What Is Behavioral Marketing? Guide 2026

To help cut through the jargon, Lotame has created an Adtech Glossary for an easy-to-use guide to understanding all of the current advertising and programmatic abbreviations that exist within today’s digital ecosystem. In today’s attention economy, guessing who your audience is or what they care about is not just outdated—it’s risky. Receive the latest thought leadership, tips, and trends to make your business Data Empowered. Ready to try it out and start presenting personalized ads to your audiences? When you publish content to reach users on a personalized level after they have demonstrated specific interest, you can improve the cost-effectiveness of your advertising, saving both energy and resources.

Tracking which items are abandoned often helps shape upsell, urgency messaging, or retargeting strategies. For example, if users hover over a “Size Guide” link but do not click, maybe it’s too small or unhelpful. FigPii session recording session to identify user behavior (Source) Session recordings like this help identify attention drop-off points and test areas for improving on-page retention.

Retargeting platforms, web personalization tools, and analytics software complete the stack by enabling real-time behavioral targeting and measurement. Customer data platforms (CDPs) are the foundation for behavioral marketing, collecting and unifying customer behavior across channels. Behavioral marketing typically delivers higher ROI than traditional broad-based marketing because it targets users who have already shown interest in your products or services.

For example, a customer’s last order and location can shape what they see next, creating messages that feel timely and relevant to their current context. Here, communication via email or other messaging happens in direct response to customer activity. The aim is to bring people back into the journey, not start the conversation again from scratch. Behavioral cues—like items left in a cart, unfinished forms, or repeated visits—help brands identify intent and follow up with relevant marketing messages. Dynamic content adapts in real time, showing different products or services, messages, or visuals depending on each person’s actions.

Lars Lofgren, co-founder and chief growth officer of performance marketing agency Stone Press, stresses the importance of knowing the behavioral data points that drive value for your company. Search behavior is a valuable data point for marketers because it can indicate consumer intent to buy products. Apps like Frequently Bought Together use behavioral data to suggest products customers are likely to find interesting.

Whether you’re just getting started with behavioral data or looking to refine a mature strategy, these seven steps offer a clear framework for putting customer insights into action—ethically and effectively. According to HubSpot's 2025 State of Marketing report, 77% of high-performing marketers say behavioral data is their top personalization asset. With this data and the right platform, organizations can drive growth and revenue, activating known and unknown first-party customer data and informing personalization for the greatest impact. Through improved engagement, they can also identify audiences at a particular moment in the buying process, which provides businesses the opportunity to further engage them by offering their products and services to them. Research provides insights into how companies serve customers and approaches for measuring the impact of marketing efforts. As consumers increasingly expect tailored experiences from brands, it’s essential for marketers to prioritize personalization and transparency in their strategies.

This allows you to show relevant offers to your audience based on the day they visit, location, and the content they view. With Optinmonster’s drag-and-drop pop-up building, creating a dynamic text for personalization is easy as shown below. Optinmonster uses the Smart Tags feature to help businesses personalize websites with useful content that will increase users’ engagement and conversions. HubSpot has different personalization options in its marketing hub. Segment is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and so it uses pixel to track info. With Sailthru, you can create a customer profile with behavioral data to deliver personalized experiences for your customers and increase your conversions.

Netflix tracks what users watch, skip, pause, and finish. Each example shows how brands used real user actions to shape messaging, experience, and results. Behavioral marketing works best when buyer actions are analyzed through the lens of consumer behavior. Without consumer behavior insights, behavioral data can be misleading. Understanding consumer behavior helps marketers interpret these actions correctly. These actions reflect consumer behavior in real time.

Behavioral marketing in action

For general feedback, use the public comments section below (please adhere to guidelines). Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page. Social media influencers significantly impact marketing and consumer behavior, but they also pose ethical, psychological, and regulatory challenges. The content is provided for information purposes only. With influencer marketing projected to reach an estimated $480 billion by 2027, companies increasingly rely on SMIs to Behavioral marketing promote products and foster consumer trust. A recent study by the University of Portsmouth systematically examines the negative impacts of SMIs, highlighting issues such as misinformation, endorsement of dangerous products, unrealistic beauty standards, the fostering of a comparison culture, deceptive consumption, and privacy risks.

Rather than provide a few examples, however, I will also share the best tools you can use to get started in behavioral marketing. Then, marketers use behavioral segmentation to target specific consumers based on the actions they take. Companies collect customer behavior data from channels they own or through partnerships with other companies.

How Behavioral Marketing Enhances Customer Experience

Behavioral marketing allows businesses to track and measure consumers’ behavior from the moment they enter a website up to the point of purchase. Salesmate’s reporting tools provide detailed insights into customer behavior, helping you identify trends and optimize your segmentation strategy. Customer loyalty segmentation helps measure and understand customer loyalty levels, enabling businesses to target repeat customers effectively. Yes, by integrating offline data, such as in-store purchase data or loyalty program information, with online behavioral data, businesses can gain insights and optimize marketing strategies for offline channels.

• Salesmate’s reporting tools provide detailed insights into customer behavior, helping you identify trends and optimize your segmentation strategy.
• Small and medium-sized businesses can leverage this approach to better understand customer preferences, optimize marketing efforts, and stay competitive without needing extensive resources.
• This underscores the commercial impact of personalization derived from understanding consumer behavior.
• Gain deep insights into how your audience interacts with each visual element—tracking clicks, shares, watch times, and more.
• The platform brings customer data together across channels, interprets it instantly, and uses those insights to deliver personalized messages that meet people where they are.

Choose Lotame to Manage the Data for Your Behavioral Targeting Ads

A first-time visitor sees different messaging than a repeat buyer. Behavioral marketing lets you respond to each person based on what they've done, not just who they are. Your approach should be tailored to your company’s size and lead volume, leveraging behavioral data and technology while maintaining simplicity. Aimee Savran recommends using “lightweight scoring frameworks as directional guides, not strict gatekeepers.” This prevents scoring systems from becoming rigid barriers that block potentially valuable relationships.

Match lead scoring & messaging to buyer stages

Behavioral marketing data helps you to create personalized content for your customers so that you can reach them at the right time with the right message. Personalization and behavioral marketing is a brilliant match that can skyrocket your business to another level. Use behavioral data to drive customer growth and expansion

By clicking the button below, you consent for NP Digital and partners to use automated technology, including pre-recorded messages, cell phones and texts, and email to contact you at the number and email address provided. Visibility does not start on your website anymore.… Use A/B testing on different behavioral segmentation to see what customers respond to. An ad promoting the fuel efficiency of the Toyota Prius targets consumers looking for ways to reduce their impact on the environment. You may not think that something as simple as the websites you visit can reveal anything about you on a physical level, but you’d be surprised.

On their website, they provided different categories of interest and ask their visitors to choose the one they want. This makes it easy to retarget website visitors, upload the email list of companies and integrate your CRM tool with the platform. Here is a step-by-step guide to Facebook Custom Audiences. Facebook provides a feature for behavioral targeting in the Facebook Ads Manager.