Behavioral Segmentation and Targeting: Engaging Recent and Returning Site Visitors

Consumers arrive at your site, look around, come back a few times, and finally decide to make a purchase — or not. If those consumers are interested enough in your products or services to return to your website, what can you do to help convert them to customers? And how can you get their attention if they’ve been to your site only once and are still shopping for products or services that you offer? According to useit.com (article published in 2005), 75 percent of orders are placed within a day of the consumer first visiting the site. That leaves 25 percent of consumers who come back to a site, perhaps more than once, before deciding to buy. With higher-priced items, the purchase cycle tends to be longer. The above article gives an average conversion rate of two percent, and the percentages include only those who become customers. Our focus in this article is on how to increase the conversion rate among recent and returning site visitors.

How behavioral segmentation and targeting work

Behavioral segmentation involves learning about your target audience and categorizing them into groups according to their profiles. Following behavioral segmentation, behavioral targeting is getting the right message at a particular in time to the people it’s relevant to. It’s the opposite of mass marketing, which is delivering the same message no matter who the audience is.

With email marketing, for example, a campaign based on behavioral targeting will deliver different emails to different segments of their audience, depending on their geographic location, age, gender, or other variables.

At your website, you can use behavioral targeting to present different information to returning visitors. Offsite, you can present different ads to people at sites where you advertise and who have already been to your site. The variable is where site visitors are in the buying cycle. Cookies indicate if a visitor has been to your site beforeŸ ad serving applications can serve different ads to visitors in different target groups.

How to reach recent and returning visitors

If recent site visitors haven’t returned to your site yet, you can advertise to their target group to help entice them back to your site before they buy from a competitor. Having the ads link to landing pages specific to the ad content brings the consumers one step closer to making a purchase.

When visitors return to your site, you know that you’ve already gained their interest. They’ve gone through the “need recognition” phase of buying. They may be comparing your products to a competitor’s, or they may be researching a product or service that you offer. Help them in their information search by directing attention to links to more information or product comparison options.

Whether at your site or at other places where you advertise, these techniques can help increase your conversion rate:

• Display different ads for the same products to reinforce your message.
• For more expensive purchases (those with a longer purchase cycle), use sequential advertising to provide more information with each ad.
• Provide incentives such as time-limited discounted pricing, free shipping, or other special offers to help visitors make that purchase decision — everyone likes a good deal.

Make your site user-friendly for returning visitors

When those visitors return to your site, your site should make it easy for them to continue their information search and to make a purchase:

• Be sure that links to product details, comparison pages, contact information, and the shopping cart are clearly visible on each page and near each item.
• Don’t require any personal information or registration until consumers are making a purchase. Make it easy for people to just look.
• Have items remain in the shopping cart long enough that when visitors return after several weeks, what they’d put in your shopping cart on a previous visit is still there. People often put items in shopping carts when they’re considering items, long before they make a purchase.