How to use behavioral segmentation in the customer journey

Knowing how to navigate a lead through the sales pipeline is a special skill that takes years of practice to get down. The easier it is for you to create a positive customer journey, the more likely the overall experience will result in a conversion.

In order to create a positive customer journey, businesses are looking to customer segmentation for answers on how to streamline the entire process.

However, customer segmentation is a huge topic that can’t just fit into one article. There are all different kinds of segmentation that can be based on emotions, psychological factors, and even demographics.

Here, we’re going to discuss how to use behavioral segmentation in the customer journey to optimize the experience and get customers to keep coming back.

What is behavioral segmentation?

Behavioral segmentation, as the name suggests, breaks down leads, opportunities, and customers based on their purchasing behavior. This can include:

• Buying patterns
• How they use products or services
• How they spend money
• Brand loyalty
• Their lifestyle

The reason sales and marketing managers like to break down leads, opportunities, and customers this way is because it allows them to create targeted sales and marketing strategies that fit the needs and wants of each segment.

Behavioral segmentation plays a big role in the customer journey.

The customer journey is all about the experience from the moment a lead or opportunity is contacted by your company to when they finalize a purchase.

Optimizing the customer journey by offering personalized experiences, allowing leads and opportunities to take advantage of multiple channels, and being available for support can all help improve the overall experience.

When you use behavioral segmentation to optimize the customer journey, you’re paying attention to:

• Which salespeople are working with each lead.
• Purchase history, so reps know which products or services are the best fit for the customer.
• Any previous interactions to go into each conversation with additional context.

What are the benefits of each behavioral segment?

Now that we understand what behavioral segmentation is and its role in the customer journey, we can go more into detail about how each behavioral segment can help a company optimize its sales and marketing strategies to ultimately improve the customer experience from start to finish.

Purchase history

Purchase history can help you determine what products or services are the best fit for the customer. It also helps determine what a customer actually needs or doesn’t need.

If you see that the customer just recently made a purchase, you have an opportunity to cross-sell another product that will only help to improve the overall experience.

Then after some time has passed, it might be a good opportunity to upsell if the data shows that the customer had a positive first experience.

In most cases, your goal should be to speed up the buyer’s journey to eliminate the chance of any outside influences preventing a lead from finalizing a purchase.

However, if they’re a previous customer and you want to continue that relationship, taking advantage of purchase history data can extend the buyer’s journey in a way that actually benefits the company long-term.

Brand loyalty

Understanding how long a customer has been with your company can also help extend the buyer’s journey. This is a good opportunity for marketing and sales teams to work together.

Marketers can take advantage of loyalty by personalizing ads that target customers who’ve been with the company for however many years. The longer you’re a customer, the better the savings.

And this is where sales can take advantage. They can, with permission, of course, offer sales that reward long-time customers for sticking with the company.

This doesn’t just reward the customer but rewards the company too by encouraging other people to stick around when they find out what the rewards are.

Think of loyalty cards at coffee places and restaurants where you buy ten drinks and get one free. That one drink isn’t technically free; it costs ten drinks, and customers aren’t always aware of that.

However, they enjoy the fact that their loyalty is recognized and this helps to extend the customer journey in each party’s favor.

Lifestyle habits

If your business is already paying attention to the demographics of your audience, monitoring lifestyle habits can also help to give marketing teams a significant edge when it comes to targeting leads and opportunities with personalized ads.

If your potential buyers are from an upper-class area, you can target them with ads that feature expensive hobbies, people in nice clothes and cars, and other luxury imagery.

If there’s a disconnect between your product or service and the way people live their lives on a regular basis, they’re simply not going to feel a need to buy your product.

People buy things based on how they will make their lives easier or better. If something made for modest budgets is being advertised to the very wealthy, and vice versa, you can’t expect that product to change lives.

The customer journey in 2018 and beyond is going to play more of a role in differentiating businesses from each other, which means that if you’re targeting the wrong people, they’re going to move on.

The final word...

Behavioral segmentation is an excellent way for sales and marketing managers to target leads and opportunities more effectively, increasing the likelihood of a positive customer experience.

The overall customer experience has a huge impact on the customer journey. It starts the moment your company contacts a lead, or a lead contacts your company, and when the purchase of a product or service is finalized.

Monitoring a lead or opportunity’s purchase history, lifestyle habits, and brand loyalty—among many more examples—can all give you the context you need to provide a personalized experience.

The easier it is to provide a personalized experience, the more likely it will be that the customer journey is positive and more streamlined to fit the specific needs of all your customers.

About the Author:

Reuben Yonatan is the CEO @ GetVoIP, a leading VoIP systems comparison guide that connects shoppers with relevant providers.