What on Earth is Behavioral Marketing?

In our latest SaleCycle Academy video, CMO Chris Sheen explains what behavioral marketing is, and how it works. 

Video Transcription

Behavioral marketing, or behavioral targeting as it’s sometimes known, is all about tracking customer behaviour on websites and using that data to produce smarter and more targeted marketing campaigns.
A simple example of behavioural marketing is one any Amazon customer will be familiar with. When you log on to Amazon, you’ll often be greeted with a number of recommended items personally picked for you.
These will be a mixture of products you’ve viewed before, and those that customers with similar purchase histories have bought.

Amazon is using customer behaviour to provide these recommendations, and knows from its own data that people are more likely to buy when the products they see are relevant to them.
Behavioural marketing can also be based on a specific user’s behavior.
For example, if a customer is on an airline website planning a trip, selecting flight times and dates, but is about to leave the site, the airline can detect that ‘exit intent’ and show a relevant message offering to save their flight details for later if they enter an email address.

You can also use customer purchase history and browsing behavior to make emails more effective. If they have browsed items on site without buying, emails can be sent showing those items and other items the customer is likely to be interested in.
Behavioral marketing works because, rather than receiving the same messaging as everyone else, customers only receive messages that are specific and tailored to them.
And like most things, if Amazon do it – you can be pretty sure it works.