As marketers, it has always been the dream to be able to predict when a potential lead may become a paying client or customer. Lead nurturing processes rely on the hope that enough nurturing will convince a lead to purchase or choose you instead of the competition.
With the introduction of new marketing technologies, predictive analytics is no longer a thing of the past. Marketing automation has brought with it tools that track past customer actions in order to predict future behavior.
Being able to record actions for each individual lead and contact is an invaluable tool because you can drill down to a person-by-person level to see how each individual has interacted with you. Did they visit your website? How many emails from you have they opened? What is their preferred method of communication?
All of this information can be tracked with marketing automation, but this is only some of the predictive capabilities these platforms provide. Outside of a record of past actions, marketing automation platforms have the ability to associate scores with certain actions in order to rank how engaged a lead is. If a lead visits your website, you may want to give them one point towards their engagement score. However, if they open your email and click a link, you may want to give them five points, or if they've made a purchase you may want to give them 15 points. Having this ability allows you to see, at a glance, how engaged each individual is as well as run campaigns that automatically target leads of a certain score. For example, you could run a re-engagement strategy for leads that have under 25 points or an appreciation campaign for leads with over 50 points.
Depending on the actions of your leads, you could also add tags to their profiles such as "filled in signup form" or "interested in service." These tags can be added automatically through campaigns or manually by your input. If you had several clients come in for a fitting and did not purchase, you could tag them all the same as "Fitting – no purchase" and run a re-engagement strategy on that group of customers automatically even though the tagging process would be manual.
Marketing automation offers lots of ways for you to determine how an individual client will behave in the future. Additionally, these platforms also allow you to see how your larger audience is reacting and interacting with your campaigns.
By providing detailed and easy-to-read reports, marketing automation platforms allow you to see how your marketing campaigns perform overall. Maybe you have one email that gets more link clicks than another. Now you know which email needs to be optimized and you even have an example of a well-performing email to base any changes off of.
SimplyCast 360 offers scores, tagging, and detailed reports to help you predict the behavior of your leads and customers. If you'd like to try SimplyCast for yourself, sign up for a free 14-day trial.
