Who your customers are and the content they’re responding to should also be analyzed consistently. Predictive analytics provides customer insight needed to establish lasting relationships and brand longevity. Let’s discuss the basics of predictive analytics and how it can improve your email marketing strategy. We’ll then touch on its influence on building relationships with your customers.
What Is Predictive Analytics?
According to Gartner, 75% of enterprises will move from testing to deploying artificial intelligence to their analytics infrastructures.
Predictive analytics is becoming increasingly popular for use in marketing campaigns. Customer retention and acquisition are most important to brand loyalty. So, it is imperative to use analytical data to craft strategies that keep and attract customers.
Identify Customer Interests and Predict Future Behavior
Predictive analytics identifies customer interests and predicts their future behavior. The use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistical algorithms helps the analytical process. Leveraging this data also helps to guide any necessary strategy changes. Information is gathered around:
- Buying behavior
- Brand loyalty
- Customer acquisition and retention
- Website activity and browsing behavior
- Social media interactions
- Email engagement
- Strength of online presence
- Content marketing strategies
- Success of communication techniques
Use Data to Understand Your Customers Better
Navigating customer data successfully means a better understanding of what resonates with customers. You can also create branded content that invokes a response or decision. By following a predictive analytics method, you can:
- Examine how visitors/subscribers become customers and remain engaged with your brand.
- Generate suggestions for the most successful customer acquisition and retention strategies.
- Study customer profiles and buying patterns.
- Recommend products or services most relevant to specific groups of subscribers.
- Segment your subscriber list based on similar interests, demographics, and purchasing behaviors.
You’re able to use the collected data to predict future behavior and craft specific marketing strategies for your target audience. Predictive analytics tells the story of who your customers are. You should use that story as the foundation for your relationship with them. Predicting customer behavior through data isn’t an exact science. Business owners can meet their customers where they’re at in their buyer’s journey, feeding them content that nurtures them into a loyal brand relationship.
With predictive analytics, you are responsible for collecting the correct customer data and interpreting and processing that data. You can develop strategies for deeper customer relationships, increased sales, and communication opportunities. Predictive analytics also help uncover patterns, correlations, and trends that humanize the data. This allows business owners an opportunity to create smarter marketing campaigns with emotion and real-world influence.
Predictive Analytics Can Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
Having a better understanding of your subscribers will power effective email marketing campaigns. That includes their likes, dislikes, engagement behavior, and content/product/service needs. Intelligent business owners effectively analyze data science and statistics.
Email marketing campaigns use data to solve real-world problems for their customers. Predictive analytics influence smarter selling strategies and deeper connections with email subscribers and website visitors.
Here are some ways predictive analytics can improve your email marketing strategy:
Recognizing Customers as Individuals and Understanding Their Interests
Predictive analytics recognizes your customers as individuals. It ensures you’re building a relationship with them based on who they are versus what you’re trying to sell to them. It groups your email subscribers based on similar interests, needs, and values. Smart segmentation allows you to create relevant content for your subscribers. It also allows you to stay organized and on top of how to best interact with your subscribers.
Tracking KPIs Relevant to Your Email Marketing Goals
If you want to track how often subscribers are opening your emails or what links their clicking on, it’s important to use predictive analytics. They will ensure you’re tracking the right Key Performance Indicators. You can make the right shifts in your strategy. This results in a better email response, clickthrough rate, and conversions.
Predicting Future Buying Behavior Based on Engagement
You can use the data gathered around subscriber engagement to predict future buying behavior. For example, suppose a subscriber is constantly clicking links about virtual personal training classes you offer. In that case, you can use this data to send them information on upcoming courses and offer specialized discounts to get them to use the service more frequently.
Engaging Subscribers With a Personalized Content Experience
Offering valuable content that addresses the right-now needs of your customers is probably the most valuable part of predictive analytics. Predictive analytics can identify your subscribers’ specific interests and values to improve the personalized email content experience for future campaigns. The collected data will allow you to do things like:
- Identify the best ways to re-engage unproductive subscribers.
