The Hottest Predictive Marketing Software of the Summer and 5 Reasons You’ll Want to Invest in It

Predictive marketing is the idea of using big data to develop accurate forecasts of future customer behaviors. This means having a deep understanding of who your customers are and their patterns and behaviors to predict their future needs accurately. 

With the help of technology like predictive analytics, AI, and machine learning, you can pinpoint a number of things such as: 

• When a customer is more likely to complete a purchase
• When a customer is at risk of churning
• How much a customer is expected to spend 
• Where a customer is at in their purchasing journey

Having the ability to look at your customers with a holistic view and understand their future needs will provide you with a unique opportunity. 

It allows you to create marketing campaigns that are customized to the specific needs of each of your customers. This will increase engagement and result in higher-performing campaigns. 

A few examples of predictive marketing campaigns you can leverage in your own business include: 

• Welcome campaigns that automatically enroll new subscribers 
• Retargeting campaigns to reach customers who recently browsed your website
• Product recommendation campaigns to increase sales and cross-selling opportunities
• Retention campaign to try and win back inactive users 

Historical customer data and real-time behaviors drive these campaigns. This means that as the needs of your customers change, so do the campaigns and messages they receive. 

By consistently sending messages targeted to your audiences’ current needs, you’ll see an increase in campaign engagement and start to build stronger relationships with your audiences. 

To successfully manage a predictive marketing campaign, you’ll need some tools to help back up your efforts. Luckily, there is plenty of predictive marketing software available that can help you do just that. 

In this article, we’ll take a look at a few of the hottest predictive marketing software options and then give you a glimpse into why you should use predictive technology in your marketing campaigns.

Find the Right Predictive Marketing Software for Your Needs

Predictive marketing is a very complex concept. You have to capture customer data, understand and digest that data, and then decipher what action to take next based on the data output. 

If that sounds like too much for one person, that’s because it is. Even with an entire team of data scientists, it would be hard to keep up with every shift in customer data in real-time and be able to reach and adjust campaigns to meet current customer needs. 

That’s where predictive marketing software comes into play. By investing in one of these tools, you can automate data collection, understanding, and campaign decision-making. You’ll spend less time sifting through data and more time reviewing successful campaign results. 

To help you get started on finding the right software for your needs, we’ve compiled a list of 8 platforms that will provide you with the data insights you need to create a predictive marketing strategy. 

1. Listrak

The Listrak platform has all of the predictive marketing tools you’ll need to elevate all of your campaigns. Combining machine learning and statistical modeling allows you to anticipate customer responses easily and automate actions that keep audiences engaged. 

This platform has everything you need to manage your campaigns across platforms and leverage all the possibilities when it comes to predictive marketing.

Get to know who your audiences are with real-time customer data and insights. This information will allow you to make informed decisions and begin to understand and predict future customer behaviors. Then with a tool like Listrak, you can bring it all together to create successful campaigns. Image courtesy of Listrak. 

Data and Marketing Capabilities: 

• Increase customer lifetime value and overall revenue with the help of predictive data-driven insights and automated segmentation
• Target your customers based on where they’re at in their personal journey based on predicted life cycle stages and future spend insights 
• Integrate predictive technology into all of your marketing channels and campaigns that work together seamlessly with their Enterprise Marketing Automation Platform
• Improve targeting by predicting things like future spend, likelihood to purchase, discount affinity, the likelihood to unsubscribe, and more 

Listrak Customer Testimonial: “The manual process of importing and exporting data files was hampering our ability to quickly set up audience targeting, but Listrak Exchange was able to automate that process, removing a huge frustration for us.”

2. RapidMiner

RapidMiner is a data science platform that can help you drive revenue, reduce cost, and avoid risk across all of your marketing campaigns. With everything, you need to understand your customers and predict their future wants and needs — this tool can help give you a competitive edge. 

With specialized options for various industries such as automotive, retail and eCommerce, Energy, Healthcare, and more, you’ll find a solution to help fit your needs. 

