Marketing segmentation has always been a key component of the most effective digital strategies. Dividing customers into smaller groups based on their needs and actions ensures you are best placed to efficiently solve their problems and in turn, sell more of your products.

Maximising your first-party data—like customer location, age and gender—is a key first step towards seeing a clearer picture of who your customers are. But if you want to truly know what motivates them and offer them what matters, you need to go deeper. This is where behavioural segmentation comes in.

Behavioural data segmentation can help you identify how your customers interact with your products and services. Fuelling your strategy with tools like Epsilon’s proprietary data, can offer valuable insights that are actionable in real time, and help you guide shoppers through each touchpoint seamlessly.

This blog will define behavioural segmentation, break down its key benefits and outline the four main types of segmentation that—with the right solutions in place—can be leveraged to optimise your marketing strategy, create tailored onsite experiences and drive conversions.

What is behavioural segmentation?

In marketing, behavioural segmentation is a way to divide your customers into segments based on their behavioural patterns when they interact with a particular business or website.

Grouping people that visit your ecommerce business by purchase behaviour, product usage and brand interaction in this way offers marketers a more holistic view of each shopper, enabling tailored onsite experiences that align products and messaging to each individual customer’s needs.

Going beyond the traditional demographic and geographic segmentation methods and utilising behavioural data allows for the execution of more successful marketing campaigns.

Why is behavioural segmentation important?

If you have a successful ecommerce business, you most likely already know a bit about who your customers are. Behavioural segmentation goes a step further, revealing what they do—and why.

Every action a shopper takes on your site can provide you with deeper layers of insight into their motivation and intent—ensuring you connect seamlessly and provide onsite experiences that reflect their needs and interests.

Behavioural segmentation can enhance your marketing efforts in these important ways:

• Identifies your most engaged users. The ability to filter existing customers and potential prospects by levels of engagement will enable you to make more informed decisions on how and where to best allocate time and resources—so you can focus on those most likely to make a purchase.
• Improves messaging accuracy. Imagine you’ve already identified that 24- to 35-year-olds are the most active segment on your site. Behavioural segmentation can then adapt messaging and experiences to match those behavioural trends—based on shared engagement patterns.
• Provides refined personalised experiences. Offering personal touches—like recommending related products or sending a timely upsell email—can lower bounce rate, reduce cart abandonment and speed up the purchasing process.
• Builds brand loyalty. Behavioural segmentation is key for ecommerce brands seeking to keep customers happy, boost repeat business and grow revenue over time by making targeting more accurate and offering unique onsite experiences.

Epsilon's identity resolution and onsite personalisation capabilities provide granular data segmentation and analytics that you can tap into for advanced insights from various touchpoints. Fuelled by industry-leading first-party data, our solutions are built to provide a clear view of who is shopping your site — and respond in real time.

And the more clearly you can see your customers, the easier it will be to provide customised onsite experiences that build meaningful connections and drive higher ROI.

What are the four types of behavioural segmentation?

Customers expect personalised experiences. When done right, segmentation can help you create onsite experiences that feel personal to each customer—ensuring they feel like you know them.

Let’s break down four main types of behavioural segmentation that provide a holistic view of your customer throughout their buying journey. Each one reveals actionable insights you can use across touchpoints to help guide their purchase decisions.

1. Segmentation based on purchase and usage behavior

Segmenting by purchase behaviour can help you pinpoint varying trends, and behaviour patterns that customers have at purchase. Businesses that leverage this type of segmentation benefit from seeing a map of each customer’s position in their journey—their role in the purchasing process, the obstacles they are facing, the incentives they’re most likely to respond to—allowing for timely, personalised engagement.

2. Occasion or timing-based segmentation

Occasion-based segmentation categorizes customers who are most likely to interact with your brand or purchase from your website on either specific occasions or set times. It can also be triggered by a customer’s daily routine, such as picking up a coffee on the morning commute or ordering lunch delivery during a regular work break.

3. Benefits-sought segmentation

Segmenting by benefits sought refers to dividing your audience based on the unique value proposition your customer is looking to gain from your product or service.

For example, some people buy skincare products for anti-ageing benefits while others are seeking solutions for sensitive skin. Investing in the right technology can ensure that you surface products that are most relevant to the benefit each person cares about most.

4. Segmentation based on customer loyalty

Loyalty-based segmentation measures the level of engagement a customer has with your brand—distinguishing between first-time buyers, repeat shoppers or high-tiered rewards program members.

The goal of this type of segmentation isn’t just recognizing your best customers, it can help you focus on repeat customers, their needs, behavior patterns—ultimately, optimising future campaigns, improving your businesses’ value proposition and strengthening your brand positioning. For retailers operating loyalty programmes across markets like the UK, France and Germany, this type of segmentation is particularly powerful for driving long-term customer value across different regional behaviours and preferences.

Other types of behavioural segmentation

In addition to purchase, benefit, loyalty and timing-based segments, there are other types of behavioural segmentation you can use to optimise the onsite experiences of your ecommerce business—such as customer journey stage, engagement and customer satisfaction.

Segmentation based on customer journey stage

Segmenting by customer journey gives direction to your business objectives and helps you provide a path for customers to seamlessly move from awareness to retention. The insight to nudge customers from desire to purchase requires well-positioned product imagery and good website design.

Our onsite personalisation platform provides a data-driven approach that streamlines website journeys, offering a comprehensive view of each stage your customer is in, as well as touchpoints they interact with—increasing opt-in rates, conversion rates and AOV.

Segmentation based on engagement

Just like customer journey stage segmentation, grouping customers based on their engagement levels can help you to understand the reasons why their behaviour falls into specific categories.

Customer engagement is categorized by three levels:

• Occasional: Occasional customers are not in regular contact with your brand.
• Regular: Regular customers interact with your products or services but fail to use them to the full extent.
• Intensive: Intensive customers are those who are intensive advocates of your product or service.

Segmenting your customers in this way will aid customer retention by dividing the relevant materials between those engaged, and those unengaged, and ultimately help to reduce churn.

Segmentation based on satisfaction

Behavioural segmentation based on satisfaction is the most straightforward of them all. Customer feedback—like surveys and NPS scores—can help you to enhance your product or service by understanding which features your customers most desire, or which could help you stay ahead of competitors.

Conclusion

By segmenting customers based on their behavioural data, you gain a more comprehensive look at how you can adjust your messaging, brand, marketing materials and ultimately products or services to stay ahead of the competition and reduce your customer churn.

While creating marketing campaigns that resonate and offering customised onsite experiences does require deeper insight into your customer—that’s just the start. Leveraging that insight effectively is the only way to execute higher performing campaigns and drive better outcomes.

Establishing an effective behavioural segmentation strategy takes an investment in a technology partner that can provide a solid foundation of data and identity for you to build on. Epsilon Accelerate offers best-in-class identification and onsite personalisation capabilities that can help seamlessly communicate with your shoppers—always sending them the right message at the right time.