Behavior segmentation in action

Let’s look at a brief behavioral segmentation example: As part of their marketing strategy, a beauty and bath products retailer might use behavioral segmentation variables  — like how often a customer buys shampoo, how much they typically spend, and the fragrances they prefer —to create targeted  email campaigns. They could promote specific product sales to different segments, or display similar products to browsing customers. (e.g., “since you liked this, you might love this”).

5 ways to leverage behavioral segmentation software to boost revenue 

1. Identify high-value segments 

High-value segments are the customers who impact your business the most (e.g., generate the most revenue, bring in more business, buy repeatedly, etc.). They’re the people who buy more often, spend more money, and return frequently. Identifying this segment (or segments) allows you to understand them better, so you can create content, offers, and strategies that resonate with them. 

Catering to high-value customers can turn them into brand advocates and inspire them to recommend you to their friends and peers. It can also help you develop strategies to attract more customers like them. 

2. Track ROI Closely

According to a recent survey by CWJobs, less than a third of IT decision makers are satisfied with their employees’ ability to use the new tech they invest in. That’s why it’s so important to track the ROI of your behavioral segmentation tools and processes closely.

Creating key performance indicators (KPIs) to track success is one way to do this (e.g., track revenue, total sales, customer acquisition costs, and customer retention rates). Once you’ve established your KPIs, you can work to achieve maximum ROI through continuous improvement by identifying engaged users and  targeting them with more tailored content.

3. Optimize marketing campaigns by segment 

Behavioral segments allow you to create and optimize your marketing campaigns by tailoring your messaging, content, and offers based on segment preferences, historical purchasing behavior, and more. 

This not only increases the chances of conversion, it reduces the cost of acquisition since precise targeting means less waste when it comes to ad spending. It also allows you to shift gears when a campaign or strategy isn’t working, reducing time (and money) wasted on poor performing campaigns.

4. Leverage AI to streamline behavioral segmentation

AI streamlines the process of behavioral segmentation by automating data collection and analysis. AI can also use predictive analytics and real-time decision-making to further optimize customer segmentation. It lets marketers, sales associates, and other team members spend less time on costly, time-intensive processes, like data entry and manual segmentation, so they can focus on more meaningful work. AI-driven segmentation can also improve the accuracy and effectiveness of customer segmentation since it reduces one of the biggest causes of poor data quality—human error.

5. Integrate existing systems

Integrating behavioral segmentation software with existing systems helps boost revenue since it requires less investment to achieve advanced segmentation. That’s because you don’t need to overhaul your entire tech stack to realize the benefits of effective segmentation.

Look for tools that are compatible with common CRM and marketing automation platforms and can facilitate seamless data transfer and synchronization. Integrating your different customer data sources into one unified ecosystem can reduce potential legal costs by keeping customer data more secure. 

Affordably boost revenue with behavioral segmentation software

It’s possible to use advanced behavioral segmentation techniques to boost revenue without a huge investment in new technology. The key is to find behavioral segmentation software that reliably unifies your customer data, automates the process of creating high-value segments, and enables you to leverage AI to streamline data collection, analysis, and segmentation tasks.

By taking the time to evaluate what you need, developing KPIs to measure success, and implementing a pilot program prior to full adoption, you can further reduce costs. The best way to boost revenue with any technology is to make sure it’s a good fit for your organization. That means it should integrate with existing tools and adapt as you scale.

How to choose the right segmentation software vendor

As with any new tech investment, it’s important to assess your needs and budget so you can pinpoint behavioral segmentation software that meets both. When evaluating vendors, consider reputation and expertise within your industry and market sector. Interviewing a vendor’s clients (past and present) and reviewing case studies can help you identify solutions that may or may not be a match for your organization. 

Great support is key. Look for vendors who can provide responsive customer support and a clear roadmap for future development. They should be able to scale as you scale. Once you select a behavioral segmentation provider, we recommend starting with a pilot project. This lets you test the tool’s effectiveness with a specific use case before adopting it fully.

How to Boost Holiday Sales for Ecommerce Shoppers

There are several ways to ensure an optimal customer experience for online shoppers. Here are our top 10 tips for reducing speed to purchase and boosting sales this holiday  season.

