Behavioral Segmentation: Understanding and Leveraging Consumer Behavior

Meet Taylor and Alex, two young men with the same age and education who couldn’t be more different.
Taylor is calm and focused. He values practicality and spends his money on books, educational materials, and fitness gear. Meanwhile, Alex is energetic and impulsive. He’s always chasing the latest trends in streetwear, gaming accessories, and music equipment.

As a business owner, if you only looked at their demographics, you’d miss the unique aspects that make Alex and Taylor who they are — and lose their business.
Demographics alone won’t cut it. Instead, you need to reach customers based on what they actually want and do, i.e., behavioral segmentation.
What is Behavioral Segmentation?
Behavioral segmentation means grouping customers based on their actions and behaviors in order to target each group with tailored content and products. It focuses on how customers interact with your brand.
The segmentation criteria include purchasing behaviors, content preferences, and engagement.
Purchasing Behaviors
Buying behavior is the series of actions and interactions a consumer goes through before, during, and after a purchase. Sometimes, people buy a product because they want variety. Other times, they buy out of habit or on impulse. Most often, though, people research the product and its features before deciding to buy.
When segmenting your audience based on their purchasing habits, analyze these criteria:
- The products they buy,
- Their preferred shopping times,
- The frequency of their purchases,
- The duration of the customer journey,
- Their loyalty and repeat purchase behavior,
- Their reactions to discounts and special offers,
- Their feedback and reviews on products and services.
Content Preferences and Engagement Behaviors
While each customer prefers specific types of content and channels, video and social content are more popular these days. What’s more, mobile phones are essential in modern life, with many people using them before bed, after waking up, and even in the bathroom.
So, to connect with your audience, figure out which content works best for each group and plan your strategy around that.
To segment customers based on content choices and interactions, consider these criteria:
- The device they use,
- The content they read or watch,
- How often they interact with your website or app,
- Their response to marketing campaigns and promotions,
- How often they open or click on the links in your marketing emails,
- The channels they use to interact with your brand (e.g., social media, email, in-store)
Combining Behavioral and Demographic Segmentation
You don’t have to choose one type of segmentation over another. Behavioral and demographic segmentation can work in tandem since age, gender, and income influence behaviors and preferences.
For example, demographic data might show that most of your product buyers are women aged 30-40, and behavioral data could reveal that this group primarily buys during special sales and prefers using mobile devices for shopping. You can combine these insights to create a more effective campaign.
Why is Behavioral Segmentation Important?
Segmenting your audience by demographics is only a little better than broadcasting your message to everyone. But if you create behavior-based segments, you get practical insights for each group. This way, you know exactly how to engage your audience effectively.
These are the top benefits of using behavioral segmentation:
- Deeper customer insights: You’ll know what your customers need and predict what they’re more likely to buy next.
- More personalized campaigns: You can tailor your marketing campaigns to fit your customers’ habits, and preferences. This way, your messages are more likely to make an impact.
- Increased customer loyalty: Personalized communication makes customers happier, which keeps them coming back to your brand.
- Smarter budget allocation: You can focus your money and resources on customers who are likely to spend more.
- Enhanced customer experience: Adding a personal touch at every interaction point improves the overall experience for your customers.
- Optimal timing: When you know your customers’ activity times, you can reach out to them when they’re more likely to engage with your messages.
Behavioral Segmentation for Your Email Marketing
Email marketing has been a top marketing channel for years, and it’s still going strong. One in three marketers uses email, and 87 percent plan to either maintain or increase their investment in it in 2024.
However, one of the biggest challenges today is creating personalized experiences. And we know great personalization begins with great segmentation.
You can segment your audience in many ways, but we especially recommend two methods:
- Segmentation based on the customer lifecycle: This method looks at where your customers are in their journey with your brand.
- Segmentation based on engagement level: This method focuses on how actively your customers interact with your emails.
Let’s consider each email segmentation strategy in detail.
Segmentation Based on the Customer Lifecycle
The customer lifecycle tracks the long-term relationships between you and your customers. It focuses on engaging customers over time to encourage repeat purchases and loyalty.
At Campaign Refinery, we identify six stages in the customer lifecycle:
- Awareness,
- Interest,
- Research,
- Purchase,
- Retention,
- Loyalty.
Remember Taylor? Let’s take a closer look at his profile.

