Events

The primary goal of any modern marketer, working for an online business is to create great customer experiences and keep them coming back for more. This ties back to your users, how they perceive your brand and how they interact with your product.

As marketers, we are well aware of the fact that different kind of users have different needs and are capable of responding to the same message in different ways. Such varied human behavior is what has led marketers around the world to adopt personalized and contextual lifecycle communication.

The idea is to give each user what they want when they want it - delivered through a preferred channel of communication, as a response to their behavior.

Sounds great, right?

But managing the expectations of millions of users, every day, is no easy task. It involves keeping track of each user, observing their behavior, understanding their needs and engaging with them accordingly.

So, how do you make this possible?

Understanding Your User’s Lifecycle

The first step to delivering contextual communication is to understand the mental, emotional and physical states that your users experience while interacting with your product.

At this point, any experienced marketer will be quick to point out that there is no way (yet) to quantify the mental and emotional states experienced by their users. (Detailed read: Marketer's User Empathy Model)

True.

But what you can quantify (track and analyze) is the physical state experienced by a user throughout their lifecycle.

You can think of the physical state as the actions performed by users when interacting with your app and website. These actions could be anything like;

• searching for a product
• applying filters
• viewing product details
• making a purchase and so on.

So, if we were to break down a typical online user’s behavior into stages, it would look something like this:

At each stage, users perform various actions and evidently, experience different mental and emotional states. This warrants the implementation of differentiated strategies for engaging one-on-one with users at each stage.

Tying Behavioural Data to Everything You Do

The most scientific way to start designing differentiated engagement strategies is to track the behaviour of your users, throughout their lifecycle. Here’s why:

1. Behavioural data lays the foundation for analysing your users’ actions and creating hypotheses around what they think and feel, as they move from one stage to the next.

2. It’s also the starting point for digging into the possible motivations built into your product or campaigns which push some users to convert faster than the others (or abandon you all together).

3. And lastly, behavioural data plays an essential role in understanding what’s missing from your product or communication - something that could help users make the most of your offerings, faster.

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Use-case

For example, if you observe that most users take maximum time to move from Evaluation to Conversion, then you know that they need some form of motivation, reinforcing their decision to make a purchase.

This motivation could be anything like;

• Sending a compelling offer, bringing them a step closer to owning a product they’ve been eyeing for a while.

• Showing users how happy other customers feels after purchasing your product/service.

• Making it easier for them to commit to a long-term purchase by offering a time-bound return policy.

• Showing them how your product/service can make a significant contribution to their lives.

• Or, making it easier for them to make a payment and checkout by simplifying your UI.

While variables like the message, channel and timing can be guided by a combination of individual user preferences and the details shared with you - the fact that they need external motivation to progress from Evaluation to Conversion becomes indisputable.

In this sense, all behavioral data doubles up as a source of truth. It tells you what your users want and helps you gauge the effectiveness of your communication by indicating if it resulted in the desired behavior or not.

At WebEngage, we firmly believe that the success of any consumer business, like yours, is tied to how well you understand your users and their actions. Conceptually, all behavioral data points are called Events in your dashboard. And each Event can further be understood in the context of its Attributes which includes details like time, location, device details, price, quantity, and so on. This enables you to gain in-depth insights into user interactions and behavior across your app, website, and channels.