1. Optimize Your Landing Page for Mobile

With consumers looking for a quick and easy shopping experience, you should limit the size of landing hero images for mobile experiences—and avoid videos altogether, if possible. High-bandwidth creative content slows down performance and could deter visitors from continuing their journey down the funnel, especially during a higher traffic season.

2. Include Personalized Messaging

Personalized content can help clarify shipping costs and timelines to the shopper’s location and reduce the Cart Abandonment Rate. Shoppers may experience frustration and cut their shopping journey short if they were expecting free shipping or a quick turnaround, and it was not made clear upfront.

3. Promote Fulfillment Options Early

Retailers should promote fulfillment options such as buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) on product pages. In-store locators can also be promoted when a store is within a specific range of the user’s location. This way, visitors are more likely to convert during their shopping journey online if delivery times or costs are unfavorable.

4. Simplify the Checkout Process

Don’t let small distractions stall a purchase once the customer has made it to the checkout page. Remove large or complex creative pieces on the cart and checkout pages, such as high-resolution photos, GIFs, or videos. This is especially important for mobile users who are looking at a smaller screen than desktop users. Data shows that many online purchases are made through a mobile experience—79% of smartphone users have purchased online using their mobile devices in the last six months. Ensuring that the cart/checkout process renders seamlessly can prevent any hang time during payment processing.

5. Use Social Proof to Influence Purchases

Social proof is based on the idea that people will conform to be accepted by society. For example, offering clues to users about your brand’s most popular items is a form of social proof. Consider adding messages that identify products likely purchased as gifts on product pages to steer shoppers toward additional purchases.  

6. Promote Product Finder

Promote usage of a product finder to help visitors find the perfect gifts for their loved ones. This could be included on each Top-Level Category Index page.

7. Use Badging to Identify Holiday Exclusives

Identifying items as “Holiday Exclusive” or “Limited Time” by using badges can lead to a higher Average Order Value, as shoppers may want to stock up for the year due to scarcity. Think pumpkin spice in the fall. Many consumers are more likely to buy multiples of pumpkin-flavored coffee creamer, knowing they won’t be able to purchase it come December. Some even buy products they wouldn’t usually buy because the holiday version is special.

8. Personalize Recommendations Based on Demographics

Personalized recommendations based on demographic data on product listing pages can garner great results for those hard to shop for friends and family. For example, a section labeled “For Mom” would focus on personalized recommendations by utilizing gender and age-based data, such as best sellers among females in the 40-59 age group. Likewise, a “For Brother” section would focus on personalized recommendations by utilizing gender and age-based data on best sellers among males in the 18-30 age group.

These types of recommendations help shoppers who may only be visiting your site to browse. Because they don’t yet have an item in mind, personalized recommendations point them toward an actual purchase.

9. Take Advantage of Holiday Bundles

Personalized recommendations based on items frequently bought together is another excellent method for boosting holiday sales.. Marketed Holiday Bundles often sell out quickly, while the individual products remain available to purchase independently. As such, a recommendation carousel titled “Found Together in Our Holiday Bundle” or “Create Your Own Gift Bundle” that returns all items included in the Holiday Bundle encourages the addition of multiple items to the cart.

10. Don’t Forget the Stocking Stuffers

Offering personalized recommendations based on cost during the checkout process is often effective during the holiday season. For example, adding a “Stocking Stuffer” recommendation slider on the cart/checkout page that returns popular lower-priced point items, ensuring relevancy to the items added to the cart, can positively impact Average Order Value and Revenue Per Session.

Increasing Holiday Sales in a Changing Retail World

The COVID-19 Pandemic forever changed how consumers shop. While this created several new risks and challenges, it has also presented retailers with a plethora of new opportunities. 

eMarketer estimates that total retail sales growth for the United States for the 2023 holiday season is expected to increase by 4.5%, resulting in $1.328 trillion in sales value.

Retailers who are ready to capitalize on this opportunity—a continuously growing shift to online retail—will stand apart from the competition and likely see an increase in holiday sales this season. Consider our 10 tips for an optimal customer experience as you prepare for what lies ahead.

