Target Users with Incentives by Behavior, Browsing Patterns

It doesn't take a mastery of big data to understand that knowing a user's buying behavior and browsing patterns leads to more (and higher-value) sales. The technologies that are emerging to support this, despite privacy mavens' very vocal objections, are being increasingly utilized by merchants.

Conversion and analytics vendor Spring Metrics, for example, has announced the release of Smart Offers, a "quick-deploy" solution that uses behavioral targeting to present personalized offers to website visitors. The product uses Spring Metrics' behavioral targeting engine to profile visitors and then acts as an automated sales agent. The company claims that participating sites have increased revenue by over 32 percent in a single month.

As an Internet retailer, that should spark some interest, right?

Smart Offers essentially enables Web merchants to segment the targeting of customers and visitors. For example, a website owner can configure one type of offer to be served to "lurkers"-- those who repeatedly visit a site but haven't purchased. They can also configure another offer type to target social media visitors by delivering custom incentives to visitors who arrive from a specific source such as a Facebook.

"Smart Offers are designed to help Spring Metrics customers drive more sales and more revenue from their online stores. And our Smart Offers do this automatically 24-hours a day, even while the site owner is asleep," says Shannon Bauman, director of product management. "By understanding the behavior of their customers, and then targeting promotions based on that behavior, website owners not only turn more visitors into buyers, they actually entice the buyers to spend more on each purchase."