Personalization and Behavior-Based Trigger Marketing

In today’s marketing landscape, it’s becoming increasingly more obvious that it’s the end customer who drives marketing. Trigger marketing, also known as behavioral marketing, refers to engaging with customers at pre-planned times – but rather be dictated simply by a set passage of time, communication is initiated based on activity by the user. We’re going to discuss just how personalization based on data collection is key to behavior-based trigger marketing.

But Where Does Behavioral Targeting Fit In?

Although 95-percent of traffic to a website are anonymous ‘visitors’, in reality they real potential customers… and if you don’t know who is visiting your site, how can you provide them with a personalized experience? Behavioral targeting captures data such as time on site, page views, location, device and more from each unique user and stores this information without the visitor providing any direct identifiable information – this can include what pages they visit, what content they look at and how long they spend on the site. These various data sources are used to create ‘buyer personas’ based on user activity and by studying personas, marketers like you can then look for trends and tailor web experiences to better serve clients.

There are two categories that data falls into to create customer profiles and personas:

Historical Behavior

Here, we look at what pages they visit when they return to the site…what device they have used to view the site…how often they come back…and when they come back, how long they spend on the site. By tracking and analyzing user activity data, marketers can then refine their campaigns so that targeting is based on behavior patterns – not just “one-off” interactions or purchases.

Real-Time Behavior

With real-time behavior, we consider such elements as what pages the user is on right now…where he or she is located…what time it is at his or her location…and what device he or she is using. By studying real-time behavior, marketers can improve a customer’s experience while they are on the site; the most popular example of this is when sites show them an offer for a product they just viewed.

Behavioral trigger marketing, or behavior-based marketing, gives you a clear picture of who visits your clients’ sites while allowing for personalization to occur, which is essential for a website’s success.