The Benefits of Homepage Personalization

Personalization really is the key to unlocking the most revenue from your homepage. I know that every marketer (and technology partner) seems to have a different definition for it…and that’s a topic for a future blog post. It can mean dynamically updating a homepage banner based on previous purchases, or serving a recommendation slider with products relevant to a specific visitor. For marketers still building the case for personalized homepages, let’s focus on 1-to-1, AI-driven personalization and how retailers are using Monetate’s personalization platform to increase revenue.

To illustrate why, let’s look at a real-world example of homepage personalization where I’ve only removed identifying features about the brand. A current Monetate customer and well-known retail and eCommerce brand (with a top-down culture of viewing the homepage as a work of art) decided to launch a pilot to compare personalized performance with the one-size-fits-all approach.

With executive buy-in achieved and a goal metric (click-through) set, the next step was establishing how to personalize the homepage. Should they create variants specific for genders or product lines or something else? We ultimately decided to create variants across four of these, including the traditional curated homepage as a “control,” and let the Monetate Personalization Engine decide what visitors would see. 

Key results? After 14 days, the Individual Fit Experience drove a cumulative +26.42% lift in click-through from the homepage. Using Monetate, the marketing team was also able to get insight into which categories our AI-powered engine determined were most influential to assign traffic to our goal metric, and this will help them plan future strategies.

How to Start With Homepage Personalization

As you can see, executing a homepage personalization strategy and running a successful pilot test can be done with minimal variants and the data you already have. If you’re ready to get started, here are some additional tips from my work with leading retailers:

• Start small. Most homepages already include a wide range of persona-specific products. Using an Individual Fit Experience to update what content is above the fold can be incredibly effective, and it doesn’t require any additional resources.
• Trust the personalization engine. This isn’t the typical “If you bought this, show this” type of experience, and we have proven results. With a clear goal, you just need to let the engine learn and make the right decisions. Remember that you’re still in control of all the variants.
• Bring data. Monetate’s Individual Fit Experiences can make decisions out-of-the-box based on context it can “see” but your first-party data can also ensure visitors are getting the perfect experience.

Why Personalized Homepages Work + A Case Study

• Monetate customers use what we call “Individual Fit Experiences,” a form of dynamic testing, to deliver personalized homepages to their site visitors. This method uses both first- and third-party data to inform individualized content decisions—meaning that each site visitor receives a unique combination of the variants determined to be most likely relevant to them. 
• This is different from something like an A/B test, where it’s certain that a random section of your target will see a less relevant experience. In fact, Monetate examined data from over 2 billion personalized experiences in order to learn how manual methods perform compared with their AI counterparts. Our finding? Individual Fit Experiences succeed 4X as often as A/B tests.

Ecommerce Recommendation Engine Benefits

If you’re shopping for an eCommerce recommendation engine, here are several key benefits you may want to consider while information-gathering.

Drive Traffic

Through personalized email messages and targeted blasts, an online recommendation engine can encourage elevated amounts of traffic to your site, thus increasing the opportunity to scoop up more data to further enrich a customer profile.

Deliver Relevant Content

By analyzing the customer’s current site usage and previous browsing history, an eCommerce recommendation engine can deliver relevant product recommendations as he or she shops based on said profile. The data is collected in real time so the software can react as shopping habits change on the fly.

Engage Shoppers

Shoppers become more engaged when personalized product recommendations are made available to them across the customer journey. Through individualized product recs, customers are able to delve more deeply into your product line without having to dive into (and very likely get lost in) an eCommerce rabbit hole.

Convert Shoppers to Customers

Converting shoppers into customers takes a special touch. Personalized interactions from a recommendation engine show your customer that he or she is valued as an individual, in turn, engendering long-term loyalty.

Increase Average Order Value

Average order values typically go up when an engine is leveraged to display personalized options as shoppers are more willing to spend generously on items they thoroughly covet.

Increase Number of Items per Order

In addition to the average order value rising, the number of items per order also typically rises when an engine is employed. When the customer is shown options that meet his or her interest, they are far more likely to add items to to their active purchase cart.

Control Merchandising and Inventory Rules

When you use a recommendation engine for eCommerce, you can add your marketing and inventory control directives to a customer’s profile. Then you can feature products that are on clearance or overstocked so as to avoid unnecessary shopping friction and tone deafness.

Reduce Workload and Overhead

The volume of data required to create a personal shopping experience for each customer is usually far too large to be managed manually. Using an engine automates this process, easing the workload for your IT staff.

