When you’re trying to resonate with hundreds of thousands of people with varying needs and preferences, marketing segmentation is a must. This allows you to deliver messages and experiences that are highly relevant to different types of customers. Yet if you’re only limiting yourself to the basics such as demographic and geographical segmentation, your efforts will also have limitations.

While it’s important to know the age, gender, and location of your customers, these alone aren’t enough. You also need to find out what they do and how they behave to paint a clearer picture. That’s where behavioural segmentation comes in, allowing you to create even more relevant customer experiences beyond demographic and geographical data.

Read on as we take a deep dive into behavioural segmentation definition, importance, and examples.

What Is Behavioural Segmentation?

As the name suggests, behavioural segmentation refers to the process of segmenting audiences based on their behaviours and habits. This isn’t just limited to their buying habits but also includes what they do online – Which social media platforms do they use? When are they most active? Which news sources/publications do they follow?

This gives you a better idea of the unique needs and preferences of different audience groups. So you can use it to form a smarter marketing strategy that isn’t just one-dimensional. Keep in mind that behavioural segmentation shouldn’t be used on its own. Rather, it should supplement and add more substance and context to other types of segmentation.

Why Do You Need Behavioural Segmentation?

When you divide your market into several smaller segments based on common behavioural characteristics, it becomes easier to create targeted campaigns that will resonate with different types of people. The top benefits of behavioural segmentation include:

• Better Personalisation – It allows you to target different audience segments with offers that are personalised according to their purchase habits. And you can also decide on the best channels and timings to deliver those offers.
• Effective Prioritisation – It helps you identify your most valuable prospects so you can focus your time and resources to target, nurture, and convert them.
• Behavioural Prediction – You can also predict how certain segments might behave based on historical behavioural patterns. This helps you prepare ahead of time and look for ways to influence the outcome.

Five Powerful Behavioural Segmentation Examples

There are different types of behavioural segmentation that you could implement. Here’s a detailed look at each and some real-life examples:

1. Stage in the Buyer Journey

This involves segmenting your audience based on where they currently are in the buyer journey – awareness, consideration, decision, or retention. This will allow you to personalise your messaging, offers, and experiences to boost conversions at every stage.

For example, Grammarly sent out offers to existing free users, encouraging them to upgrade to a paid, premium plan. This email won’t be sent to existing premium users. Rather, it’s only targeted to free users who are still in the “consideration” stage for Grammarly Premium.

Buyer journey stage segmentation is a little tricky as a single interaction or behaviour isn’t enough to tell you where someone currently is in the funnel. Someone who’s already far along the conversion funnel may sometimes go back to an awareness-stage blog post to get a quick refresher, for example.

So for a more accurate reading, you’ll need to combine all the behavioural data from across multiple channels and touchpoints. This will give you a more comprehensive picture of where someone might be in the buyer journey and can be particularly useful for B2B behavioural segmentation.

2. Buying Habits

Buying habit segmentation involves segmenting customers based on the different ways in which they act throughout the buying process.

You could create different segments based on the unique factors that influence their purchase decisions, such as:

• People who look at brand name when buying products
• People most likely to be influenced by online advertising
• People who look at a product’s utility to make purchase decisions
• People who look to social media for purchase inspiration
• People who are likely to be influenced by recommendations from friends and family

Audiense Insights, for instance, comes with a “Purchase Influence Factors” feature that gives you a detailed breakdown of what influences the buying behaviour of certain audience segments.

You could also use this type of behavioural segmentation to further break down your audience based on how they typically shop. How many of them are prone to make impulse purchases? Are they more likely to prefer using credit cards to shop? How many of them are likely to be influenced by targeted advertising?

This gives you the insights you need to deliver experiences and create campaigns that will get each segment to convert. For example, email notifications about “Deals of the Day” could be enticing for impulse buyers. On the other hand, informative and educational newsletters may be a better option to target people who look at product utility before buying something.

One great example is how H&M runs ongoing Instagram ad campaigns, targeting existing customers who have often interacted with their ads in the past. Here, the segmentation is based on customers who are most likely to be influenced by Instagram advertising.

3. Service/Product Usage

Segmentation based on service/product usage is pretty much self-explanatory. It involves segmenting your audience into different groups based on how they’re using your product/service. So it looks at factors like frequency of use, duration of use, favourite features, and use stage (new users vs. seasoned users).

This is a great way to identify the reasons that might compel people to become heavy users and why some remain light users. That way, you can test different methods of marketing and nurturing to turn light users into avid users and to keep your heavy users from leaving.

For example, WordPress does a great job of welcoming new users and easing them into the experience. They send educational emails about how new users can customise their site and get more out of it. Through these emails, they also seamlessly talk about how new users should upgrade their plan to access more features.

4. Customer Loyalty

This involves separating your most loyal customers from habitual customers. Segmentation based on customer loyalty is crucial because it costs five times less to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones.