Now, see how our sensible bookworm will move from one segment to another as he passes through the lifecycle stages:
- Signing up: Taylor discovers our online store and decides to complete the registration process. We send him a personalized welcome email and add him to the “NewMembers” segment in our database.
- First browse: As Taylor moves deeper into the interest stage, he browses through our online store. He’s particularly interested in our selection of contemporary fiction and adds a few books to his cart.
- Cart abandonment: Despite his initial interest, Taylor gets distracted and exits the website without paying. Since our email automation software lets us automatically tag users, we don’t move Taylor to a new segment. A simple “AbandonedCart” tag will do.
- Cart abandonment email: The next day, we send Taylor a friendly cart abandonment email. This email reminds him of the items he left behind and includes a small discount.
- Purchase completion: Taylor returns to our online store. He reviews his cart, makes some adjustments, and completes his purchase. From here, we move him to the “FirstTimeShoppers” segment.
- Post-purchase retention: We send Taylor a thank-you email. This email confirms his order and provides details about shipping. We also invite him to subscribe to our newsletter for personalized book recommendations.
Segmentation Based on Engagement Level
This segmentation method involves grouping audience members based on how they interact with your business. For example, you might have one group that frequently visits your website and another that often responds to email campaigns.
To begin, choose a metric that aligns with your channel and business goals. Then, split your audience into several groups based on that metric. In email marketing, the most common metrics are open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
We recommend creating at least these four customer segments:
- Active: These customers frequently interact with your content, make regular purchases, and might recommend your brand to others.
- Passive: These customers make occasional purchases and engage with your marketing campaigns less frequently.
- Disengaged: These customers might have made purchases in the past but aren’t doing so anymore, and they rarely engage with your marketing campaigns.
- Inactive: These customers haven’t engaged with your brand in a long time. They may have unsubscribed from your emails, stopped following you on social media, and haven’t made a purchase in a long time.
Pro tip: Clean your email list regularly. If someone hasn’t interacted with your business in over six months, consider removing them. That’s because sending emails to people who don’t engage can hurt your ability to reach the primary inbox.
You can also use multiple metrics and combine them with a formula to get an overall engagement score. This score helps you understand their overall level of engagement with your brand.
The table below shows an example of how you might do this:
Metric | Weight | Calculation |
---|---|---|
Website Visits | 25% | Number of visits |
Email Opens | 15% | Number of opens |
Click-throughs | 25% | Number of clicks |
Purchases | 35% | Number of purchases |
Unlock the Full Potential of Behavioral Segmentation with Email Automation
Behavioral segmentation provides you with valuable insights into how your customers behave. However, to truly tap into its full potential, you need automation because it lets you respond instantly to your customers’ actions.
Let’s discuss three scenarios where you can get the most out of behavioral segmentation with email automation.
Winback Campaigns
One-time customers spend less than half compared to returning customers. So, it makes sense to try to get old customers to come back. This is exactly the goal of a win-back campaign.
To run an effective win-back campaign:
- Identify customers who haven’t interacted with your brand in a while.
- Segment these customers based on their purchase history or engagement level.
- Send them personalized messages with a special offer and a compelling CTA.
- Track the results to refine your approach and maximize returning customers.
Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are automated emails sent on a schedule to nurture leads or guide customers through their journey. Since four out of every five leads never turn into a sale, a drip campaign isn’t optional if you want to keep your leads engaged and moving toward a purchase.
The process is similar to the win-back campaign. First, segment your audience based on their customer journey stages or specific triggers, like signing up for a newsletter. Then, target them with automated messages designed to guide them through the next steps.
Back-in-Stock Alerts
Back-in-stock alerts are automated emails that notify customers when an out-of-stock item they were interested in is available again. These emails drive 50 percent of interested customers to your website and have a 5 to 15 percent conversion rate.
To use back-in-stock alerts effectively:
- Segment users based on their browsing or wish list activity.
- Send personalized, automated emails as soon as the items are restocked.
Examples of Behavioral Segmentation
Let’s go over five real-world examples to show how businesses successfully use the practice to connect with their customers.
Huel’s Welcome Emails Are Tailored to Spark Interest
Huel, a British company that makes plant-based meals and snacks, tailors its welcome messages based on the page where subscribers sign up. This way, when you subscribe, they send you an email coupon for a product you’re probably interested in. This friendly approach makes the experience feel more special and boosts the chances of making a sale.

