Acquiring new customers is a key part of any business strategy, but it’s undoubtedly one of the trickiest. With consumers now seeing as many as 10,000 marketing messages every day, standing out from the crowd and ensuring they choose your brand over others can prove extremely difficult.
That’s probably why attracting new customers is significantly more expensive than retaining the ones you already have. In order to get ahead, you need to ensure your marketing strategy is relevant and engaging for your audience - and that’s where data comes in.
Data is now one of the best tools businesses have at their disposal, with figures from LinkedIn suggesting that data-driven customer acquisition could account for 51% of all marketing budgets by the end of this year.
While there are several different types of customer data, let’s focus on one of the most versatile: behavioral.
By now, you’ll probably be familiar with the creation of buyer personas as part of a marketing strategy. However, while these can be useful tools in narrowing down demographic-related goals, it’s important to remember that it’s not possible to make assumptions about customers’ requirements based on the fact that they’re, for example, a 40-year-old Asian women.
After all, this might suggest she is a potential buyer of contemporary romance books when what she really enjoys is zombie horror.
Instead, you need to go deeper and understand what people interact with and why in order to gain insights into their motivation for purchases - because therein lies the potential for conversion and engagement.
Behavioral data refers to the information generated by a person’s engagement with your business, whether that’s a click-through to your website, an email newsletter sign-up, or a message to your contact center.
In order to collect it, you might look at search engine history, browsing information, IP addresses, CRM programs, cookies, and details of mobile apps, to name but a few. The data will likely be different depending on whether individuals are logged-in or anonymous, and it’s usually broken down into ‘events’ (like a website visit) and ‘properties’ (like the type of device they’re on).
Behavioral data has become the backbone of some of the most successful businesses ever. For example, Amazon got in on the ‘you may also be interested in’ idea early, and now 35% of its sales are generated by this recommendation engine.
Meanwhile, Netflix can even work out from its customer data the amount of weekly usage necessary to keep them paying their subscription fee each month.
Behavioral data is about creating a personalized service by analyzing what people do and using this information to make future predictions, and it’s crucial when it comes to optimizing conversion and retention.
What’s more, any business of any size can do it by learning what their audience is tempted by and personalizing their offers accordingly. How? Well, here are a few ideas to get you started:
By looking at the demographics, purchase history, search history, and more of your current customers, you should find you can discover new audiences that are also a close match and might act in similar ways. Once you’ve found them, you can employ scale marketing campaigns targeted specifically towards them.
Businesses can determine much about signals of intent from the terms people enter into search engines, price comparison sites, and review portals. For example, a Google search for ‘star necklace’ might indicate that someone is keen to make a jewelry purchase.
Knowing about this is a great source for potential customer acquisition through other forms of targeted marketing.