A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned "directed behavioral segmentation" as a technique for learning more about your online marketing respondents sooner, in support of an early segmentation strategy. It's worth delving more deeply into that concept since it's an interesting hybrid of two more prevalent ways of segmenting people on the web -- but with the combined benefits of both.
The most common way in which respondents are segmented is through "form response segmentation". When it comes time to collect contact information, you ask demographic-like questions on a form, such as the person's industry, job function, company size. The problem is that you acquire no insight on the people who abandon before filling out the form -- which is a high hurdle -- and even those people who do complete it usually don't perceive any incentive to fill out that portion accurately. Typically, their incentive is to get past the form as quickly as possible.
"Undirected behavioral segmentation" is an alternative that has been pushed by many web analytics providers, in which a post-hoc analysis of where a user surfed through your web site is used to make an educated guess as to their segment. While this is early segmentation, its accuracy is suspect since the respondent didn't have any awareness of the segmentation to make sure it aligned with their larger purpose. They were simply jumping around your site, perhaps following a temporary tangent -- of which most web sites offer aplenty -- and their clickstream may very well diverge from their true segment.
As shown in this diagram, the accuracy of respondent segmentation can be seen as a function of two dimensions: incentive and transparency. Transparency assures that the respondent knows what the segmentation choices are; incentive is the degree to which they're motivated to choose the one that aligns best. Form response segmentation is high on transparency, low on incentive. Undirected behavioral segmentation varies in incentive, but has low transparency.
Directed behavioral segmentation aims for the best of both, by making it very clear to a respondent what the segmentation choices are, and by providing good incentive -- content and fulfillments targeted to their needs. This incentive works also because the hurdle is low: the respondent simply needs to make a click, not deal with completing a form.
Landing paths (a.k.a. conversion paths), which are typically a branching tree of two or three pages, are a great vehicle for directed behavioral segmentation. As we've seen many times, this approach tends to deliver a high segmentation rate and a good conversion rate, since the content and offer for conversion are tailored for the respondent's true segment.
- Scott Brinker
