3 Best Practices to Turn Customer Behavior Insights Into Marketing Gold

Today’s marketing automation tools open up a world of possibilities by combining powerful campaign management tools with detailed reporting. Add to that the customer relationship management systems that nearly all companies use today, and online marketers have huge amounts of customer data at their disposals.

However, marketers frequently take a narrow view of this data, focusing on the same old metrics — a current campaign’s open rates, clickthrough rates and registrations, for example — and using only previous campaign metrics as benchmarks. So why are they letting all of that data sit idle?

Savvy marketers are digging into those mountains of data, mining the nuggets of customer behavior, and realizing that they have a gold mine of valuable insights to help increase marketing effectiveness and drive revenues. The key is in looking across campaigns, events, channels and data sources, and focusing on the behavioral patterns that different user segments exhibit. Going further, they’re challenging typical segmentation models — not limiting themselves to size/industry or gender/income buckets — and letting different behavioral patterns segment themselves into more valuable, more accurate and more actionable buckets.

Here are three best practices with examples showing you how cutting-edge marketing teams use behavioral analytics to build pipelines and improve conversion ratios:

1. Look for behavioral clues pre- and post-sales. A Software-as-a-Service firm relies heavily on the Web for marketing and sales. Behavioral analytics provide the firm with insight into the behaviors of prospects before, during and after the sale, enabling both marketers and salespeople to better segment, qualify and route leads. This translates into more effective lead handling and increased profit per lead.

2. Assign leads based on sales team expertise. A services provider markets via the Web but depends on a large field sales team for closing deals. Behavioral analytics enable the firm to analyze clickstream data and then segment leads by potential value. Then those leads are routed to the most effective field sales teams for that particular profile, increasing close rates.

3. Match customer profiles against appropriate marketing/customer support teams. A software vendor sells a huge portfolio of products to both consumers and corporations, creating a wide variety of customer segments and lifetime value potentials. Using behavioral analytics to analyze both Web and CRM data, the vendor better understands how customer support satisfaction maps against customer profiles. It also funnels support requests to the most effective and efficient channel, helping lower costs and increase support team efficiencies. The vendor increases customer satisfaction and improves renewal and upsell rates by knowing precisely the right — and wrong — times to focus on particular segments, and by knowing more about how different segments use its products.

The latest marketing automation tools do wonders for increasing marketing efficiency, but the true golden nuggets of effectiveness are buried within the customer behavior data. By looking beyond simple metrics and focusing on the behavioral patterns of customers and developing creative customer segments, marketing teams can truly unearth that gold mine of marketing nirvana.

Brian Kelly is CEO of Quantivo, a San Mateo, Calif.-based on-demand behavioral analytics provider. Reach Brian at bkelly@quantivo.com.

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