This tool will provide you with all the insights you need to develop effective, personalized experiences across all your platforms that are based on real customer insights. With easy-to-read reports available at the click of a button — you’ll have everything you need to create high-performing campaigns. Image courtesy of RapidMiner. 

Data and Marketing Capabilities: 

• Improve customer segmentation efforts with deeper audience insights, identifying commonalities between customers, and discovering new opportunities
• Identify red flags that indicate customers are likely to churn and take action to reach out to these audiences to re-engage them 
• Predict customer lifetime value to understand better what audiences you should be putting your time and money into based on their purchasing potential
• Use life-event patterns, buying behaviors, and other insights to determine what the following action should be for each individual customer

RapidMiner Customer Testimonial: “This tool has helped our company grow better over the past few years since we started using it. We use it to execute data mining activities of all types quickly and easily. It works smoothly regardless of data source. Our business intelligence performance has totally improved since we have it.” 

3. Alteryx

Alteryx is an analytics automation software that can help businesses to optimize their campaigns and improve success rates. With capabilities to meet various analytical needs, departments, and industries, Alteryx has a solution that will fit the needs of your business. 

This platform can help you manage everything from designing your reports to connecting platforms and diving deeper into machine learning. 

Get all of the data insights you need from one centralized platform and provide your customers with the interactions they want. The Alteryx software has everything you need to plan successful campaigns with the correct data from all of your most important platforms. Image courtesy of Alteryx.  

Data and Marketing Capabilities: 

• Combine customer data and insights from various platforms including social media, Salesforce, automation systems, and more to get a complete customer view
• Improve targeting and personalization with the help of segmentation and profiling to only target prospects with the most potential
• Tap into easy-to-use analytics to dive deeper into what campaigns are successful and how your audiences are engaging with them
• Use all of these customer insights and capabilities to better forecast and predict future customer needs and behaviors 

Alteryx Customer Testimonial: “Alteryx has contributed to higher analyst productivity and has empowered them to devote more time to innovations and higher value-added initiatives such as improving patient experience and reducing length-of-stay and case variance.” 

4. MicroStrategy Analytics

MicroStrategy Analytics is an enterprise analytics platform that will help your business get the answers you need to create campaigns that drive the results you want. This platform is an excellent tool for companies that are looking to use a data science-driven tool for more than just making informed marketing decisions. 

MicroStrategy Analytics has solutions for businesses in various industries, including retail, financial services, healthcare, government, and OEM. 

Get the data insights you need to make informed marketing decisions based on how your customers are currently engaging with your audiences. With the help of business analytics and hyper-intelligence, you’ll have everything you need. Image courtesy of Pexels. 

Data and Marketing Capabilities: 

• Build analytical dashboards that connect with all of your data sources to get a complete view of your customers and provide you with actionable insights
• Utilize business intelligence technology to provide your teams with the data they need to reach customers at the right moment
• Integrate one-click actions directly onto the websites, applications, and devices your customers are using every day
• Easily embed sophisticated analytical functionality into your existing applications and integrate it into a custom product offering

MicroStrategy Analytics G2 Review: “MicroStrategy interface design is very clear and the functions respond perfectly to the user commands. Pulling or importing multiple data across channels for analyzation, visualization and complex data management and the quality of the MicroStrategy outcome are very helpful to the users.”

5. SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud is a platform that combines technology like business intelligence, augmented and predictive analytics, and planning capabilities into one centralized environment. With the help of this tool, you can easily tap into your customer insights and use these different technologies to make more informed marketing decisions. 

This software provides businesses with a variety of different tools and capabilities that can be added to plans and services as desired. 

The SAP Analytics Cloud will provide you with a snapshot of all the most important customer data and insights you need. Having everything in one centralized location will allow you to develop highly targeted, predictive marketing campaigns. Image courtesy of SAP Analytics Cloud. 

