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Out of the 4 bases we discussed in the last post - Segmenting by behaviour is the most important and most widely used. Reason is very simple - Segmenting by age or location can have less effect than segmenting by the consumers behaviour with regard to the product. What usually happens is segmenting by behaviour follows with a demographic and geographic segmentation.

Segmenting by behaviour has 2 main areas.

1. Benefit segmentation

Seperating by the benefits sought by the consumers.

Offline example - Micromax mobile segmented a part of mobile phone users who wanted their mobile to have long lasting battery without recharging (Because they didn't have electricity). Micromax came up with X2i - a phone that reduced Nokia market share from 62% to 50%.

2. Usage segmentation

Segmenting by how they use the internet.

There are several interesting ways to segment.

1. Access speed

People access internet through dial up, broadband or their mobile internet connections. The varying speed of these effect their behaviour. For e.g. Only a broadband user will watch videos or download videos.

Article by Chamath Palihapitiya - Vice President (User growth, mobile and international) of Facebook said more than 100 million users now login to Facebook through their mobile.

2. Time online

Users can be separated to 6 different parts based on the time they spend online & their activity. They are

• Simplifiers - Use internet for a specific task
• Surfers - Comes online to see whats new
• Connectors - Comes online to connect with communities..etc
• Bargainers - Comes online to find good deals
• Routiners - Comes online primarily for content
• Sportsters - Same like routiners, But comes online for Sports & Entertainment mainly

You can build up your own segmenting by behaviour method using your industry specific behaviours. For e.g. A Car web site owner classified his site visitors as

• Explorers - Buy vehicle within 2 months of visits to the site
• Off-roaders - Lot of site visits, But buy offline
• Cruisers - Visits often. Buy rarely, but convince others to buy

Next post we will discuss some cool ways of target marketing online.