Understanding Behavioral Marketing using Flowcharts

“All the data in the world won’t gloss over bad customer experience or poor campaign execution.” ― Dave Walters

The very pervasive ubiquity of the global Internet has created unique, high-volume sales opportunities and selling platforms for marketing professionals and purveyors of goods and services. The legions of buyers, digital visitors, and potential customers that have gained access to the digital domain present a burgeoning market, unlike any other in the history of humankind. In this context, behavioral marketing has emerged as a key technique that allows sellers to develop custom strategies that intelligently target users of the Internet with contextual advertisements. In other words, “behavioral marketing takes all available information such as Internet browsing and search history, Internet Protocol addresses and cookies, and uses these to build a more definitive profile of each user, and then tailor marketing messages accordingly.” Therefore, we could state that behavioral marketing taps the habits of individual users of the Internet to impart higher meaning, context, and velocity to modern Internet-borne marketing campaigns. Armed with such information, a website’s ad server works to generate (relevant and targeted) content (or online advertisements) that appeals to users’ interests, tastes, and preferences. The modern flowchart can help design a variety of behavioral marketing strategies based on contemporary paradigms such as web analytics.

Clicking an on-screen advertisement represents a fundamental act in the journey of a behavioral marketing campaign. Such actions encourage online marketers to construct expansive campaigns that could feature the products and services offered by a commercial organization. For instance, a pharmaceutical company can create and implement ad campaigns that encourage Internet audiences to peruse a range of pharmaceutical products, such as new versions of blood pressure medication or a new hyper-activity drug. The keywords typed into search engines by members of such audiences serve as triggers that mark the onset of a behavioral marketing campaign. Subsequently, Internet users may click on the displayed advertisements, thereby initiating the sales process of sponsor entities. Various editions of such a strategy, when etched inside a flowchart, generate high levels of visibility for marketing professionals that steer such campaigns.

The conversion of visitors to consumers represents one of the foremost aims enshrined in behavioral marketing strategies. Website analytics represents the beating heart of such strategies. The various metrics that animate web analytics include the type of content preferred by visitors to a website, the number of page visits to a website or micro-site, the number of ‘likes‘ and ‘shares‘ that emanate from visitor activity, the time spent by individual visitors on each section of a website, multiple visits to a website by the same individual web surfer, etc. Marketers can subsequently undertake a measurement and analysis of information and data to develop an understanding of user behavior. Such understanding fuels the creation and deployment of appropriate behavioral marketing strategies. The outcomes could include higher volumes of sales of advertised products, bulk purchases by interested visitors, and a bigger revenue share for merchandise advertised on multiple online platforms.

The phenomenon of behavioral marketing exerts a definitive impact on the return on investment (ROI) registered by the modern enterprise. Such marketing paradigms offer an information-dense image in terms of customers and visitors that variously clicked on a web link, used a search engine to find products, watched a certain video, searched an online store, shared certain artifacts with colleagues and friends, read a blog article, initiated a purchase, etc. These lines of information are critical to marketers when they set about designing the next iteration of a multi-phase marketing campaign that pitches products and services to interested members of digital audiences. The subsequent ROI for the sponsor could significantly boost the business bottom line and reinforce faith in various behavioral marketing strategies. Further, these elements can find positioning inside flowcharts that serve as testing grounds for refined strategies that could power marketing campaigns in the future.

Tailored offerings (that recommend services and products to customers) represent a prime objective of modern behavioral marketing strategies. Such a technique is especially critical to address scenarios wherein, visitors appear to abandon digital shopping carts in e-commerce websites. Marketing professionals can choose to tap a wide array of metrics to study consumer behavior emanating from such individuals and create baskets of recommendations for a visitor’s subsequent shopping sessions. We note such a technique implies marketers will devote special attention to individual shoppers and create significant incentives to encourage shoppers to complete purchase processes. Such techniques hold special utility for brick-and-mortar retailers that wish to heighten the quanta of revenue that accrues from digital sales channels. A flowchart can prove instrumental in outlining the contours of such behavioral marketing campaigns.

Content that retains high relevance to specific groups of customers (or buyers) can form an interesting plank of modern behavioral marketing stratagems. In light of this assertion, commercial operators could mandate content creators to develop bodies of interesting content in formats such as text, video, graphics, audio, posts, memes, etc. For instance, a commercial manufacturer of frozen desserts could initiate behavioral marketing campaigns that hinge on customer education on types of such product, the various flavors of product, customer experiences with such product, upcoming product lines, special discounts, franchise opportunities, etc. We note successive iterations of such campaigns can unfurl on social media platforms, driving customer awareness and the development of fan communities. Subsequently, a survey of digital conversations on the topic of frozen dessert can aid sponsors to pitch products to new segments of customers, thus widening the reach of marketing campaigns. When designed inside the expanse of a multi-stage, inter-linked illustration, such campaigns offer additional perspectives on content-driven marketing mechanisms.

A studied segmentation of consumer behavior can empower business operators to devise email marketing systems and in-app push notifications as part of ongoing efforts to refine behavioral marketing tactics. This technique is especially relevant for branded operators of leisure services, such as coffee shops in urban locations. A multi-pronged marketing strategy could take shape in the form of in-app push notifications that urge regular customers to access the primary product at different times of the workday. Such notifications can also alert customers to special offers and ‘happy hour’ events at select outlets. Weekend leisure seekers could be targeted with specific promotional offers that provide large discounts for groups of coffee consumers. Large troves of consumer data and the use of analytics packages (deployed through flowcharts) can help refine and expand the implementations detailed above.

These suggestions can help marketing professionals to ideate, design, and create bespoke strategies to gain the attentions of online visitors. In addition, behavioral marketing techniques can benefit when organizations devise and deploy re-marketing tactics to accelerate conversion rates among visitors and consumers. Such real-time tactics involve the study of consumer behavior to spotlight exact areas of interest and types of merchandise favored by customers. Subsequently, the information is utilized to display related and popular products at downstream points of a consumer’s web surfing voyage. That said; modern marketers must strive to deepen investigations into consumer psyche and behavior. The use of experimental technologies can add impetus to such initiatives, while sharing information with other marketers can elevate marketing tactics on the Worldwide Web. Flowcharts can play a central role in such exercises; these illustrations allow marketers to examine the efficacy of legacy strategies, while evolving definitive inputs that will enrich the future of modern marketing.

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