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.

“Our team optimizes shopping feeds at a granular level – using GoDataFeed – honing every data point that helps determine performance.”
“GoDataFeed's low cost solution provides a single point of integration to optimize, automate and track product feeds.”
“GoDataFeed makes it easy for merchants to market their products on comparison shopping engines and marketplaces.”
“We love GoDataFeed and use it all the time.  It is really simple to integrate GoDataFeed into your website.”
“A multi-pronged marketing endeavor probably seems daunting but it doesn’t have to be. Companies like GoDataFeed exist to help simplify the process.”
“Companies like GoDataFeed provide solutions for managing multiple data feeds. They also automatically upload your feed daily, or even more frequently.”
“Data feed tools automate the process and will undoubtedly save you some energy to tackle larger tasks at hand. Personally, I’ve had good experiences with GoDataFeed.”
“Look at more advanced data feed management tools like GoDataFeed [for] the heavy lifting to get your feed in the right format.”
“GoDataFeed is considered by many to be 'king of the castle' when it comes to data feed tools. It’s integrated with many CSEs in addition to Google Shopping.”