Customer Behavior Modeling: What Does it Have to Do with CRO?

Customer behavior or consumer behavior is a parameter that has to do with sales, customer experience, and, in the end, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

In the most straightforward words possible, consumer behavior would describe how a customer or a consumer-like entity – i.e., a business or an organization – selects, purchases, and uses products and services.

Customer behavior modeling studies and utilizes data to offer a better customer experience and help boost CRO efforts.

If you’re not sure about what CRO really is, this blogpost will answer all your questions. But if you’re sure, read on to see how you can reach it through customer behavior modeling.

What Is Customer Behavior Modeling?

Customer behavior is not a new concept, and it can shape consumer habits. But what is customer behavior modeling? How can it help your brand become a trendsetter?

More importantly, how can customer behavior modeling help out with your CRO efforts, and how can you benefit from it?

• You’ll be able to figure out how to improve your campaigns based on consumer behavior.
• You’ll be able to study said behavior through extensive research and data study.
• You’ll manage to utilize your marketing budget in a way that will create a digital campaign designed to bring forth some actual CRO results.
• You’ll model the way your prospects form opinions and distinguish common factors and differences between products.

All in all, by using customer behavior modeling, brands can modify the marketing budget, know exactly what it takes for our digital campaigns to be successful, and realize what it is that a customer would love to see.

The Definitive Factors

So, you’ve got a person’s own opinions that can shape their taste and influence their whole behavior when making purchases, picking out products, and picking out alternatives for said products.

These are the demographics you’ll use when personalizing, the person’s ability to digest and categorize information, prioritize their needs, and use their income accordingly.

You’ve also got the peers and how those can influence customer behavior. The same principle applies to social media and social media influencers. The level of education and other factors play a psychological part as well.

Demographics and the data are what will give you all of the information you need. And that data will, ultimately, help you create your plan.

CRO: How Are You Reaching It Using Customer Behavior?

CRO is an ongoing process that considers a prospect or a customer and how the data mentioned above can encompass and form a consumer’s behavior.

By taking into account what your data has indicated as psychological, sociological, and monetary factors, you can set all of your digital marketing tools and strategies and create parameters that will allow you to up your game.

By understanding how consumer behavior psychology works, you can influence, make people happy, and see how they can use your products or how your products and services can help them shape their lives and become better people.

As with all things marketing, to optimize your conversion rate through customer behavior modeling, you need to implement some techniques and tools, including, but not limited to:

• Vigorous A/B testing on all the page elements that need to be changed – according to your data, of course
• CTAs that will be actionable and optimized to nudge the user in the right direction and, eventually, further down the funnel
• Copy that will convince and a content strategy that will produce valuable, actionable content that will help with your marketing efforts
• SMART goals

If you think that the techniques above don’t differ from what you would use in any marketing effort, you are right. The goal is always to convince and influence.

And influence is what, essentially, models a customer’s behavior.

Sounds great, right? But how are you going to get this moving in a way that will work in your favor?

Customer Behavior Models First

Boosting CRO through customer behavior modeling without creating customer behavior models before developing your marketing plan wouldn’t make any sense. So, we will have to place the techniques through which marketers build those models to predict customer behavior first in order of business.

Let’s see how that is possible:

• What do your customer data say? 

Studying customer data will show you the types of changes you need to make – if any – and the strategy that will lead prospects down the funnel. Looking into purchase history and customer survey will help your segmentation efforts. Never forget to invest in your CRM data as well.

• Segment and personalize

Data need to be broken down into smaller segments. With the help of AI, you will be able to see some exciting trends you should follow as a marketer and help you create tiny segments that will, eventually, allow you to create marketing messages that will feel effortlessly personal. These messages are your first step towards hyper-personalization.

• Test, always

After you’ve created the marketing messages and campaigns you need, do a test run. If your test run fails, it’s time to look at your data and make sure you’ve done everything by the book. Data will help you make educated decisions and leave nothing to fate when it comes to your marketing and sales strategy.

All in all, following the above tactics will help you create customer behavior models that will respond to the real people of your audience and not a theoretical persona.

Email Marketing, Landing Pages, A/B Testing and More

All businesses, eCommerce businesses, SaaS businesses, you name it, don’t just want digital marketing. They need it, in all the ways possible. This is the best way to utilize most channels and achieve all goals.

First of all, you’ll need to figure out a fantastic email marketing strategy. Lucky for you, some of the best email marketing services offer free versions that cover a wide variety of needs.

