Every year you spend a huge portion of your marketing dollars online in the hope to convey your message with the greatest possible clarity to your audience, and in turn, win their blessings in the form of elevated sales and heightened loyalty. However, this communication and its expected reciprocation would come to naught if you don’t look deeply at the digital footprints of your site visitors. Every day, hundreds of them or maybe thousands land on your digital property and do a myriad of things—search what they need, get converted, articulate their views by leaving comments, or depart in nothing flat.
For online players like you, the sweetest aspect of all these activities is the generation of a rich layer of behavioral data. Mine the data to gain privileged access to the farthest corner of visitors’ psyche. You could only then be able to target them with deliciously personalized, context-aware offers. As a reward, your marketing efforts don’t go down the tubes, both temporally and financially. Here are some ideas on how visitor behavior analysis can supercharge your marketing ROI:
Streamlining the budgeting process for marketing
It’s not in your best interest to go prodigal with company funds when preparing the marketing budget. Your focus should always be on how to make the most of the limited resources you have. Behavioral data of your existing customers and the prospective ones will help you to initiate marketing that’s relevant and compelling to the core. From time to time, it happens that a marketing strategy of yours fails to produce favorable customer reaction. In those situations, you can leverage data to fine-tune the non-performing strategy or drop it completely. You are thus saved from the risk of stepping out of the budgetary allocation.
Bulking up the competitive muscles
You are not operating in the solitary state. Competitors are there to make the game tougher. Even a single misstep at your end could result in an advantage for the competitors. So, you have to ask yourself why should visitors choose you over the competing businesses? Is there anything that sets you apart from the rest of the cookie-cutter offerings? Much to your surprise, the definitive answers to these simple yet highly strategic questions are buried under behavioral data. Once you get hold of those, you can roll out hard-to-replicate products and services that precisely cater to the tastes of customers at the individual as well as aggregate level. In return, customers will support your brand like a true-blue fan and you get the chance to retain them for a longer duration and increase their lifetime value. You will find outflanking competitors is not an unachievable task.
Creating content that visitors love to consume
Content is a big factor in attracting and converting visitors. In no way, you can provide content that’s irrelevant and unable to guide visitors to fulfill their expectations. Developing meaningful content that directly addresses what visitors want is the ultimate requirement. Moreover, it would be one heck of a self-destructive blooper if you lace your content with just marketing pitches. So, what to do? As per normal, data is your perfect go-to. Run data-backed A/B and multivariate tests to determine which content is captivating visitors’ attention. For instance, see how visitors react to a small change in the design of a landing page.
Solving the frequency of marketing communication problem
To inform customers about your latest promotions and campaigns, you have to stay in touch with them. Nobody will refute the preceding argument. But, here comes the catch; there’s no universally accepted norm about how often you should communicate with your customers. If you are tempted to maintain a very high frequency, you will be viewed as being obtrusive. Conversely, a very low frequency is equally dangerous. In such a case, another retailer can sneak in to fill the resultant void and drive away customers. You can’t opt for either of the options; you are actually caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Setting yourself free is easy; remember what you have learned from the insights about customer value. Depending on that decide to whom you will send marketing messages more often and whom not. Your marketing messages can be personalized individually based on the past customer behavior.
Notably better lead nurturing
Customers show allegiance toward you in the hope of special treatment. Hence, to keep enjoying their loyalty and augment the retention period, no wonder you have to handle them with utmost care. In this regard, data-driven personalization techniques will serve your purpose. OK, we have talked about existing customers. But, what about those who have arrived at your site but for some reason backtracked from further engagement? Who knows a vast majority of those leads are waiting to be your customers in near future. To get them back, you can formulate a remarketing strategy that has data at its center. You can formulate targeted lead nurturing programs to generate more conversions.
Proper segmentation
Don’t think that in this era of hyper-personalization the concept of segmentation is at death’s door. Even today you have to tease out the most lucrative customer segments based on age, gender, geography, the time of the day when a maximum number of purchases happen, product line, or any other criterion for channelizing your marketing investment in the right direction. With behavioral data by your side, you can accurately target different segments in a very economical manner. You can create segments based on behavior patterns rather than demographics and that can make all the difference.
Fantastic customer experience
As a marketer, your job is not limited to bringing traffic to your site. It’s only the beginning. The real fun starts after that! Post-arrival, if visitors are greeted with a nightmarish experience (overly complicated checkout, lengthy form submission, poor navigation, or JavaScript issues), they will definitely leave the site. Data will serve you a clear picture of the frictions that hinders the creation of a smooth customer journey. Act on the information to satisfy your visitors and forge a lasting relationship with them.
To conclude
Marketing is the art of reaching out to people who do business with you with something that has real value to them at the appropriate moment. But, due to the changing dynamics of the ecommerce world and customers’ rising demands, you have no scope for considering the art as abstract. Rather, by understanding the behavioral patterns of your website visitors you can give your marketing strategies a concrete shape. Down the line, you will thank yourself when your hard work will fetch handsome returns.