How to get started with Predictive Marketing

Predictive marketing is the future. Literally and figuratively. 

Being able to predict how customer segments behave to alter pages and content accordingly is becoming crucial for great performance.

As a matter of fact, Adobe has stated that 47% of digitally mature organizations have a defined AI strategy. Do you?

Keeping up with automation practices like these allows your business to have more peace of mind and time to dedicate toward other tasks. 

Agencies can begin the journey of implementing predictive marketing much easier than they think, too.

Follow along as we teach you what predictive marketing is and how your company can begin using it today.

Make sure to try Morphio today for free, we offer advanced predictive marketing software.

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What is predictive marketing?

Have you ever spent countless hours and energy figuring out the best strategy for your agency?

Maybe it was marketing, advertising, or client acquisition. You spent heaps of time split testing and running through spreadsheets.

What if I told you that all of that hard work can be done for you and your team?

Yep. All thanks to predictive marketing.

Predictive analytics and marketing are achieved through using machine learning software which offers feedback for the highest converting strategies and channels based on your work.

It looks like this:

Take U.S. Cellular, for example. They are one of the largest telecom companies in the world and needed any understanding of what their retail and online data meant. Have you ever been there before?

That’s why they paired with a predictive marketing company to determine these things:

• What were the highest-grossing revenue streams?
• Which actions helped them achieve them?
• How could they replicate these actions and scale further?

U.S. Cellular’s partner studied the purchase intent of their website, user behavior, service renewals, and other metrics to discover:

• Certain website actions were more predictive of selling than others.
• How to quantify website content and its ROI.
• Having a clear framework with the dollar value of every website action significantly contributed to the company’s bottom line.

The Digital Analytics Manager, Katie Birmingham, said: “Purchase intent research helped us move forward in two ways: showing us the site actions that did lead to offline sales, and definitively showing us which of those actions were most important, in order to help drive our testing efforts.”

This information was then used to achieve a 61% boost in customer lifetime value. If your average client is worth $5,000, that’d be an extra $3,050 in revenue for scale.

Why predictive marketing matters

Now that you know what predictive analytics and marketing are, why does it matter? Why should your agency use it and what are the benefits you’ll gain? Let me explain.

Predictive marketing helps you offer a better user experience

In-depth data from predictive marketing allows agencies to improve the user experience of their website, services, and products.

Marketing campaigns that are customed thanks to predictive marketing will experience up to a 6x transaction rate, as well.

This, as a result, can increase your client’s average lifetime value, the likeliness of referring leads, and satisfaction with your work.

There’s a deeper benefit to predictive advertising, too, and that’s compassion for your customers.

Giving them personalized and tailored experiences help you bring the human element back into business despite everything being deeply digital.

Predictive marketing increases ROI and marketing performance

Understanding how users behave, which channels offer the best ROI, etc creates the opportunity to double-down on the best-performing assets.

This means that your agency can spend more time productively on the channels that matter the most for your business.

The e-commerce company First Book is a great example of this. Struggling to increase engagement and repeat customers, they knew they needed to work smarter, not harder. That’s why they began implementing predictive marketing.

By choosing the right solution, they were able to identify traits of the highest value customer, predict how they behave in sales, and clean databases to become more organized for segmenting.

The result? A 331% increase in repeat sales and 99.7% accuracy in predicting customer spending!

And that’s one of the greatest benefits of forecasting like this: you don’t need any more budget, employees, or campaigns. You simply need to fine-tune existing efforts.

Predictive marketing can optimize omnichannel buyer journeys

Your agency can’t be on one platform. It needs to be on several to maximize reach. 

As a matter of fact, it’s been found that customer retention increases upwards to 66.12% when three or more channels are used.

However, it can be a headache developing strategies for each one. That’s why predictive marketing takes the stress off your shoulders by allowing you to customize buyer journeys on every channel.

For example, you will be able to apply custom calls to action on ads and other material to resonate with specific audiences.

This is crucial because every audience is going to respond and convert differently to messages. Some may respond better to urgency while others respond to benefit-driven copy, for instance.

Furthermore, this same strategy can be applied to landing pages and views based on behavior patterns.

It’s easy to look at it in a complicated way, but really you’re offering content and advertisements that mean more to your customers and are easier to understand. 

3 easy steps to implementing predictive marketing yourself:

We know, we know. You probably think that getting the ball rolling with predictive analytics and marketing is going to be a headache. Far from it when done right, actually.

That’s the whole point of AI and automation: to make running your business easier.

Here are the steps you need to take to start reaping the rewards of predictive analytics.

Step 1. Choose a predictive marketing company

Unless you wish to develop your own machine learning software to reap the benefits of predictive analytics and marketing, you’ll want to find a suitable company that offers it as a service.

This will save you a lot of time, hassle, and helps you jump straight to the results.

A big factor to consider with this form of analytics is that time is everything. The sooner you begin collecting data and optimizing your agency with it, the better.

You can start a free trial with Morphio to experiment with predictive marketing today.

Step 2. Watch the analytics that matter to your business

Every business is different, although there are some universal metrics and channels to observe as you begin using predictive marketing.

These elements include:

1. Cost per acquisition
2. Customer lifetime value (LTV)
3. Website bounce rate
4. Average time spent on page
5. Website sessions
6. Social shares
7. Backlinks

Learn more about these metrics you need to track for your agency’s success in one of our previous articles.

Similarly, you will want to pay attention to which channels are performing better or worse than one another, such as:

1. Organic
2. Social media
3. Email marketing
4. PPC

You will be able to narrow all of these down further, such as discovering LinkedIn is better than Twitter of Google Ads performs over Instagram Ads, for example.

That brings me to the last step.

Step 3. Optimize with your new data

You look at the dashboard and there are tons of new data. Now what? Time to put it into action!

Depending on what tools you integrated and how you set up your dashboard, you will now have predictions for what to do and not to do.

I suggest that you begin putting more time and energy into the channels and strategies that predictive marketing helped discover are the most effective.

Furthermore, all of this information should be shared with your team so they know how to move forward.

For example, you may have them focus more on specific social networks, SEO keywords, or types of content with your new discoveries.

Since predictive analytics software is a form of machine learning, you will want to keep constant tabs as it finds anomalies and new insights for you to capitalize on, as well.

Make sure to read our blog post on why every agency needs to use anomaly detection while you’re at it.

Wrapping up predictive marketing

Using predictive marketing could be one of the smartest investments you make for your agency.

It will help you make better business decisions, improve productivity, and ultimately grow at a faster rate.

Predictive marketing takes your existing campaigns and data, find patterns, and makes forecasts you can leverage to speed up performance.

While it can be tempting to develop your own software, it can take months. 

Start a free trial with Morphio to see how our marketing solution can help you start with predictive analytics.