Email campaigns should be created to generate interest and revenue, right? No one wants to create emails that are just shouting product information and CTAs into the void. One of the most effective ways to spark a recipient’s interest is to use predictive intelligence and predictive personalization in your email marketing.
What is Predictive Intelligence and Personalization?
Have you ever noticed that many sites feature a “picked for you” or “you recently viewed” section on their website? If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, go visit Amazon and you will see it pretty quickly after doing a few searches and then visiting their home page. This is predictive technology that allows the website to capture data from your searches and clicks and then translate that into helpful links, collections, CTAs and more.
This technology can be used in your advertising and marketing as well. If you’ve ever received a cart reminder or noticed a banner on Google prompting you to look at items you just viewed a day or hour ago, then you’ve seen predictive personalization marketing campaigns.
How Can Predictive Intelligence be Used in Email Marketing?
There are both simple and complicated ways to use predictive personalization in your marketing campaigns. What you choose to use will depend on how much data you want to gather and how specific you want to market to your leads or consumers post-purchase.
Market Segmentation
Let’s start with the most basic part of predictive personalization and the part that every single company should be doing: segmenting their recipients. Don’t send out the same emails to your entire list every time. Predictive intelligence can help you divide your audience by location, demographics, website navigation (what they are interested in, or how often the browse), past purchases and more.
By breaking down your list into small clusters, you can better reach your audience and avoid spamming them with emails that are not relevant. When surveyed, 86% of marketers say they use personalization to segment, but a Forrester Consulting study also found that most marketers only go as deep as basic customer data and do not gather behavioral or preference information.
Send Abandoned Cart Reminders
Abandoned cart emails generate an average of over $36 in revenue per click, which is higher than any other predictive email campaign, but only 15% of marketers sent out abandoned cart emails in 2014 (Salesforce, 2014 Predictive Intelligence Benchmark Report).
This is a big deal. When someone leaves your site without completing their purchase, do you nudge them to return? Now, it is important you don’t take this too far. Groupon has a bad little habit of doing far more than a nudge. If you put anything into your cart there, you might notice that you will get several emails about your cart and asking if you still want the deal. One, maybe two, is plenty. But, not sending out a reminder is losing a huge opportunity to pick up additional revenue.
Post-Purchase Care
Predictive technology can also help you support your customers after purchase. Many marketers and company leaders are so concerned with new leads and conversion, that they forget to nurture the leads they already have. So much of the initial work is already done with your customer base – they have made a choice to purchase from you, moving through the entire sales funnel!
If you aren’t already doing so, you should be using predictive personalization to reach out to your customers. Send them tutorials or accessories that are relevant to their purchase. Send out a thank you email. Remember, the days and months following purchase, your customer is still evaluating your policies and products to form their view of your brand.