A Recommendation Engine Provides Reports

Detailed reports are an integral part of a personalization engine. Accurate and up-to-the-minute reporting will allow you to make informed decisions about the direction of a campaign or the structure of a product page.

Getting the Most Out of Your Ecommerce Recommendation Engine 

An experienced personalization platform provider like Monetate can offer advice on how to use the data collected from your recommendation engine to impact your bottom-line. Acting as a partner and a consultant, whatever platform provider you choose should have the industry know-how needed to help guide you and your eCommerce site to a prosperous future.

Post-click Optimization Strategies

There are several factors to consider when improving the post-click experience:

Content and Messaging

Retailers need to have access to a library of images and content that can be associated to the “pre-click” experience. For example, if there is a series of UGC-based social media posts, the post-click landing page should be able to draw from these same creative assets. Or if there is a banner ad that pulls from the product catalogue, the post-click landing page should pull from those same product assets.

Personalization and Data

Post-click optimization works best when retailers can test certain segments (such as people that searched for a particular product) and can use data to personalize messaging for individuals (such as someone that is a loyalty member that just clicked through on a special offer in an email.) These experiences can only be created if you can access the same customer data from a CRM system, from channel partners, or from third-party data partners.

Automation and Scale

Retailers certainly can’t create every version of a post-click landing page by hand, and even if they could, they couldn’t match these pages to individual advertisements or search terms at scale. In order to expand post-click optimization to work across a large audience, retailers need a personalization engine that’s automated based on rules and algorithms, and can execute at scale with ease.

Easy to Get Started, Easy to Grow

Just a few small post-click optimization tests can quickly demonstrate to  retailers just how valuable it is to focus on this important customer experience.

With Monetate automated personalization  retailers can use both majority fit experiences (MFEs) and individual fit experiences (IFEs) to test and personalize landing pages across segments and individual visitors for dramatic improvement. 

Majority Fit Experiences 

MFEs, sometimes referred to as dynamic tests, leverage machine learning to dictate the amount of traffic exposed to each variant based on the chosen goal metric.

Use MFEs to optimize messaging to a large audience: With MFEs, retailers can test elements like hero images for overall optimization improvement, and can segment and test specific audiences. For example, by segmenting audiences by origination channel, such as search or social, or by what ad or message they were exposed to, brands can optimize the customer experience even for people that haven’t visited the site before.

Individual Fit Experiences

IFEs leverage AI to decide which content to show to each visitor based on everything known about them—the goal here is to maximize performance against a given metric.

Use IFEs to deliver unique personalization: UK clothing retailer JoJo Maman Bébé worked with Monetate to improve home page engagement by 124% and conversion on their site by 25%. By using AI to test a wide variety of creatives at scale, the retailer was even able to predict and optimize for new visitors as well.

How to Deliver B2B Personalization

To deliver streamlined personalization in B2B marketing, sellers must go beyond mimicking the company-specific product and pricing catalogs of old. Given the complexities of online B2B purchasing, sellers should also find ways to personalize experiences based on individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and budgets. In doing so, B2B suppliers can: 

Surface the right products more quickly

Dynamic personalization can serve individualized content and products starting with the initial page load, based on the individual’s past purchase history and company- and role-specific rules. On-site search should also be personalized, given that it frequently tops the list of important features for B2B buyer. 

Provide the right context during the consideration phase 

More B2B buyers than ever are researching products in-depth, with 32% saying they use more sources when researching and evaluating purchases, according to Demand Gen’s Report, “2022 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey.”

To stand out as a definitive product information source, B2B sellers should demonstrate relevance through personalized product content on their website that is applicable, speaks to, and demonstrates industry expertise – an important feature for 56% of B2B buyers according to Demand Gen’s Report.

Route items appropriately once ready for purchase 

Once B2B buyers have selected the right items, personalized purchasing paths can serve them the right options for their role – whether it’s placing items in an order queue for a colleague with spending authorization to review and approve, completing transactions via P.O., or buying with stored credit card information. As they navigate the cart and checkout, dynamic personalization tools can factor in role-based information and business rules on the fly and serve further recommendations, such as bulk options and bundles that help make budgets go farther. 