Data and Marketing Capabilities: 

• Explore data across your organization with business intelligence tools that provide you with insights at the point of decision
• Automate data cleansing processes to identify any potential errors in an effort to keep your data clean and highly effective 
• Tap into automated machine learning capabilities to identify new relationships, patterns, and outliers that are hiding within your customer data
• Use predictive analytics to forecast potential outcomes and be ready to meet the future needs of your customers 

SAP Analytics Cloud G2 Review: “Learning and implementation of SAP analytics on cloud are simple. It is a very effective tool.” 

6. TImi

TImi is a data analytics platform that specializes in machine learning, AI, big data, and business intelligence. It’s an excellent tool for businesses that are looking to expand their data analytics capabilities from campaign integration to reporting. 

By investing in the TImi Suite, you’ll get all of the data analytics assistance you need. From better understanding who your customers are to identifying key trends and patterns that will allow you to develop customized campaigns — you’ll get it all. Image courtesy of TImi. 

Data and Marketing Capabilities: 

• Use your customer data to identify critical moments in your customer relationships to build a positive customer experience from start to finish
• Make strategic, data-driven decisions that precise and accessible predictive models back 
• Create customized dashboards and reports that automatically update and provide you with the business intelligence insights you need
• Improve your internal processes by integrating automation into your reporting, distribution, and other digital processes 

TImi Customer Testimonial: “The speed and the user-friendliness. You can easily automate in a few mouse clicks the most complex data processes: Data cleaning, Computation of KPI’s, Scoring, etc. You practically never have to write one line of code (but you can also code if you really want to).” 

7. Explorium

Explorium is a data management platform that will allow you to pinpoint valuable customer insights within your existing data set and leverage external data sources to learn even more. Whether you’re looking for ways to beat out your competition or simply increase revenue — this platform can help you do it. 

The different solutions you can expect from this platform include lead scoring, demand forecasting, risk modeling, and lifetime value. 

Explorium is designed to help marketers focus on reaching their audiences by helping analyze data and build models based on those insights. This will provide you with the knowledge and answers you need to make the most out of each marketing campaign you create. Image courtesy of Explorium. 

Data and Marketing Capabilities: 

• Increase revenue by improving your lead scoring capabilities by using enhanced datasets to enhance audience targeting 
• Predict which customers are most likely going to drive the most value to ensure you’re allocating your marketing spend in the proper places
• Quickly and easily incorporate data-science driven strategies into your marketing campaigns 
• Tap into thousands of external data sources to get the answers, context, and visibility you need to disrupt your market 

Explorium Customer Testimonial: “Explorium offers one of the most ingenious and robust data science platforms we’ve come across. The valuable work we’ve been able to conduct in Explorium’s platform has allowed us to evolve our fraud detection capabilities and mature them significantly in a very short period of time.” 

8. H20 AI

H20 AI Hybrid Cloud is an end-to-end platform that utilizes AI technology to improve data understanding and customer insights. With the ability to prepare, model, explain, operate, develop, and consume information, this software will help take your capabilities to the next level. 

This software has a variety of different capabilities that are designed with multiple industries in mind, such as banking, retail, manufacturing, and more. 

The H20 AI platform is a great tool for marketers across all industries. You can do it all with this tool, from increasing sales with cross-selling and upselling opportunities to improving customer loyalty through personalization and recommendations. Image courtesy of H20 AI. 

Data and Marketing Capabilities: 

• Use AI technology to better understand what customers have a higher likelihood of churning and initiate campaigns to win them back
• Maximize your profits by finding ways to optimize pricing for your customers based on various data sets
• Understand the dynamics of your customer interactions and get to know who your audiences are and what their needs are
• Quickly detect anomalies in transaction volume data across multiple channels, including mobile applications 

H20 AI Customer Testimonial: “H2O Driverless AI gives amazing performance in terms of feature performance and also model performance.”

5 Reasons You’ll Want to Use Predictive Marketing

Are you still on the fence about whether predictive marketing is really what your business needs? After all, it will require you to make a substantial investment in software and require your teams to learn yet another skillset. 

Well, in this section, we’ll take a closer look at why you may want to use predictive marketing in your life. Once you understand how this type of marketing can help benefit and elevate your current marketing efforts, you’ll be ready to start building your predictive marketing strategy.

