Behavioural marketing: the new digital goldmine
As the cost of driving traffic to a website continues to rise, it is understandable that marketers are becoming ever more frustrated with existing marketing channels. And while the online gaming industry is currently taking over 29% of market share, there is no doubt that fatigue within existing channels is creating a downward spiral that will continue to erode revenue margins.
And as pressure continues to grow, marketers cannot afford to keep doing more of the same – but without a way of deterministically identifying the large amount of anonymous visitors and activating them, options are limited.
Existing channels are constrained by two key problems: an inability to identify and track individual visitors across all devices and, as a result, an inability to monetise these visitors to their fullest potential.
But the key to unlocking this untapped ‘digital goldmine’ is combining the ability to identify a single visitor across every device, channel and browser with empirical behavioural data, unique to that visitor. By using this behavioural marketing approach, marketers can build visitor profiles that reveal the level of intent and enables a far more sophisticated, relevant and timely marketing interaction.
Time to ditch promotions
Organisations currently have little choice but to treat all their visitors the same because the majority can only identify a small amount of the traffic visiting their site. Instead of intelligently identifying their audience, they bombard their users with the same offers and incentives, treating very unique customers with very generic experiences. In addition to neglecting the value of the distinct intent levels of their visitors, the promotional game is actually eroding their margins.
An individual’s behaviour can offer huge insight that can be harnessed to transform the relevance and quality of the online experience. Behaviour, most notably, gives vital clues into an individual’s likelihood to convert – from the number of times they have only partly completed the registration page, looked at various options on the site or the time they have spent researching the odds on an upcoming football match.
Behavioural marketing, coupled with identity resolution technologies, leverages this new understanding of behaviour to deliver more relevant digital experiences that increase conversion rates and drive up revenue, regardless of the device, channel or browser of your newly identified traffic.
Once in possession of this highly granular information about what each individual user is doing in real-time, marketers can move forward and embrace one-to-one, people-based communications.
Critically, with the ability to identify the high-to-medium intent users, 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 them further through the conversion funnel and begin to address the fatigue created by existing marketing channels.
Cross-channel identification
In today’s multi-device landscape, the challenge for marketers is not only to track this digital behaviour to understand an individual’s intent, but to do so across every device and browser they interact with. With mobile gambling expected to grow at double-digit rates, the importance of syncing up these channels cannot be forgotten. But without a comprehensive understanding of each visitor’s device interactions, the behavioural profile will be incomplete. To unlock this new revenue source, therefore, it is essential to identify visitors across all devices and browsers. Armed with a unique identifier, such as an individual’s email address, a company can both target that visitor across all browsers, device types and channels and associate the specific actions the visitor takes on and off the website to a unique visitor profile.
Behaviour led
This ability to analyse a visitor’s online behaviour to understand motivation and intent enables marketers to become both more focused on customer value and far more proactive – guiding an individual through the process towards conversion. For example, a first time visitor is typically in discovery mode and wants to know more about the company, its products and values. In contrast, a visitor who has already browsed the site via tablet and is now back via a different device is clearly showing more intent to deposit. Simple steps such as ensuring any bets made on a tablet are replenished in any other device and presenting recently researched odds on the homepage immediately reinforce the brand experience.
This can be enhanced by specific offers designed to increase the likelihood of conversion, such as free bets. And this is key: freebies work, clearly. But simply offering every single visitor the same offer is cannibalising revenue and undermining brand value. Behavioural marketing enables marketers to intervene in the right visitor’s journey, at the right time, with the right offer to deliver tangible value.
People-based marketing
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 visitors. By adding behavioural marketing 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 revenue.
Email marketing is not dead
In addition, in spite of the ever-evolving and emerging channels available to us today, email has also remained a relevant piece of our digital lives. In today’s universe, an email address represents more than a means for communication. It is used to access almost all social media accounts from Facebook to LinkedIn, Twitter to Instagram, and is often the key login for gaming and gambling sites.
Today, around 80% of emails in a person’s inbox are not from a person – they are transactional communications, such as receipts, marketing newsletters and news updates. For businesses, this means that the competition for mindshare is at an all-time high, and if
you don’t rise above the overcrowded inbox, your emails will be lost.
It boils down to creating a strategy segmented toward targeting the right individuals at the right moment with the right message. Email is, and always will be a pinnacle channel for your digital marketing strategy. But, capturing emails is not just about growing an email list – it is about providing an organisation with a unique identifier that follows you regardless of your method of engagement.
Nick Keating is the director of EMEA at BounceX, a leader in cloud-based behavioural marketing and the fastest growing software company in America. He is tasked with establishing the company’s UK headquarters and growing the BounceX business throughout EMEA. Keating has a track record in successfully growing early stage software and professional services companies in the Enterprise B2B market in EMEA and was previously VP EMEA at Maxymiser.