How to get the most out of Predictive Analytics

Retaining customers and converting them into loyal customers is the silver bullet of business. Especially in industries like eCommerce and sports betting and gaming. But it’s almost impossible to execute a retention strategy without any insight into your audience. Predictive analytics is a good step towards understanding what can make your customer tick in the future.

With choice at an all time high, earning loyalty can be hard, not least because customers don’t like it when businesses try. So the more understanding you have the more value you can add early on.

It takes a serious understanding of your customers, their wants, needs, and behaviours to stand out from the crowd. But now you need to if you want to compete in crowded and competitive markets.

However predictive analytics can be a strange thing for businesses to get their head around and integrate into their campaigns.

Getting the most out of predictive analytics means that you can foresee the outcomes of your campaigns early on. Then, make decisions so that their performance is the best it can be.

As with any campaign you carry out, you can’t go in blind and expect results. It’s all about the work you put in at the start that makes everything go smoothly throughout and deliver.

Understand your Challenges

In the last few years, industries across the world have experienced a lot of change. This has been largely down to the pandemic accelerating trends or, in some cases, changing buyer behaviour altogether. 

Businesses are faced with a choice. Innovate or die. 

Emphasis on Multichannel Experiences

Customers who use multiple channels to shop are thought to have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who only use one. This is a sign of how consumer behaviour is changing.

Your communication strategy has to include every touchpoint your customers engage with now or you will lose out. You can’t afford to ignore the ways in which your customers prefer to interact or communicate with your brand. 

Excellent experiences for customers across all channels is where you need to perform and put weight towards. Other companies are already doing it. So if you’re not, then you need to catch up.

Data Silos

Providing the experience customers expect starts with how you treat and use your data. With so many channels on offer, it can be easy for your data to become siloed.

You will run into difficulty if your data isn’t stored in one place. The same generic message sent down every channel will annoy customers. Storing your data in one place can help you feed more personalised messages down the different channels you provide.

Define your Goals

Creating any marketing campaign should begin with defining what you want to get out of it. If you don’t define any goals you can’t know if it worked. It might seem like an obvious place to begin, but businesses don’t do it enough. 

Predictive analytics can help you to visualise your future outcomes. Defining your objectives can help you tailor your marketing activity and help your predictive analytics performance. 

You need to have a clear understanding of what your campaign means for your business and what it will deliver.

It could be sales, sign ups, downloads, or growing your audience on social media. 

Predictive analytics can answer some of the questions that you might ask yourself as a business, such as:

• Which of my products will have the highest demand by the end of the month?
• What customers are likely to churn?
• Which customers are the most likely to stay loyal after the holiday season?

There is a variety of data you can use to help you get to your answer. Use historic data to help you understand customer behaviour in certain situations.

Maximise your Data 

Using plenty of data to inform your campaigns and increase performance of predictive analytics efforts is necessary. However, don’t go too overboard with the amount you use. You may shoot yourself in the foot.

Creating measurable, successful campaigns requires actionable data. You need to get into the practice of breaking down your data sets to make them more manageable. Without doing this, there will be far too much to go through and individual insights can go missing.

To make data more manageable, try breaking it down like this:

• Define your ideal audience/customer persona
• Define what they want, or need from you

Dig into these profiles and uncover more details. Get to know your customers, including demographics, their behaviours and interactions with you. You can even start to uncover what help they are looking for from you.

Once you have broken your data down into smaller, more digestible sets, you can start to uncover patterns much more easily. You might use predictive analytics to discover how often a particular customer, or set of customers, use your website or app.

You might discover more about how customers behave in the lead up to a purchase. Maybe they visit certain pages, search for specific things, or visit your customer service page. This can help you identify potential purchasers down the line and you can respond in the best way possible. Generally, this would pose an opportunity for an upsell or to spark a campaign that can nudge them further towards making a purchase.

It’s up to you to decide what that might be. But with predictive analytics providing the insights, whatever action you take should be well received.

Improve Customer experience

The experience the customer has with your business is what will either keep them with you or drive them away. The better the experience, the more likely they are to become a loyal customer.

Every conversation and every interaction you have with them is an opportunity to understand them better. You need to take this information and add it to their customer profile. You should be aware of the content they download, the offers they click on, the channels they prefer. Knowing this builds up a really in depth view of the customer.

Predictive analytics can be used here to identify browsers that would be worth your time concentrating on. Perhaps you have identified that your best repeat customers browse your website at least four times a week. If someone has browsed this amount of times and still hasn’t made a purchase, you can create messaging that might nudge them in that direction. They would be quite likely to follow through with a purchase after this nudge. This is down to your knowledge of how your browsers behave before making a purchase.

By applying the data and understanding that you have on your most valuable customers, you can identify prospects that have the same potential. Turning them from browsers, into purchasers, and maybe loyal customers somewhere down the line.

Use Marketing Automation tools

To provide the ultimate user and customer experience, you need to exceed customer expectations. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.

Basic marketing automation platforms can help you apply basic information to your messages. A customer’s name, birthday, company, etc is all well and good, but to achieve long term success you need to go much deeper.

Using a marketing automation platform will give you the tools to go that step further. You can segment and personalise the content you send. But also send communications that address the customer’s wants and needs.

It’s also all about being as quick as possible in getting in front of the customer. Your messages should respond to an action in almost milliseconds. 

Identifying the right channel to send them through is very important as well. Having this understanding means that your messages won’t get missed. There is no point in sending an offer through email to someone who never looks at them.

Overall, use predictive analytics to gain that actionable insight into your customers and prospects. Then use a marketing automation platform to apply those actions and deliver campaigns that will really interest the receiver.

Don’t Give Up

Just like it is with a lot that happens in business, you will rarely get it 100% right the first time. The same goes when it comes to predictive analytics and how you weave it into your campaigns.

It’s a tough task to predict exactly how your customers and prospects will act. Unless you have a crystal ball, it’s unlikely you’ll get your predictions exactly accurate.

But, applying some predictive analytics practices to your data knowledge can get you pretty close.

If you want to know more about how Xtremepush can help you apply predictive analytics to your marketing campaigns and deliver exceptional messages, book a demo with a member of our team today.