Why behavioural marketing is the game changer that marketers need

Marketers are becoming ever more frustrated with existing marketing channels as the cost of driving traffic to a website continues to rise, while returns fall. And while digital revenues in the UK are still increasing, channel fatigue is becoming a very real concern. Existing channels are constrained by two key problems: an inability to identify and track individual visitors across all devices and, as a result, a lack of insight into each customer’s intent to purchase and hence potential value.

Behavioural marketing is the game changer that marketers need. It combines the ability to identify a single visitor across every device and browser with the use of that visitor’s digital body language to build a behavioural profile that reveals the level of intent and enables far more sophisticated, relevant and timely marketing interaction.

A majority of ecommerce organisations can only identify around 5% of the traffic visiting a site, so there is little option but to treat all traffic the same, irrespective of an individual’s level of intent – and increasingly, that means catch all discounting. Whether a customer is demonstrating a clear intent to buy or just idly scrolling before bouncing, the offers and incentives are the same. Not only are ecommerce brands missing a trick by failing to differentiate between potential customer value, but this continual promotional game is actually teaching customers to wait for the discounted offer, making them less likely to ever pay full price.

Behaviour gives vital clues into an individual’s likelihood to convert – from the number of times they have looked at a certain product, the use of zoom, whether or not they have read a product review etc.  And a brand new marketing channel – behavioural marketing – is gaining significant ground in leveraging this new understanding of customers’ online behaviour to deliver more relevant digital experiences that increase conversion rates and drive up revenue.

With this highly granular information about what each individual visitor is doing in real-time, marketers can move forward and embrace one-to-one, people-based marketing.  With the ability to identify the high to medium intent customers, marketers can begin to focus activity towards the most valuable people – and it is by increasing the sophistication and relevance of interventions, both online in real-time and offline, that marketers can increase an individual’s intent and move him further up the conversion ladder and begin to address the fatigue created by existing marketing channels.

Behavioural marketing marks a significant shift in the way marketers can engage with visitors online. Cross-device identification combined with better understanding of behavioural psychology plus behavioural profiling can truly enable marketers to gain new insight into the mind-set of those critical medium and high intent visitors. By adding the behavioural marketing channel to the existing online mix marketers have a chance to focus on high intent visitors, build the relationship and explore sophisticated online and offline interventions to unlock a digital goldmine and drive up incremental revenue.