Marketing isn’t just about reacting to your customers’ behavior. You can now predict their behavior with advanced technology and initiatives.
Predictive analytics is quickly becoming the hottest way to proactively market to consumers on the internet. Businesses use historic data and outcomes to build predictive models that provide information on near-term and long-term customer behavior.
This can provide them with information on a number of things, including:
- How to create the best shopping experience for each customer
- What products customers want now – and will seek in the near future
- How to develop personalized marketing messages
- How to identify and leverage purchasing patterns
- How to create customer profiles
- Which places and channels customers are most likely to see (and purchase) those products
- What the entire consumer cycle looks like
- Ways to improve promotional initiatives
- How to make the customer and the customer experience the main focus of marketing strategies
- How to identify your customers’ switches between each channel and connect their movements and interactions
The Power of Predictive Analytics
Let’s look at a basic example of how predicative analytics can improve a company’s bottom line.
An online retailer may notice that customers who buy a particular diaper pail often return to buy refill bags. That’s useful information, but predicative analytics can take it even further. The business can seek to predict:
- Exactly which customers are likely to return
- After what length of time they are likely to make the purchase
- What other products these customers may also buy at that time
- How often they will make repeat purchases of those refills
This empowers the company to reach out directly to the customers most likely to purchase when they are most likely to purchase and more effectively upsell related items.
This can improve the number of conversions as well as the average order value. It also means more targeted promotions and personalized messaging.
More complex predictive analytics can provide insight on price elasticity, the development of trends, how to address seasonability, and performance of multiple channels.
Putting Predictive Analytics to Work
Predictive analytics can give you a deeper look into where your customers are going to interact with your brand, and what will make them purchase your products or respond to your calls to action.
But it’s often hard for businesses to keep track of behaviors through all of the different channels they are using, and the reason is obvious: there’s more information to organize and more complex data to sort out.
Ecommerce data management platforms like GoDataFeed ease the process by unifying your analytics from multiple shopping channels into one dashboard and...
- streamlining the process of data collection
- monitoring cost and sales data
- alerting you to changes in performance
- automatically taking action based on performance thresholds
Beyond using the right software, predictive analytics requires that you build the right team. The technical personnel to crunch the numbers, spot the trends, and create the models. And the marketing personnel to contextualize the data, provide insight into customer intent, and translate that into marketing initiatives.
Implementing predictive analytics now will set you and your company up for consumer-driven success in the future. Be at the forefront of marketing strategies by using predictive analytics to back up your decisions through all of your different shopping channels.
Bryan Falla
Bryan is a digital marketer with roots in journalism and creative writing. Over the past decade, he's helped hundreds of online retailers develop and implement ecommerce marketing strategies. When he isn't educating retailers on ecommerce, he's out exploring South Florida and stalking local breweries.
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