Email marketing is 40% times more effective to acquire customers than social media, both Facebook and Twitter combined. Investing more time and effort to deliver the best email marketing is a-must if you don’t want to be out of date. And by far the best way to level up your email marketing is to use predictive analytics.
Predictive Analytics is a technique that uses your past and current data to predict future outcomes and trends. It doesn’t tell you exactly what will happen in the future, but it will forecast what might happen so you can come up with a suitable solution or plan.
In the world of ecommerce, predictive analytics uses your customers’ data which includes: their personas, browsing history, shopping behaviour…and forecasts their future actions, helping you understand them better. It can also give you a deeper look into customer’s long-term value.
Let’s see how predictive analytics can help you level up your email marketing.
1. Acquisition or Activation
After having customers subscribed, what will you do?
- Send welcome email to your customers or even a welcome gift such as a discount code or free shipping to encourage customers to make their first orders.
- Use A/B testing to find out which email is better for sales, in order to optimize the opened rate and decrease the bounce rate.
- Segment customers and send email based on each customer’s persona.
- …
All these hard work and effort are for one purpose only: generating more sales. The fact is that you can always use predictive analytics to simplify all steps. It will help online sellers segment your customers into small groups and build model based on what it learns from them.
Moreover, if you do all the tasks above by yourself, you might be overwhelmed due to the fact that customers’ data must be updated in real time and it’s hard to segment your customers by hand. For example: new & existing customers are two types of customers that require different kind of service and support. You should not send the same email written to a new customer to your loyal one, as it will create unnecessary distance to loyal customer relationship.
With the data you have with predictive analytics, you now know what email is best for which groups, making the most effective combination of welcome email and promotion email. It increases your customers converted rate and increase your first sales orders by 2 to 3 times.
2. Growth
How do you use that list to generate more sales? It’s time to build relationship with your customers and to convert them into loyal ones. However, it’s easier said than done because every store has that same purpose, so the competition is harder than ever.
Predictive analytics is the key to make your wish come true (or at least our wish). It helps you to create personalized emails and use your subscriber list to generate more sales. You want to send your customers emails to remind them of your store and to promote your products, not to spam them so that the better you personalize your email, the better you take our mail away from being spam.
Understand customer behaviors to recommend related products
As we have discussed, predictive analytics builds models based on your customer’s behaviour. From that model, you can forecast what your new visitors would like based on previous customers’ behaviors on your stores. For example, most of your customers who buy a Canon camera will then buy a 8GB memory stick, so you can recommend Ellen – your new customer to buy that memory stick for her new camera. That is how you make she overwhelmed by your service and satisfied with your understanding.
Update and adapt to your customers’ changes
Moreover, predictive analytics can easily get adapted to all customers’ changes from habits, interests, behaviour to personas, which is quite time-consuming if online sellers do it by their own. As it continuously collects customers’ information in real time, it misses nothing about your customers. This may sound creepy but actually it’s necessary.
Analyze and follow-up email
Predictive analytics can collect customers’ data for further analyzation and provide you with each customer’s purchase history. It will help you to know which products they often buy, how often they visit your store or purchase with you, how much they spend each time…With that information, you will know how and when you should send them new email in order to follow up and maintain your relationship with them.
One suggestion of follow-up email is re-order reminder email. For example, the last time Briance buys dog food from you was 2 weeks ago, and it must have run out now. You should consider to send her a new email to offer her to buy one more dog food bag or to promote a new line of healthy dog food that she might be interested in. That is how you can make use of what you learn from your previous customers to your new customers to increase sales and to “tie” customers to your stores.
3. Retention or Reactivation
Predictive analytics can also help you keep your customers active or reactive if they have left.
Keep track of your customers before they become inactive
You shouldn’t wait until customers stop shopping at your store to send them retention email. With predictive analytics, you can tell when customers will purchase next. Based on customers previous buying behaviour and how often customers purchase, you can know when you should click “send” button.
Keep your customers active.
A nice way to do it is to reward your frequent buyers. You can send them thank-you email to show how you appreciate their support and/or a special discount or gift for loyal ones. Your customers now have the reason to stay longer at your store while you have more time to build stronger relationship with them.
Re-engage your customers at the most effective cost
If your customers stop purchasing, it is suggested that you engage them back to your store. With what you know from customers, you can evaluate each customers’ lifetime value and how much they purchased on the past. The fact is that each customer doesn’t have the same value. If you offer 15% discount to a customer who didn’t spend much with you, you suffer lost from the acquisition cost. On the other hand, if you offer 15% discount to a customer who have spent $500 with you, you can earn more from them in the future. Predictive analytics can help you find the suitable discount level where it can help you retarget them with the most effective cost.
Conclusion
With predictive analytics, you can better manage your customer base to increase sales. It’s more powerful than any other technique in terms of building long-term relationship with customers.
What’s better than having customers follow you and become loyal to your brand? It doesn’t exaggerate to say that predictive analytics is the first key to open the gate of new ecommerce trend.
Wanna try predictive analytics now for your email marketing with us? Beeketing can help you do it all with just a simple click to get started.
If you have any questions or need more suggestion, please feel free to contact us.
Recommended for you