How are you building role-based personalization into your business?  Schedule a demo of Monetate to see how B2B retail personalization software makes it easy. 

Approaching Your Omnichannel Retail Strategy

While each phase of an omnichannel personalization strategy will vary depending on objectives, resources, and where a business is in their integration, there are some patterns for how retailers have proceeded with this approach.

Start with Web and Email Personalization

Usually the quickest avenue to revenue, web and email personalization are easy to implement, have well-defined key performance indicators, and therefore tend to be the starting point. Implementing product recommendations that best resonate with each customer across site pages is often the main focus, with an emphasis on testing strategies for optimal conversion. Through an email address, loyalty number or other consumer identifier collected via the website, email and web channels can be easily tied together to trigger emails that dynamically deliver product recommendations tailored to individual customer preferences, based on insights gathered from web activity.

Targeted Content & Offers and Contextual Segments

With a solid personalized product recommendations strategy, and wider omnichannel strategy, in place, businesses can start looking for ways to engage and retain customers through personalized content. 

Content, such as hero shots, videos and blogs, and offers targeted to individual customer interests often come next. In combination with this, leveraging contextual information to segment experiences based on geography, weather and day-parting patterns becomes an interest, to further target content and offers, as well as add another layer to product recommendation personalization.

Mobile Personalization

Building on content, offer and product recommendation tactics on the web, implementing mobile and tablet specific personalization strategies that leverage geography to hone the experience for on-the-go shoppers and deliver geo-targeted offers is often a big focus. Utilizing the same identifier captured for web and email will align the mobile channel, allowing data sharing within and across channels for a seamless experience.

In-Store Personalization

With a mobile strategy soundly in place, extending personalization in-store is a natural next step. Arming sales associates with tablets for clienteling and introducing kiosks and digital displays is the quickest way to pull personalization into brick-and-mortar locations. Capturing in-store purchase data can be a bit more difficult because POS systems are often not in sync with online channels. It comes back to referencing the same consumer identifier implemented in other channels. Once in place, the interconnection creates a seamless omnichannel personalization experience across off-line and on-line interactions.

Contact Center Personalization

Contact centers often comes in at this later stage, pulling online and phone-based customer service agents into the mix with a view of offers and product recommendations relevant to each customer.

Personalization Powers a Successful Omnichannel Strategy

Your omnichannel retail strategy should continue to evolve, fueled by shifts in consumer behavior and increasing expectations for more personalized and tailored experiences. These experiences need to be consistent across any and every channel a customer chooses to interact with. Businesses can start delivering on this expectation by determining the channels that are most important to their customers, quickest to revenue, and easiest to implement. Then, it’s easy to kick-off a phased omnichannel personalization strategy that will ultimately deliver on the promise of a seamless customer experience.

How a Personalization Engine Can Help Your Business

A website personalization engine is a revenue-increasing tool for your online business. It’s a technology that tailors an ecommerce site as the customer shops, customizes communications for each respective shopper, and increases revenue through the implementation of certain capabilities like personalized recommendations.

Personalized Shopping Experiences

It’s possible for each of your customers to have a personalized shopping experience every time they visit your site. A personalization engine creates a unique profile for each visitor in real time as he or she browses and shops. Once a customer profile is created, AI-driven software makes adjustments and additions as the customer inputs more information. Their shopping habits and browsing patterns provide details about their interests and needs. This information can be leveraged to create a site that is of greater interest to that particular customer upon each visit. This keeps him engaged within the site and interested in the merchandise.

Customized Communications

Information collected and analyzed by a personalization engine can also be used to create communications that grab the attention of the customer and encourage him to return to your site. Each email, from receipts to newsletters, can become a personal note to your customer.

This kind of attention to detail creates customer loyalty. It also give the customer a reason to return to your site. That reason will ultimately be different for each visitor, but a personalization engine can capture the details needed to discover it eventually.

Increased Revenue

When you can show your customer personalized recommendations while shopping, you give them options they may not have known were available. Increasing your customers’ choices leads to increasing the number of items purchased per sale and the dollar amount made per purchase. In the end, this optimizes a site’s revenue and strengthens your bottom line.

Using personalization software will benefit your site’s sales, communications, as well as the overall experience your customer receives. By gathering information you can give your customer the type of relevant results today’s sophisticated shopper craves.