A marketing platform won’t make your budget explode – especially if a free version works for you in the end – and can provide plenty of options. Some of those are automation tools, AI, everything that will gather all of the information you’ll need to get your CRO game to a great level.

You’ll also need to set up a landing page or two and align your emails’ CTAs – or any CTAs that will be leading to those pages, really – with the CTAs and overall look and feel of your landing page.

Are you, for example, setting up a video marketing campaign? Ensure that your emails and landing pages have this element as the core element. Then, start building content around your video.

Check out the graph above before deciding on the content, of course. Video marketing is, undoubtedly, the winner.

What do your prospects like to read about? What do they want to see? Data will tell you all about that.

Use advanced AI to answer those questions and create email campaigns and landing pages that will be hyper-personalized and highly targeted.

The data you’ll gather through AI will give you some better insight, and A/B testing your campaigns as a whole will allow you to look inside your prospects’ minds.

But to do that, you do need to be sure of what you wish to achieve in the first place. 

Set SMART goals and think of what you need to achieve.

Do you need more leads to optimize conversion? Then make landing pages that won’t sell but will entice people enough to have them want to hear from you.

Create elements that will be tested repeatedly. Optimize these elements to reach the end goal you’re going to set from the very beginning. And make sure that goal is actionable and that your team can accomplish it.

Customer Behavior Psychology, Content, and CRO

Every day, we experience a wide range of emotions that influence our decisions. Long ago, marketers started using various psychological tactics to influence consumer behavior and encourage people to purchase.

According to a study conducted at Harvard, emotional purchases make up 95% of the overall purchases a person makes.

Emotions are the driving force behind everything we do, including our buyer behavior. This is why consumer behavior psychology is an integral part of every successful CRO strategy, as our “gut feeling” makes us pick X items over Y and Z.

The factor that influences that gut feeling is that people need to know the part of their lives with which your product can help them. What is it that your product can do better than your competitors’? Why is your brand the one to trust? By answering those questions, you can find your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Your USP is what your content needs to revolve around. Essentially, it will showcase what your product helps your customers do.

Get prospects on board by telling them why they need you. The emotion behind your content is what will make or break your CRO efforts.

If, for example, your primary field of interest is to boost your conversion by tackling customer churn, then ask your customer service team for some feedback. What is it that makes customers have second thoughts about your brand?

Take to social media and ask your prospects what it is about your business that’s not quite cutting it. Get their opinion through a questionnaire and quizzes and move forward with actions.

Try as hard as you can to understand what would be a great fit. Would a simple Google AdWords campaign be right for your business?

Walk a mile (or more) in your prospects’ shoes. Try your content yourself before “serving” it to someone else, and answer the following questions yourself first:

• Did your landing page’s actionable verbs convince you and urged you to take action?
• Were said actions clear enough and leading from A to Z?
• Did your website show you exactly where you needed to go?
• Would you know exactly why you need your product, had you not worked in that company?
• How would your product make your mother happy, your father sad, and your siblings pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised?

Make sure that you get the right type of ad, banner, graph maker, and, of course, some excellent copy that will stimulate the exact emotion you need – nothing more, nothing less.

The audience will determine the right type of ad, banner, visual, and copy. Big data analytics and A/B testing are what will give you the answer you need. Take a look at that:

Don’t forget that a minor display change in one of Microsoft Bing’s ads led to an astonishing 12% increase in 2012. That was a result of A/B testing.

This is what will be able to influence customer behavior to the point that they’ll help your conversion thrive.

I wouldn’t want to delve into behavioral experiments like Pavlov’s dogs and whatnot. But you can use common sense. By provoking an emotional response, you gently nudge a customer towards a specific type of action.

Now, if you manage to create content so strong and representative of the desired type of behavior that the customer will inevitably connect your content with a purchase, then you’ve got the emotional response you’ve been looking for. By extension, you will get the Conversion Rate Optimization strategy that had been missing.

Takeaway

The whole point in using customer behavior modeling to pinpoint a consumer’s pain points and use them in all of your marketing strategies is a CRO tactic.

There’s a general principle to keep in mind: CRO is a sum of efforts, deeply tied to emotional responses.

Creating models that can predict your audience’s behavior is a technique that can be applied to all your marketing efforts and allow you to be one step ahead. What is more, it will give you a unique insight into your prospects’ journey down the funnel.

Whether you pick out email marketing and landing pages, or social media and website design – or all of the marketing channels you can use, really -, by studying your customers’ behavior psychology and incorporating emotional responses to your CRO efforts, you simply cannot lose.