Segment on User Action to Drive Conversion

Most segmentation strategies focus on things like gender, geographic location, race, weekend vs. weekday traffic and the like. However, I have found that segmenting by user action is far more effective at driving conversion.

Let’s take a hypothetical that an e-commerce site has a wish list feature. Customers can put items on the wish list for purchase later. Let’s say a customer adds an item to the wish list. Now what does this tell us? It tells us the user is likely to return and since most wish list functions require registration we now have the personal info of this user. That means we can send them a customized and highly targeted email campaign or have the wish list product info dropped into a cookie so when they return a modal pops reminding them of the product.

Here’s another hypothetical: consider a web site with three levels for a service: novice, intermediate and pro. Let’s say the pro version has the most profit margin and that’s what you want to focus on. You could watch for a specific path in web traffic that indicates the user is a highly qualified prospect. For instance, if the user is a new user (has not visited the site before) and the pro product page is the 2nd or 3rd page visited by that user. That’s an indicator that this person is qualified, the site can then be optimized to convert that visitor to sale.

When your audience is telling you what they want with their actions, listen.