to build datasets based on customer purchases. You might then use this information to adjust the recommendations or content that the given shopper receives when they are on your site, so that the experience you give them is more relevant and appealing to their needs.
Once you have your customers segmented and you have the data that enables you to anticipate their likely actions, you will be able to consistently deliver the best-suited content to them in real time.
That might entail prioritising the offers you show a given customer on the basis of their shopper lifecycle and behaviour, instead of the more ‘scattergun’ approach that might present them with a whole host of offers they have little or no interest in. Or you might show custom messaging to those who are about to leave your site without buying – again, tailored to what the visitor’s intent is likely to be. You may even have an arrangement whereby a specific action – such as watching a video or reading a blog post – prompts an ‘on-the-fly’ email.
You get the idea. Going beyond mere appreciation of your customers’ common demographics or even the basics of personalisation, keeping track of exactly how your specific visitors interact with your specific brand, will leave you well-placed to take the necessary actions to tempt them into buying.
Would you like to discuss the above or other aspects of your brand’s online presence in 2022 and beyond, and how we can help? Our services and areas of knowhow encompass the best in website design, graphic design, search engine optimisation (SEO), and software development services in Gibraltar, Spain and the UK – so please do not hesitate to contact us for a free no-obligation chat.