- Save a sale or subscriber by offering a personalized discount or shopping experience.
- Feed subscribers relevant discounts and sales offers based on their recent purchases.
- Provide subscribers with knowledge and information around relevant products/services in your business.
Identifying Any Gaps in Communication
Predictive analytics can show you where your communication lacks with your subscribers. It can also help you establish a safe space for subscribers to offer feedback on how your brand’s engagement techniques work. Predictive analytics can help you thoroughly answer communication questions like:
- Are we engaging with loyal subscribers with the same level of enthusiasm we do with new subscribers?
- Are we providing equally yoked content for both segments of our subscribers?
- Are we taking too long between email sends or not enough time?
- Are we Identifying opportunities to upsell and cross-sell products/services?
- Are we crafting campaigns that speak to the emotions of our subscribers?
- Are they using the reply-to email effectively?
- Are we using CTAs that resonate with our subscribers?
- Are we creating a conversation with them over email versus pushing a sales agenda?
- What are our most pertinent customer service issues, and how are we handling them via email?
- Are our email response times appropriate and consistent? If not, how is it affecting our email marketing strategy?
Any email marketing strategy should use some variation of predictive analytics to ensure you’re taking full advantage of connection. Without predictive analytics, you’re likely to overlook important data that could improve customer retention and lasting brand loyalty. Being able to predict the future buying behavior of customers, provide new visitors with tailored content, and design strategies based on specific interests, values, and needs gives you a significant advantage over your competitors.
Predictive Analytics Is Important for Building Relationships
So many businesses neglect just how important it is to build authentic customer relationships. Relationships that aren’t solely focused on selling them a product or service. Customers want to feel valued and appreciated even if they aren’t able to make a purchase. They want to know you don’t see them as another sales opportunity, subscriber on your email list, or follower on social media. Predictive analytics can help you go above and beyond customer expectations. They allow you to deliver an experience for them that sets you apart from your competition.
Show Subscribers You Care
Based on the data gathered through predictive analytics, you can provide a valuable, personalized email experience for subscribers. Show your subscribers that you care about them by offering content that fits their needs and interests. That you’re interested in who they are as a person. Customers are more likely to build lasting relationships with brands that personalize the experience.
Find out who your audience is through the:
- Links they’re clicking on
- Images they’re saving
- Event information they’re requesting
- Responses they’re sending in
- When they visit your website or open your emails
- Products/services they’re engaging with
- Identifying precisely what their opening and clicking on
- Tracking abandoned carts
- Social media pages they’re visiting
An Opportunity to Build Relationships
Predictive analytics offers a better brand experience with the right content at the right time. Find ways to build your relationships by being gracious and attentive to customer needs. Don’t be afraid to deepen customer relationships by offering resources outside of your brand. Focus on helping solve the pain points identified in predictive analytics.
From the first interaction with your brand to completing a purchase, predictive analytics can give you a base for interacting with a customer. Also, how to continue interacting with them most productively. Predictive analytics can help you nurture customers in every step of the buyer’s journey.
Building customer relationships by going above and beyond is vital to the longevity of any brand or business. Predictive analytics offers pools of information about a customer that otherwise wouldn’t be available. Actively and attentively tracking specific information helps keep customers engaged and active throughout their time with your brand.
Wrapping Up
As we mentioned, predictive analytics is becoming more and more essential to your entire marketing strategy. But, what’s the big deal? Don’t other analytics methods promise the same thing?
Like many analytics methods, predictive analytics identifies specific historical information about your customer’s needs, values, and interests. The big difference with predictive analytics is machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation can figure out faster and with more precision (than humans can) what data can and should be leveraged to improve engagement.
That means you can drastically improve your email marketing results by being more accurate (and quicker) at predicting what emails your audience segments will likely open.
Featured image by Tumisu on Pixabay.
by Ahoy
