Let’s dive in…

By interacting with your predictive segments in the right way, you’ll be able to nudge them into making a purchase decision, it’s as simple as that. That could be converting a prospect into a first time purchaser, a single purchaser into a second purchaser or preventing a customer from lapsing. Your company’s objectives will really drive where you begin.

The data you hold in your database is incredibly valuable. If you don’t already know, work out how much each email address is worth to you, both with and without email marketing permissions. This is important to understand, particulary when trying to decide if investment in predictive modelling is right for you. If you can convert more of those prospects you spent lots of money acquiring, then you’ve got to be on to a winner!

What do I do once the predictive models have done the hard work?

Let’s say you’re presented with a data segment of prospects who are highly likely to make their first purchase. What do you do with them? It’s time to create a targeted, automated journey to nurture your prospects through to a first purchase. Don’t get caught up on just sending an email though, think about all customer journey touch points, such as a social extract to Facebook or Google Adwords (which is why knowing your email address worth, both with and without permit, is important). Or use website personalisation to present your prospects with content that is relevant to their recent browing behaviour. If you have an app consider push messaging or send an SMS (yes, SMS can be intrusive and expensive for marketing purposes, but if you’ve got a targeted segment with a relevant message, this should drastically reduce the impact of these barriers). The same goes for direct mail, we receive much less post nowadays so it can have a great impact, but consider leaving it until the end of your journey to keep costs down.

I’ve had a go at mapping out an example of an automated journey flow that could help you to convert your segment of prospects, who are highly likely to make their first purchase.

How do I go about creating a journey like this?

Well, I started by putting together a list of the channels I have available to me. I took into consideration the cost and type of content I wanted to serve at each stage of the journey, to determine the most suitable channel. Using methods such as data insight, I understood my likely customer response time to making their first purchase and used that to determine what the optimum timings were for my follow up campaigns.

You’ll need to involve your content and design teams to understand what assets need creating, in what format and how quickly they can be delivered. You may have a separate social, push messaging, SMS or DM team to involve too.

Use the data you hold for your prospects wisely. Did you only ask for a first name at the point of data capture? If you have, starting communications with “Dear Mr/Mrs [[firstname]]” will instantly turn off your prospects. How about using agile content to draw their name in sand if they’re browsing holidays for example. If you’ve captured that they have a preference for European holidays, include content on deals for breaks in Europe. Or, if you have no preferences recorded, but you know they browsed a holiday to Disneyworld, Florida – get that picture of Micky Mouse in there.

The results!

You’ve done it! You’ve created a joined up, multi-channel communication to your prospects who are highly likely to make their first purchase with you. What’s more, these messages will be timely, relevant and personalised. Yes it will take time, but once it’s automated, it’s up and running, there’s not much left to do. The joy of marketing automation!

What you want to see with your marketing automation is something like the following results:

That is 25% of your revenue coming from just 2% of your automated campaigns – the ones you don’t have to do anything with, day in day out! It is worth mentioning that you will need more than this one prospect conversion automated programme live to get this 2%!

Within the prospect conversion predictive model there is also a low likelihood segment to consider. Treat these guys pretty much exactly the same way in terms of a flow and channels, but you may find you need to extend the follow ups to allow for more touchpoints. For example, detail your USPs or consider providing an offer/discount code as they get further down the journey.

There are plenty of other predictive models available, and they all follow the same process, so once you’ve got one underway, the rest should follow fairly easily. In this example, I’ve addressed the objective to increase the conversion of prospects in the database. It may be that your business has a high churn rate and you look to start with reducing this, or a big pot of one time purchasers, so the focus then becomes on encouraging a second purchase.

You’ve got the data, you’ve considered the channels, get that journey drawn up and enjoy. Creating a marketing automation journey takes time, but it’s worth it in the end, and predictive analytics makes the results all the more powerful.