How to Retarget Your Leads with Behavioral Segmentation

There’s a reason why so many people study psychology with internet marketing in college. It’s because marketers are constantly trying to harness a feeling or illicit a response from their target and existing customers. Psychology is a great way to understand how to market to people on a human level.

By applying a bit of psychology to email marketing, we can segment users into behavioral categories rather than old-school criteria. Using those segments, we can then re-target our email marketing efforts and boost sales.

Sound awesome? Keep reading to learn how to re-target your leads with behavioral segmentation.

Step 1: Understand People’s’ Intentions

This is all about understanding why people buy and don’t buy.

Whenever someone makes a purchase, they have several reasons for making that purchase. However, they likely also had a list of reasons not to buy.

Many of us marketers are trained to only appeal to the “this is why you should buy” side of things. The best email marketers know you’ll lose a lot of sales if your messaging only caters to one side. Your offer should trigger all the reasons why a prospect should buy as well as address those reasons why not to buy and help the prospect overcome them.

We all know that a new lead hardly ever makes a purchase after one interaction with a brand. In fact, most purchases are made between 5 and 12 interactions with a brand.

That’s why marketers heavily rely on “reminder” marketing but it tends to fall into the category of “remember, this is why you should buy our product.”

The other problem with this is that people who find your product are in different stages of awareness about their situation. So, you might have one person who is well aware of a problem he has with a software solution and is actively looking for a new vendor while another person might not even be aware that she has a problem on her hands.

You can’t send the same messaging to those two prospects.

When you hit a wall with your reminder campaigns, try expanding your understanding of where each lead is in their awareness “funnel” and target messaging to meet that awareness. It can help build trust in your brand and help people remember you when they are ready to make a purchase.

Step 2: Gauging Customer Interest to Help You Hit the Sweet Spot

One of the basics of behavioral segmentation is catering messaging to leads based on actions they’ve taken on your site or how they’ve interacted with your emails and advertising. For example, you looked at a pair of shoes on a website and didn’t purchase them, the vendor might follow up with an email saying “these shoes would look great on you!”

Like we said, that’s basic stuff. But what if that company could gauge how interested you were in that pair of shoes?

You can do this by making your sales funnel and interactions more dynamic. The premise of this is to assign leads to sales funnel messaging based on how interested they are.

This is crucial to building trust with your potential customers. What you get by having a dynamic sales funnel is knowing when someone knows tons about a product versus very little. If you send a message to a lead prompting him to purchase but he’s only glanced over your product page, he’ll be put off and you’ve ruined a chance to build trust with that lead.

By implementing a fluid behavioral segmentation and interest gauging funnel, you can lower costs on your follow up campaigns by making them more effective.

Step 3: Change How You Think About Retargeting

Retargeting isn’t just about reminding people about something they looked at once. Many marketers make this mistake where they focus all their remarketing efforts on pre-sale. They’re leaving money on the table by not retargeting around point-of-sale or post-sale.

See, retargeting isn’t just about re-engaging with your leads. It’s about building a trusting relationship with those leads so they’ll make a purchase and so they’ll come back to you for their next purchase. You want them to see you as the authority for whichever problem your product solves.

Your retargeting will still be a multi-channel affair. You will just change your messaging to help customers overcome their hesitations of buying, establishing your company as the best, and providing compelling offers for your leads to make a purchase.

Add a Bit of Psychology to Your Marketing

By changing the way you think about your customers, you can develop a stronger, more trusting relationship with them. Appealing to their psychological state at each point in the sales funnel will result in a higher ROI in your marketing efforts and lead to more overall sales. To learn more, download a free internet marketing eBook.