And it makes sense to know which of your customers contribute to the bulk of your revenue. That way, you can focus on how to keep them happy and maximise their value. And you could also narrow down on the key factors that might influence their loyalty. This will help you find more customers like them and implement smart strategies to nurture their loyalty.

Take a look at the highly personalised “Thank You” email that DAVIDsTEA sent to its VIP customers, for example. The email celebrates the company’s 10th anniversary and takes each VIP customer down memory lane. It details when and where they first bought something from the company, their favourite products, and how much tea they’ve bought.

This is an excellent example of how to segment your most loyal customers and keep delighting them so they don’t leave.

5. Benefits Sought

This involves segmenting your audience based on the unique value they look for in a product/service. You should be able to narrow down on this based on the features, benefits, and pain points that are most relevant to each segment.

For example, certain groups of customers may need skincare products to solve unique problems:

• Sensitivity
• Dehydration
• Discoloration
• Acne
• Dullness

There may also be a group that want organic ingredients and another that looks at price. That means even if two people belong to the same demographic group, they may be looking for completely different benefits when buying a product.

When you separate your audience based on multiple benefits sought segments, you can develop messaging and offers that will be most relevant to each group. So for instance, you can display ads about vegan skincare to Instagram users who follow a lot of vegan-related accounts.

Domestika is an online learning platform that offers courses across different categories – from creative pursuits to marketing and business. But based on the courses you’ve bought in the past, they will send email updates about the latest offers you might be interested in. So if you’ve signed up for an illustration course before, you’ll get email recommendations for the best illustration courses to buy next.

Getting Started with Behavioural Segmentation

When implemented properly, behavioural segmentation offers a multitude of benefits – from nurturing customer loyalty to personalising customer experiences. But you’ll need a strong combination of the right tools to get detailed insights into how your customers and prospects are behaving online.

For this, look no further than Audiense Insights. Using this platform, you can uncover a comprehensive breakdown of behavioural data including – buying mindset, online habits, media affinity, and more. Sign up for a free demo to get started.

Starting your own company may sound like a dream come true in your mind, on social media, and to all the people looking on in envy from their office jobs. But when the fantasy fades, you realize how much uncertainty you now have in your life. The inherent risk in any startup is that you are trading the certainty of a normal job for real growth and freedom. What people get from office jobs is much more than a steady pay check and free coffee. It’s a sense of certainty that their lives, work, and finances are in order.

You will have to give up certainty to fully take on the risks of this lifestyle. It will be roller-coaster and something you need to prepare for. Logically, it’s easy to know that. But emotionally, there are so many ups and downs in an entrepreneur’s life. Stress, frustration, and decreased motivation are inevitable.

Here are 5 ways you can deal with startup uncertainty:

1. Stick to a morning routine

There’s many ways to start a morning routine. What’s important is to have a stable, predictable routine. This centers your mind and gives you some order to your day. You manage your business and you can do whatever you want. No boss and no one telling you what to do, it can be mix of productive to outright messy days. By giving yourself some stability, you start the day off in a predictable way so that you can jump into work each day.

It’s as easy as taking your dog to the park, having a cup of coffee, and listening to a motivating audiobook for 20 minutes. You may need meditation to get into the state. Whatever it is that you need to get from a sleepy/hungover mindset to that of taking on the day.

“If you win the morning, you win the day.” – Tim Ferriss

2. Make time for high performance books

Speaking of audiobooks, everyone – especially entrepreneurs, need motivation. Get a few motivating books from other business leaders. This will do incredible things for your mindset and the way you think. Most of them help by keeping you excited for bigger goals. Look for classics from Jim Rohn and Tony Robbins. Or the newer motivational personalities like David Goggins and Rachel Hollis. You’ll be surprised at how much hearing someone’s hardships on their journey will help you on your own.

3. Schedule your week

It’s easy to get a packed calendar working an office job. Everyone else in the company seems to be demanding your time for one meeting or another. Pointless meetings are even the reason some people leave their jobs in the first place. The issue with having your own startup is that while the pointless meetings are gone, so too is any semblance of structure from a filled up calendar.

Spend one evening and fill the upcoming week as much as possible. I recommend Sunday afternoons to think about your goals. Plan big tasks every day throughout the week. That way you always know what you should be working on and stay on track.

4. Hit the gym

This one is actually part of my morning routine and it’s benefits can’t be overstated. Exercise helps fight off anxiety and stress. There’s no better way to funnel your business frustrations more than into the weights. By the time you’re done, your body and mind will be much more relaxed. A necessity when it comes to the tension of being an entrepreneur. Whether that’s staring at your laptop or making sales calls.

“Daily exercise is an insurance policy for future illness.” – Robin Sharma

5. Be grateful

Gratitude was one of the feel good things that I always used to skip whenever it was mentioned. I wanted cold, calculated strategy or tools I could use to build a business as fast as possible. Many brilliant minds in not only self help but also in business, speak about the need for gratitude.

