What is behavioral email marketing?
Behavioral email marketing tracks and interprets how buyers behave on your site, in your emails and on social media, and then talks to them based on that behavior. Companies like Amazon are good examples of behavioral marketing. They use personalized marketing campaigns and strategies every day to give consumers relevant experiences based on what they do.
Traditional email marketing starts from the calendar and from static traits: everyone on the list, or everyone aged 25 to 34 in Chicago, gets Tuesday’s newsletter. Behavioral email marketing starts from actions. Two subscribers of the same age in the same city get different emails, because one has been reading about running shoes all week and the other bought a tent yesterday.
Behavioral emails vs triggered emails
The two terms are often used as synonyms, but they describe different things. A triggered email is a single automated send: one event, such as a sign-up, an abandoned cart or a renewal date, fires one message to one person. Behavioral email marketing is the wider practice of using behavior data to decide who receives what, and it works in regular campaigns too.
In practice, behavior shapes email in three ways:
- Segments: groups built from behavior, such as “bought twice in 90 days” or “reads only product updates”, which receive their own version of a campaign.
- Content: blocks inside one email that change for each reader, such as personalized recommendations from the category someone browsed, or articles on the topic they click most.
- Triggers: automated messages that react to an event. These are the triggered emails, like the welcome, reminder and notification messages at the end of this post.
Which behaviors to track
Useful signals fall into a few groups:
- Website and app activity: pages and product categories viewed, searches, repeat visits, time since the last visit.
- Shopping behavior: products added to the cart, checkouts started, purchases, order value and how often someone buys.
- Email engagement: clicks, the topics people click on, replies and unsubscribes.
- Product usage, for software and apps: logins, features used, a trial nearing its end, a usage limit reached.
- Declared preferences: what people told you in a preference center or sign-up form, which is the most reliable data you have.
Two cautions. Opens are a weak signal: since Apple added Mail Privacy Protection with iOS 15 in 2021, Apple Mail loads messages in the background, so senders record opens nobody made, so build “engaged” segments on clicks, visits and purchases. And in the EU, cookies and similar trackers that aren’t strictly necessary require the visitor’s consent under the ePrivacy Directive, so your behavioral data is only as complete as your consent banner allows.
Examples of behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation means grouping contacts by what they do rather than who they are. Examples that work in most businesses:
- Recency, frequency and monetary value (RFM): recent big spenders, loyal regulars, one-time buyers and customers who haven’t ordered in a year each get a different message and offer.
- Category interest: people who browsed or bought in one category see that category first in the newsletter.
- Engagement level: frequent clickers can get more emails or early access, and people who haven’t clicked in months get a re-engagement series before they are removed.
- Lifecycle stage: new subscriber, trial user, first-time customer, repeat customer, lapsed customer.
- Price sensitivity: contacts who only buy during sales hear about promotions, full-price buyers hear about new arrivals.
Advantages of BEM
There are many advantages to adding behavioral email campaigns, such as:
Customer loyalty increases. Emails that respond to a customer’s own actions show that your company pays attention and reacts to their needs and interests. That is what excellent customer service feels like.
The relevance of the brand is increasing. A quick and accurate response to what people do keeps the brand visible, because each message fits the person who gets it. Even if they don’t convert now, these contacts will pay off in the future.
Faster buyer path. From the first visit to the purchase, behavioral emails reach people at the moments when they are thinking about your brand, so they move through the journey faster.
The advantage over competitors. Many companies still send one newsletter to the whole list, so a message that reacts to real behavior stands out in an inbox full of generic ones.
Revenues are increasing. If you increase loyalty, improve relevance and speed up the buyer’s journey, revenue follows: customers who see campaigns based on their own activity are more likely to buy.
Why are behaviors important to your business?
Let’s answer the question with another one. Which email are you more likely to answer: one about a product you never looked at, or one with useful information about something you have just done?
Behaviors are what make complete, contextual experiences for customers possible. Marketers need to move from speculative strategies to ones that use customer actions to shape and time relevant messages. That is how you provide value exactly when the client expects it.
Email is just part of behavioral communication
Email is one of many channels through which you reach customers and collect data back into your systems. It should work together with other channels, such as push, to strengthen habits and the connection with the product. A consistent multichannel, multi-device strategy brings brand consistency and more repeat conversions, because several channels and devices shape how your customers shop.
For that, behavior from every channel has to land in one customer profile, so that a visit in the app, a click in the newsletter and a purchase in the store belong to the same person.
How to measure behavioral emails
Measure behavioral emails by clicks, conversions and revenue per recipient, not opens. Prefer click-through rate (clicks divided by delivered emails) to click-to-open rate (clicks divided by opens), since privacy features inflate opens. The most honest test is a holdout group: keep a random 5 to 10% of a segment on the standard email, and the difference in purchases shows what the behavioral version really adds.
How to start with behavioral emails
Knowing the basics and benefits of behavioral email marketing, you can start implementing it. Start small, with two or three segments and a couple of automated messages, and add more once you see results. A few good places to begin:
Welcome
Set a welcome email to run for new customers right after registration. It is the simplest triggered email, it lets you contact them from the very beginning and it shows them that they are valuable to you.
Educate
To build a relationship with your new users, give them something valuable. Share your knowledge about industry news and new features, or give them good advice. Base the next email on what they clicked in the first one.
Remind
Remind your users about yourself. If they haven’t completed the registration or another action, remind them from time to time that they can finish it. Warn them when their free trial is about to end or when a product they like is running out.
Notify
Keep your users’ attention by notifying them about moments that matter to them. Have they just moved up to the next level? Has a friend posted something interesting? Send them a message.
Request
When a client takes a certain action, such as finishing an order or closing a support case, ask for their opinion so you can keep improving your brand. Keep surveys simple, offer an incentive for completing them, and thank the people who answer.
Behavioral email marketing is a great strategy for responding to critical moments in the customer’s journey. Be careful, though: it may look like a strategy you set up and forget, but it isn’t. Behavioral messages work thanks to maintenance. Review segments and flows every few months, and cap how many emails one person gets in a week across all flows, because trying too much undoes the relevance you worked for. Avoid personalization that feels like surveillance: “we saw you looked at this three times” helps nobody.
Effective behavioral marketing doesn’t have to absorb your time, energy and money. Thanks to Firecrux and the processes described above, you can automatically identify specific segments of subscribers and send them the content that is most valuable to them.
Whatever tools you use, if you implement even a few ideas from this post, you’ll be ahead of every sender who still mails the same message to everyone.
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