Wouldn’t it be nice if you could read the minds of every person deciding to visit your website? Are they looking for new living room furniture? Maybe they’re finally getting around to redecorating their master bedroom. Everyone has their preferences shaped around things like their gender, the environment in which they grew up, and their current circumstances. Behavioral marketing can help you create more targeted marketing techniques to appeal to consumer’s desires.
What is Behavioral Marketing
We’re a long way from technology allowing us to tap directly into the brains of consumers. The next best tool available to you is learning more about the behaviors of your visitors. Gaining insights into their patterns lets you best to pinpoint visitor’s interests and tailor your marketing campaigns to suit them.
One advantage online marketing gives us is the ability to use technology in ways allowing us to track user movements. We can see if visitors prefer the new line of recliners you recently added over older offerings or if your sofa product pages aren’t seeing the traffic you were expecting. These behaviors can be turned into actionable information allowing you to refine your approach for different audiences.
Benefits of Behavioral Marketing
- Personalizes your communications to visitors
- Customizes website ads to a visitor’s interests
- Controls your message to omit any information they don’t want to see
Being willing to learn and adapt to the needs of your visitors is the key to leveraging your data successfully. Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers like furniture stores can use it to drive business to their physical stores and their websites. It’s all about considering the wants of your customers and making sure you’re the answer to their question.
Characteristics of Buyer Personas
Where do you start when it comes to gathering information on your visitors? What should you be looking for? How do you know you’re getting everything you need from each user? It helps to keep in mind the ultimate intent of your efforts.
- Building out individual profiles of your visitors in the form of a user persona
- Pulling those profiles into different audience groups
- Coming up with marketing strategies appealing to each one
There are specific details you should be collecting from each user to aid in coming up with different tactics.
Demographics of Visitors
Media companies depend on demographics to create advertisements appealing to different groups. You can use the same information when trying to figure out who to target ads toward for various pieces of furniture. Certain items might appeal to a single person moving into an apartment, while others would be more suited to a professional person looking to upgrade different rooms in their home.
Here’s a general idea of the demographic information you should be gathering.
- Age
- Gender
- Income level
- Region
- Occupation
- Ethnicity
- Marital Status
- Size of Family
- Educational Background
The more information you have, the better job you can do in crafting your marketing around different individuals.
Behaviors of Visitors
At this point, you’re focusing on the actions taken by your visitors. Is your website currently optimized to collect the following information?
- Purchase History – What did they buy when the visited your site? Do you have related products you could try to upsell?
- Where the Clicks Are – Which sections of your website seems to get the most hits? You might want to start using your demographic information here break down which groups give you the most clicks.
- Devices Used – Are you getting more visitors browsing on their phones, or do you tend to attract more desktop users? Demographics can play yet another role by telling you the age of those using specific types of devices.
- Products Rated – Which pieces in your showroom tend to draw out reviews or ratings from visitors. What types of visitors are leaving you feedback?
Psychology of Visitors
Here’s where you do your best to learn why the visitor came by your website store. We touched on this at the very beginning of this article when we went into different reasons people might be there. We’re trying to get at their motivation and what’s driving them at this point in their life.
The tricky thing about doing this is anticipating changes in a visitor’s circumstances. Someone who might have had no children the first time they came by could be dealing with being a new parent on their next visit. That’s why you can’t collect information once and let it remain static. Keep up with the patterns of returning visitors and use that to refine or even move them into a different audience group to target.
Location of Visitors
Does it seem you’re attracting more traffic from people living in the area, or are you getting looks from users farther away? Which group tends to make more online purchases? You can use local information to create advertisements for users within driving distance while showing a different set to those living in a different state.
You can advertise special in-store previews of new furniture lines to people living closer to your physical store. Users residing outside your demographic can be offered a discount on shipping or delivery if they purchase above a certain amount. These are just some of the tactics you can modify based on where your visitors live.
Using Behavioral Marketing in Retail
Now that you’ve worked to break down all the information you have on your visitors into usable data, it’s time to turn that into a successful marketing campaign. We’ve touched on a few things you can do like refining your advertisements displayed on your website. Let’s go into a few more ways you as a furniture retailer can incorporate behavioral marketing.
- Targeted Email Campaigns – You can use the demographic and behavioral information to craft email lists and communications for different users. An expectant can receive information about discounts on the nursery furniture she was browsing earlier, while an older retiree can get reminders that the leather recliner they added to a shopping cart remains there.
- Better Upselling Opportunities – Your store can use the data gleaned from a visitor’s purchase history to have a better understanding of what else they may be in the mood to purchase. That gives you a much higher chance of success over showing them random pieces.
- Improved Personalization – It’s all about giving your customers and visitors exactly what they’re looking for. Making an effort to craft personal appeals builds trust between you and them. That can lead to a long relationship where you’re top of mind when it’s time to purchase anything furniture-related.
All of this can be a lot to take in and keep your business running. MicroD specializes in assisting furniture retailers in their efforts to craft better marketing campaigns. We can handle the details of upgrading your website and putting the right tools in place to successfully leverage behavioral marketing and website personalization to your advantage. Learn more about what we can do for you by contacting us at (800) 964-3876.