Get More Newsletters Opened Through Behavioral Targeting

If you want to be successful in email marketing, it’s not enough to simply know who your customers are. It is important that you also know how they behave. You can already get a lot of information from the information they provided during opt-in as well as through their demographic, but all they do is tell you what they “might” be interested in. Their behavior, on the other hand, will tell you what they are “exactly” interested in.

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The reason behavioral data can be used to predict future decision-making patterns and road to purchase activity of users is the fact that his or her activity online is directly related to his intent, and his social sharing activity has the ability to indicate future purchase possibilities along with the opening of emails, clicking of links and consumption of online content – all of which directly correlate to interest.

By getting insights into a consumer’s behavior on the Internet, you will gain the ability to determine where she is currently in her buying journey and the problems that she is trying to solve. With this, you can even get in depth and gain insight into the things that interest them, things that annoy them, and the factors that can persuade them into doing something.

Behavioral Targeting Through Email

When it comes to email, you can gain insight into a user’s behavior by taking note of the emails she opened, the emails she didn’t, the kind of offers that she responds to most often, and the frequency of her interaction via email.

Old, But Not Commonplace

The interesting thing about behavioral targeting, especially within the context of newsletters, is that it’s not exactly a new concept but it’s still not commonly used by list owners – not out of choice or ignorance, mind you. It’s because email service providers in the past have made it difficult to employ.

Technically, in order for behavioral targeting to work, every interaction that individual consumers have with a brand would be collected and stored in databases, which can be used to target and customize every single message easily. However, less than 50% of marketers actually capture and consolidate behavioral data from multiple channels into a single database, while traditional Email Service Providers only track email behaviors and provide open and click through rates, lacking connections to other behavioral data.

Building a Self Reliant Smart List for Behavioral Targeting

Right now, if an email marketer needs powerful behavioral targeting, they have to be self reliant, by building a smart list database that contains the following triggers and filters:

1. Demographic – such as location, age, name, household, preferences, etc.
2. Email History – sent, clicked, opened, bounced, unsubscribed, etc.

3. Social – referrals, poll answers, shared content

4. Website – visits, clicks, referral sources, search queries.

5. Miscellaneous – purchase history, withdrawal, cart abandonment, deposit, data usage, and ay other factors that don’t belong to the above categories.

Smart lists can be used to combine filters or create specific target segments, not to mention allows track campaign and response history in order to see how specific segments performed.

Lastly, another advantage of building your own self-reliant smart list for behavioral targeting is that it frees up time that you would have otherwise used on modifying spreadsheets and waiting for IT, leaving you free to spend more time on building engaging, relevant campaigns.