What Happens When You Ignore Duolingo’s Notifications
Duolingo does a great job of creating integrated experiences across multiple channels. One of its techniques is to segment users based on their engagement with the app.
The app sends you daily notifications to remind you to do your lesson. If you ignore these notifications for a few days, Duolingo moves you to an unengaged segment. Then, it sends you an email explaining that it’ll stop sending notifications.
Besides giving you a heads-up, email uses a bit of psychology to encourage you to return. It includes a personalized chart showing how many days you’ve missed language practice.

Juvee’s Popular Slayer Slushie Makes a Comeback
Juvee, an American energy drink company, often teams up with game companies to create limited-edition flavors of its drinks for game launches. One such creation was the Slayer Slushie, which was only available for two months. However, due to its popularity, the company renamed the drink to “Cherry Slushie” and made it a permanent part of its lineup.
People who showed interest in the drink received an email announcement about this change. The email includes a CTA to sign up for a reminder. This not only keeps customers informed but also lets Juvee perform more fine-grained behavioral segmentation in the future.

Bougie Enhances Customer Engagement with Special Email Promotions
One common way to apply behavioral segmentation is by categorizing users based on the channel they interact with you. Bougie, an Australian home decoration company with a flair for vintage designs, demonstrates this in the example below.
They send a promotional email for a lighter holder exclusively to their email marketing newsletter subscribers. This approach makes recipients feel special and targets a highly engaged audience more likely to make a purchase.
The email design is clean and minimal. It showcases the product and features a clear “email only” sign to emphasize exclusivity. Plus, there’s a convenient unsubscribe button if you no longer want to receive emails from Bougie.

Hulu’s Approach to Bringing Back Subscribers
Hulu, a streaming platform owned by Disney, uses a smart tactic to win back old users. If you haven’t renewed your subscription and haven’t logged in for a while, Hulu places you in a special segment to start sending a series of re-engagement emails.
The email below plays on the fear of missing out by listing all the great shows and features you’re missing. To make the deal even sweeter, they offer a free month to entice you to respond to the reactivation email.

Best Practices for Behavioral Customer Segmentation
To summarize, segmentation is a way to organize a large group of people into smaller groups based on specific criteria. It helps you target different audiences for different purposes effectively.
Keep these points in mind when creating behavioral customer segments:
- Tailor your approach: Different goals require different segmentation strategies. For example, the way you group customers for newsletter ads will be different from how you group them for reactivation emails.
- Update regularly: People change — what they like, how they behave, and their interest in your offers can shift. Regularly update your segments to accommodate these changes and move users between segments as needed.
- Accept imperfections: No segmentation strategy is perfectly accurate. For example, if you label users who haven’t interacted in the last 30 days as unengaged, what’s gonna happen to those nearing the 30-day mark? They might still be unengaged. Recognize and plan for these gray areas in your segmentation strategy.
- Find the sweet spot: Avoid creating too many or too few segments. Too many, and it’s hard to manage specific marketing strategies for each. Too few, and you might miss subtle but important behaviors.
- Follow segmentation with personalization: With behavioral segmentation, you can identify pain points in your customer journey. By adding personalization, you can fine-tune your messaging to match customer interests. This extra touch helps push the user further down the sales funnel.
Best-in-Class Segmentation Tools with Campaign Refinery
With Campaign Refinery, you get a powerful, easy-to-use email marketing tool that adapts to your needs.
Our platform gives you cutting-edge features to create segments with maximum impact:
- Effortless tag-based engine: We use tags to build segments, which means no more juggling multiple overlapping lists. And you don’t need to pre-compile anything — just add or remove users whenever it suits their customer journey.
- Audience groups: Our latest feature, Audience Groups, lets you combine multiple non-overlapping segments for a single campaign. No need to duplicate your efforts for each segment.
- Top-Tier deliverability: Our industry-high deliverability ensures your meticulously crafted messages reach your subscribers’ inboxes every time. No more worrying about your emails getting lost in spam folders.
- Flexible automation builder: Our powerful branch and rule automation builder gives you the freedom to create any automation scenario you can imagine. Tailor your campaigns with precision.
- Unlimited contacts: You can manage unlimited contacts without any restrictions on your segmentation capabilities. Segment your audience as finely as you need to, without ever hitting a limit.
Choose Campaign Refinery for an email marketing solution that truly supports effective behavioral segmentation. Apply to join us today!