UPDATE: July 25, 2019
Not so long ago, video conferences, smartphones, and all other electronic devices seemed to be special-effect gadgets from the latest science-fiction films. But these devices have now become part of our common daily life. In 2019, it’s crucial for all serious marketers to be proactive as digital marketing evolves rapidly.
Timing is Everything!
Imagine that you are on a business trip. You have been driving for quite a while and start to feel drowsy. Your first reaction is to take your smartphone and search for the closest hotel. But in a very close future, your phone will be able to know that you are far from home and will anticipate when you’ll need a rest and where you can stay. Furthermore, not only will it offer you various options but these accommodation suggestions will take into account your lodging preferences, your budget and the number of rooms available.
Knowing that most people already have a hard time coping with their over-planned and over-booked lifestyle, this new trend clearly demonstrates that timing is more important than ever. Offering personalized content at the right time and through the proper channel is now crucial. So it’s time to start planning automated workflows that will reach your target audience at the time they’re ready to receive your message.
What is predictive marketing?
The principle of predictive marketing lies not only in the data but also in the interpretation of these data. Indeed, it is about investing in a technology that allows you to extract results from data analysis to help you predict your customers’ needs.
In short, it allows you to anticipate the future needs and behaviors of your customers and prospects in terms of purchase intent, based on current or past cumulative data on the same customer or a group of similar customers. A simple analysis of past events is now a thing of the past. With predictive marketing, you’ll be able to identify various scenarios and know their results in advance, so you can choose the best strategy to adopt and seize the best opportunities. The predictive analysis, therefore, helps you make better decisions to achieve a defined objective.
Why should you start doing prediction marketing?
Predictive marketing is actually a much more advanced way of targeting that allows you to send ever more relevant communications to your contacts. As a result, the value of each customer interaction increases significantly, in addition to improving your communication performance and customer relationship. Because with the predictive, you will be able to customize your offers at a higher level, targeting users most likely to be receptive to your content at a specific time, which ultimately results in a better conversion rate.
If we go into more detail, predictive analytics has several major advantages:
- Knowing your clients’ interests
- Be able to adapt in real-time to consumer needs
- Decrease the attrition rate (loss of customers)
- Ensure better inventory management
- Reduce waste of time and money
- Increase sales and therefore a better ROI
How to implement this strategy?
If the ultimate goal of predictive marketing is to achieve a better ROI by increasing the conversion rate, this strategy should not only serve to acquire new customers but also to retain existing ones. To do this, the use of a predictive system can be useful in several contexts:
- The suggestion of more advanced products in e-commerce
- Prediction of the risks of customer loss
- Prediction of purchases
- Detection of future buyers (purchase intentions)
To implement predictive marketing in a company, you must have the necessary technology, namely machine learning. That is an artificial intelligence system with a learning capacity. And even if it is a concept based on classical analysis techniques, algorithms are in fact developed to predict human consumption behaviors more specifically. Indeed, these algorithms are in constant learning to predict the decision-making process of customers as well as their affinities with the product.
The best examples are the giants Google and Amazon, which use predictive marketing for different purposes. In particular, the detailed analysis of our web behavior by Google or our purchases by Amazon. Those who often buy from Amazon probably know what I mean when I say that their product recommendations are often very close to our preferences, so their analysis is very effective. They even go so far as to prepare customer orders before they have even been placed!
Another example you can use is to do as many companies do when using the predictive to offer discounts only to consumers who would never buy without it. This prevents you from spending a lot of money by offering a discount to people who would buy your products even if there were no discounts.
Conclusion
Finally, we now live in an era where relevance is the key to communication. We started with mass communication, then personalized our messages according to personas and now we predict our customers’ behaviors. Each phase of change is shorter than the previous one. The world of technology is changing at a rapid pace and we must be able to adopt these changes quickly in order not to be obsolete in the eyes of consumers.
Predictive marketing is still an advanced technology and can be expensive, but in Quebec, even personalization is not yet mastered by everyone. The prediction could become a great opportunity to be one step ahead of your competitors and improve your customer experience at the same time!
Think about it!
