Analyze Online Customer Behavior to Optimize Loyalty Programs

Enhancing Behavioral Model Performance & Campaign Attribution

When you last purchased a retail item, was your first thought to research it online or visit a store? If your initial journey started online, you’re not alone. More and more customers are beginning their purchasing journey online, where e-commerce sales accounted for 14.6% of total sales in 2022 (which jumps to 16% when looking at Q4!).

There are two primary ways brands can collect data about their customers’ online behavior:

1. Track traffic and customer behavior on the brand's website
2. Track customer interactions with email campaigns

Both of these methods are discussed in more detail below.

How Brands Can Use Behavioral Data

Marketers can use the data collected from website traffic and email campaigns for a multitude of things, including:

• targeting
• modeling
• segmentation
• tracking campaign performance
• personalizing loyalty solutions
• better understanding of their customers
• improving the customer experience (CX)

There are just a few examples of how brands can utilize customer data to their advantage. Marketers can leverage customer behavioral data in many beneficial ways, depending on the brand's needs. We discuss some of these benefits below in more detail.

Tracking Website Behavior

To gain valuable data and insights, brands should track customer behavior and interactions on their website. Website user data can be tracked, collected, and exported using a tool like Google Analytics 4. Since digital tracking began, marketers have tracked basic metrics like pageviews, clicks, and user sessions. However, brands can take advantage of more advanced and relevant metrics like event-level tracking to focus on specific interactions that set their members and content apart.

With the advent of Content Management Systems (CMSs), logging in can quickly bring database elements to the page. The dashboard can display elements such as “Member ID,” “Segment,” “Points,” etc., but more importantly, you can append them to each hit payload to describe the user.

Marketers can utilize website flows for more targeting. For example, in a campaign to buy more ACME bricks, you see specific members searching for “yellow” bricks. That metric could be used as an independent variable in a model, a level of campaign performance, or a new field to build customized experiences for those visitors.

It has become increasingly important for websites to adapt as technologies like cookies evolve due to privacy, browser, and regulatory changes. Site-wide tagging is recommended for obtaining the most accurate measurements possible, especially if using Google Analytics 4.

Tracking Email Campaigns

Modern emails are unbelievably dynamic. To customize these emails, brands curate personalized profile data from relational databases and fill a template that customizes its messaging for each individual in a campaign. Once a brand sends the email to its marketing list, it can track if the recipient opens the email and if they click a link included in the email. Generally, these links lead to a landing page, document, etc., that ultimately brings the user back to the brand’s website.

Tagging each URL with campaign metadata can provide valuable insights regarding campaign performance. You can also tag URLs with an anonymous ID linked to each program member to track behavioral insights over time.

Marketers and developers can take advantage of email campaign tracking data to build and utilize a history of what campaigns are most incentivizing to different loyalty members, assisting attribution and conversion algorithms.

URL Tracking

If you don’t tag it, you can’t track it. Generally, you can’t analyze website traffic retroactively if tags don’t exist for each HTTP request. Even standard tracking metrics (such as referring webpages) can be lost if a visitor opens a link on an app or device not using HTML. A page referrer translates to a simple JavaScript variable, document.referrer. A visitor opening a link on a new browser window or app such as Outlook (which isn’t built with HTML) will set that variable to NULL, and the only fallback method to track where and how a visitor arrived is through campaign tags.

You can collect this data through pixels, API calls, and/or other channels. Google Analytics 4 (& Google BigQuery), Adobe Analytics, and Tealium are three robust service providers that house and aggregate these data points.

You can track program member behavior in many ways, and more digital tracking platforms and services are launched all the time. From there, you can export your data or join it with your CRM database (especially in the case of click stream data or live data feeds). If you choose to use Google for Analytics 4 and tagging, it’s now easier than ever since only one Google tag is needed for the entire website and integration with Google’s products.

Benefits of Tracking Digital Behavior

Aggregations and reporting can now illuminate specific digital interactions to gather insights about your website. The marketing benefits of collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the behavior data of customer and loyalty members includes:

• Segmentation
• Targeting & Model Enhancement
• Campaign Performance Reporting

Of course, these are just a few benefits of tracking and analyzing customer data, but we will discuss each of these three in more detail below.

Segmentation

You can use data collected to segment members and build profiles from a host of transactional and demographic elements. Analyzing and understanding program members’ actions on a website can provide a more transparent view of who your members are. The program can add digital metrics to profiles as long as the data is correctly collected.

Targeting & Model Enhancement

Beyond segmentation enhancements, models can now utilize specific member actions such as logging in, visiting a help page, chatting with AI support chatbots, clicking certain links, etc.

Adding these independent variables to statistical models can better predict actions and target more engaged members, leading to repeat transactions.

Campaign Performance Reporting

Program dashboards can report ROI more accurately when adhering to standard practices about member and campaign metadata. Brands can confidently state how many visitors converted from each campaign, juxtaposed against the costs, to pair with CRM or other website data.

Do you have a campaign for a specific product? Proper member and campaign tracking can allow you to tie conversions on certain pages or links to specific marketing efforts.

Social Listening to Understand Customer Behavior

Website behavior is only one tool for your program’s digital analytics arsenal. Another great tool (and a huge one at that) is social listening. Employing social listening to understand social behavior can provide your brand with a current state of sentiment and discussion to act on.

While brands generally collect this behavior data anonymously, social listening may be a business’ most authentic tool for understanding customer/consumer behavior. People may feel comfortable expressing their opinions from the relative anonymity of their social media accounts rather than through direct face-to-face contact or surveys upon completion of a customer service call or chat.

Brands collect this sentiment data to optimize the customer experience (CX). They use sentiments to structure and personalize experiences for their consumers. While it’s true that consumers are more likely to complain about a negative experience than a positive one, this is excellent news for your business. Marketing teams can use these discussions to focus efforts on making a positive imprint on the collective member attitude.

Ask the Loyalty Experts!

Marketers use many metrics and behaviors to enhance their marketing data, and website behavior is among the top channels to gain insightful data.

Whether brands use those data points for statistical purposes, segmentations, or simple performance reporting, they can add this to their repertoire of marketing tools to better support their brand.

To learn more about tracking and analyzing customer website behavior and how to use that data to optimize your brand’s loyalty solution, contact Brierley’s experienced loyalty experts today!