How much more effective would your company’s marketing be if you had a crystal ball? Instead of reacting to their purchases, you’d know exactly what your customers want to buy and you’d be able to give it to them.
While clairvoyant crystal balls don’t exist, loyalty marketing trends are quickly shifting from today’s reactionary model (i.e. triggers that respond to purchases, points, etc.). Imagine, instead of sending an email after a product was bought, marketers will know their customers so well they’ll be able to get ahead of their purchases — all thanks to predictive analytics.
The use of predictive analytics is based on the idea that the value of data isn’t about abundance — it’s about intelligence.
Know Your Customers (Better Than They Know Themselves)
By using persona-driven insights, which are (hopefully) already at your fingertips via your loyalty platform, you can create personas to track and analyze your most valuable customer segments. Through the power of A.I. and machine learning, these personas can then be used to create reports, build custom predictive models, and increase personalization within your marketing efforts. This brings an added level of knowledge that helps you identify where customers stand, which can then be used to inform decisions on communication, messaging, the next-best actions, and more.
Make Informed Marketing Decisions (By Reading The Minds of Your Customers)
Getting ahead of the curve with predictive analytics also allows you to make more informed marketing decisions (i.e. strategy, budgeting, and more). By using loyalty data to identify trends (e.g. redemption patterns among certain demographics) you can not only help your bottom line, but also focus marketing efforts to avoid spinning your wheels and get smart, strategic, and forward-looking with planned campaigns.
Give Them What They Want (Before They Know They Want It)
All that aforementioned customer data (which might track back years in some cases) also allows marketers to draw assumptions from previous purchases and forecast what customers are likely to want to buy in the future. That’s a huge step toward strengthening the emotional connections you’ve worked so hard to build with your customers. And most importantly, these informed predictions allow you to act on those “premonitions” and share offers, coupons, and more with your customers for products and services that are perfectly paired with their preferences (even if they don’t know it yet).
As loyalty programs move into the future, predictive analytics might not quite be a crystal ball, but it will be key in keeping you one (or several) steps ahead of your customers. Contact us today to learn the best ways to leverage predictive analytics to keep and create loyal customers.