Here’s why it helps me when the business is going through growing pains or everything seems like it is going wrong. I get filled with doubt and uncertainty and gratitude is the quickest way to relief.

Yes, starting your own business is a massive effort, but there is always some job out there. You decided to launch something of your own because you don’t want a baseline existence. You want to grow and build with the freedom someone can only give themselves.

That alone is enough to be grateful. But if you need more, how about that most people are too scared to do what you’re doing. Or that you are taking the time to believe in yourself and live a life of taking chances.

That speaks to your character and self-worth. Much more than the life of quiet misery so many people in the world allow to decide their entire lifestyle. Be grateful you have this opportunity and make the most of it.

Today’s ideas are tomorrow’s winning businesses. Ideas executed brilliantly and with proper investment bring your business success. That is how the world of business got the likes of Apple, Google, McDonald’s, Amazon and so on.

But why in spite of the brilliant and promising ideas at the core of their business, many startups fail to attract investors? Why do investors hesitate to put their money into some startups? Well, investors have reasons and only by deciphering these reasons we could get hold of some deterrent factors that hold them back.

Let us explain some of the vital factors that prevent investors from putting their money in the startups below:

1. Inefficiency or Absence of Leadership Qualities

Inefficiency is the most significant deterrent factor for pulling the success of most startups. This can also be referred to as the lack of leadership qualities. Investors always want to make sure that they don’t lose their money through a company that has an extraordinary business model but no efficient and skilled business leader to make it successful. When fetching investment from investors, you need to offer a clear prospect and detailed plan of how you are going to achieve the goals.

2. Lack of Trustworthiness

An investor puts his money on a venture purely on the basis of the credibility and trustworthiness of the business. This is why besides having a sound business plan with clear objectives, you need to establish the integrity in terms of the security of the investor’s money and how the fund is going to be invested to give results as per business plan.

If an investor has a feeling that the startup may not have enough customers to fulfil its financial liabilities or if it finds that the business is hiding some information, it may further push the trust of the investors down. Total transparency and establishing the faith of the business brand are crucial for finding investors in favor.

3. Lacking Experience in Business Management

You have a great business idea backed up by a sound business plan and solid trustworthiness based on your background, but you have zero experience in managing a business. This is a serious reason for an investor to deny making any investment in your business. An investor cannot put his money just to allow you trying and learning your management skills the harder and riskier way. Uncertainty is the single biggest turn-off factor for any investor and lack of managerial experience is synonymous to that.

4. Business Model is Not Sound Enough

You have a business idea, some efficient, competent and experienced professionals as leaders, the great stamp of trust and pretty much everything that make a company look promising. But what about your business strategy and business model? Are they sound enough to take on the market competition and challenges for business growth? Well, this is what investors are most interested in.

In most cases, a business model is what makes an investor think twice and even take a backward step from investing in a startup. After all, your business model and strategy will decide how your business and products will be able to withstand competition and become victorious.

5. Taking Investors for Granted

This is a big mistake on the part of many startups. Just by becoming confident in the potential and the soundness of the business model and prospect, a business can consider getting investors on board requires just a little effort and time. But in reality, getting investors on board is the toughest thing a business can think of.

This is why without proper and meticulous preparation, it would be foolish to approach investors for your business. Most investors receive hundreds of such emails and a similar number of approaches through other means and they coldly just let them pass. This is why you need to send them very detailed proposals backed by strong recommendations and referrals.

6. Targeting the Wrong Investor

Every business has a target customer base, right? Not all customers are interested in every product in the market. Similarly, not all investors are interested in your business. Investors based on their prior experience and industry exposure, put their money in businesses that they know like their own palm of their hand.

So, targeting an investor who has no interest in your business will only drain your energy and bring you unnecessary frustration. When you are seeking investors for your software startup, don’t approach someone investing in real estate business.

7. Non-Realistic Proposal for Funds

Investors normally come with huge experience of your industry and so they have a clear idea about the fund requirements for your business startup. Moreover, they already have invested in other ventures or have gone through many proposals. Naturally, they have every bit of estimate already in their mind. So, any proposal claiming a lofty and unrealistic amount will only face rejection.

This is why it would be wise to become meticulous about your estimation of the required fund and calculation of various cost factors. Have meticulous details about every facet of investment backed up by breakup of the costs. Only when you can convince them with correct estimation, investors can take interest in discussing the matter further.

8. Make Sure Your Product Solves a Customer Problem

Will any investor put money in building a simple calendar app now? No, simply because such an app idea has no value for the end users now. Will an investor put money in a product that has already been outdated and has no use? No, no investor has to even go through such a proposal for dismissing them.

Well, to fetch investment, your product must be thoroughly customer-centric. It not only has to solve a problem but has to deliver some competitive value in comparison to similar products in the market.

Obviously, finding an investor for a new business is not an easy task, considering the huge competition that businesses need to deal with. But, if your business idea is unique and you fill all those requirements correctly as mentioned above, finding investors may not be as tough as it sounds.