3 Ways Predictive Analytics Can Improve Your Email Marketing

by Maria Bashi · Sep 14, 2019

In a time when everyone is bombarded with emails, how do you make your email marketing campaigns stand out? Improve your customer relationships and increase sales with predictive analytics.

We’re here to tell you that predictive analytics is the answer to your email marketing dilemma. Predictive analytics provides you with a way to mine the mass amount of data you have about your customers. It then helps you to identify areas of improvement and opportunity in your current email marketing campaigns.

From understanding where your customers are in the buyer’s journey to identifying the content and deals they want for you, predictive analytics can do it all. In this article, we’ll discuss three ways that predictive analytics can improve your email marketing campaigns to build better customer relationships and increase sales.

Here’s a quick look at what we’ll cover.

How to improve customer relationships by creating nurturing campaigns based on the information learned from predictive analytics
Identify areas of opportunity for increased sales by understanding the products your customers are purchasing and may purchase in the future
Improving customer experiences by curating content based on their past behaviors and interests

Improving Customer Relationships with Nurturing Campaign

Predictive analytics can help you build a better relationship with your customers by improving nurturing campaigns. Tracking the actions and shopping behaviors of every one of your customers to understand where they are in the buyer’s journey is a daunting job for anyone — but with predictive analytics, it becomes feasible.

Not only is it difficult to manage the sheer volume of customer information, for it to be valuable to your email marketing programs, but it must also be accurate and real-time data. Meaning that when someone made a new purchase or shopping behavior changes, you need to know right away.

With predictive analytics, you can do this. Once you have the data and understand how your customers are interacting and purchasing with your site, there are a number of different nurturing campaigns that you can segment your customers into to improve customer relationships and boost sales.

Lead nurturing tops the list for the most valuable feature of a marketing automation system. These types of programs are helping businesses everywhere to reach the right customers at the right time and serve them the content they need based on where they fall in the sales cycle. Predictive analytics makes this process even more effective.

Here are a few examples of nurturing campaigns you can implement with the help of predictive analytics.

Welcome campaigns:

A new customer has made a purchase from your store, you can send them welcome emails. These campaigns can simply thank customers for shopping and may even provide a coupon or incentive to come back and purchase more. With predictive analytics, you can determine which new customers to send coupons and discounts based on their onsite behavior and purchase amounts.

Welcome campaigns can be very simple, but very effective when trying to bring customers back to their website. Check out this example is thanking someone for signing up for an email subscription and offering a discount for them to continue shopping on their website.

Loyalty campaigns:

For your frequent shoppers, a loyalty campaign may be just what you need to increase sales. With the data collected through predictive analytics, you can determine what customers are your most loyal and have a higher spending value. You can then provide them with extra loyalty incentives and discounts.

Loyalty programs will provide your frequent customers with a reason to keep coming back. The more incentives they receive the more likely they will return to your store and purchase more products.

Retention campaigns:

We all know there comes a time where some of our previous customers become inactive. Having insight into their behavior will allow you to know when they are becoming more distant and have not visited your site or made purchases in a while. This allows you to try and win them back before they have gone completely inactive.

Retention emails are a great way to reach out to customers before losing them to an inactive status. This example on Crazy Egg is a simple reminder that this user still needs to install Dropbox on their computer, they may be trying to reach the customer before they have moved onto another program.

Of course, these are only a few of the many nurturing campaigns you can develop. But it all goes back to having the data and ability to segment your customer base with real-time analytics.

Identify Areas to Increase Sales

Email marketing is the perfect outlet to increase sales through product recommendations and upselling. The data that is available with the help of predictive analytics allows you to better target customers with these types of promotions.

By analyzing not only what people are purchasing, but also what they may come back for a few days or weeks later is the key to increasing sales through product recommendations and upselling tactics. It gives you the opportunity to provide customers with insight into a purchase they may not even realize they needed yet.

Product recommendations and upselling to current customers is very important when it comes to increasing sales. You’re much more likely to sell to an existing customer than a new customer. Why not provide them with a better experience and give them product recommendations that they want?

For example, if you know that customers who purchase a new video game system often come back for a second controller, why not proactively send them an email with the items they may need in addition to that original purchase? This not only provides you with another touchpoint but also may provide the customer with a better experience by serving them exactly what they needed.

This example is showing a customer some beauty products they may be interested based on their past purchasing. It pulls in great personalization tactics, look at the products at the bottom “for your green eyes only”, “your light complexion perfector”, “your oily skin solutions”. A great way to use the data you have on your customers to make them feel unique.

Personalized Content For a Better Customer Experience

This last way to improve your email marketing takes the steps of email personalization that we’ve already talked about but builds on it a step further. Having the ability to collect data from your customers provides you with the ability to personize the email content you send to customers like never before.

The product recommendation example we discussed above is a great instance of this. The company took all the information they knew about the customer, their eye color and skin tone for example. Then they’ll target the email directly to their needs. If this level of personalization doesn’t provide a great customer experience.

People positively react to personalized content. Check out these open rates that show that personalization goes a long way in email marketing. The better you know your customers and can understand the data you have at hand, the more likely you are to reach your customers.

But with predictive analytics, it doesn’t stop there. You have the ability to not only know the purchasing behavior and how they interact with your site — you can also begin to collect information on what their interests and hobbies are to connect on a deeper level.

A very simple, yet effective way to reach your customers on a personalized level. People love to receive birthday deals. Here’s an example of one that does a great job at saying happy birthday and trying to bring the customer back to their website to start this new year off in style.

Then, you can test different content and determine what works best for your customers. The data you collect throughout the process of trial and error will allow you to hone in on exactly what content to serve your customer, when, and how. This will, in turn, lead to increased email conversions and sales. A win-win for any email marketing program.

Predictive Analytics and Your Email Marketing

If you aren’t already taking advantage of the benefits that come along with predictive analytics, now’s the time to start. Chances are you already have all the data you need to create an amazing email marketing experience for your customers. You just need to be able to understand it.

Email marketing isn’t going away and people are bombarded with more and more emails each day. That’s why you need to make sure your emails stand out from the crowd. Predictive analytics can provide you with the competitive edge you need.