1. Predict Future Customer Behaviors and Proactively React to Them

Once you have a platform to help collect, manage, and analyze your customer data, you can start putting that information to work. One of the most effective ways to use this knowledge is to predict the future needs of your customers and then put a plan in place to react to them.

This can all be done through predictive analytics. 

As defined by SAS, predictive analytics is the idea of using data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. 

Predictive analytics takes many things into consideration. From consumer behaviors to machine learning insights, you’ll have a better understanding of who your customer is and how to make the most significant impact with your campaigns. Image courtesy of Buyergenomics. 

Using predictive analytics will allow you to forecast what the needs of your customers will be accurately. Your data management platform will learn to identify patterns and trends that create signals to determine when a customer’s needs are about to change. 

That then allows the system to adjust the content the customer is receiving based on their signaled changes. Proactively building marketing campaigns for various funnel stages and scenarios will let you stay ahead of your customer’s needs and get the right content in front of them at the right moment. 

2. Identify Unengaged Users and Reduce Churn Rates

Predictive marketing technology will allow you to pinpoint precisely what audiences are actively engaging with your content and which ones are not. Having this insight provides you with the ability to reward your most loyal customers and try to win-back those who might be at risk to churn. 

When you consider that increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase your profit from 25-95% — it’s easy to see why this is such an important topic. 

It’s much more cost-effective to spend time retaining the customers you already have than it is to go out and find new ones. That’s why having the ability to identify who your inactive customers are and take action to re-engage them will directly impact and increase your revenue. Image courtesy of Act.

With a predictive marketing software, you can set guidelines that identify when a customer is most likely to churn. These guidelines might be something like any customer who has been inactive for 60 days or hasn’t engaged with a specific percent of emails in a 90 day timeframe.

Once you’ve made the determination of what qualifies someone as an inactive customer, it’s time to start trying to win them back. 

To do this, you can create retention campaigns that encourage these users at risk of churning to start engaging with your content. There are many ways to do this, but here are a few strategies to include in your retention campaigns: 

• Provide your customers with an offer or something of value
• Give your customers something to look forward to with your content
• Promote your customer service capabilities
• Make sure you’re not oversharing and don’t send too many messages

Having the ability to identify who your inactive customers are and target them with retention campaigns will be well worth your time. 

3. Actively Engage Users Throughout Their Buying Journey

We’ve alluded to this one with the last two topics discussed, but it’s important to talk about the ability to engage users throughout their entire purchasing journey actively. This means providing audiences with targeted content from the moment they learn about your brand until they’ve become a purchasing customer — and beyond. 

Understanding the buyer’s journey and how a user moves from one step to the next is an important element in a predictive marketing strategy. Clearing defining what those key signals and triggers are will help you build a more accurate complete journey plan. Image courtesy of Hubspot. 

To start, it’s important to define what the buying journey is. There are many different terms and formats for the journey, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll use the following terms: 

• • Awareness: when a user has just become aware of a problem and is starting to research their options

• Consideration: the user now has a better understanding of their problem and is actively searching for a solution and considering their options
• Decision: the user has decided what product they want to purchase and converts 

So how do you get started with creating campaigns that span the entire buyer’s journey? 

First, you’ll want to build campaigns that are focused on each specific area of the journey. That will likely include a welcome campaign for brand new users (awareness), nurturing campaigns for existing users (consideration), and conversion campaigns for those who are ready to make a purchase (decision). 

Once you have each of these different campaigns created, then you need to define what the triggers are to move someone from one to the next. 

An example of this might be once a user has visited your website and browsed a few product pages. You can then send them product recommendations based on the products they looked at. 

The journey stage indicator here is the user taking time to browse products on your site, telling you that they might be moving closer to making their purchasing decision — you’re just helping them along with the process. 

Creating full journey campaigns will allow you to identify active users and keep them engaged from the moment they subscribe to your content until they’ve become loyal brand evangelists.

4. Improve Lead Identification and Scoring

Predictive lead scoring is the next topic of discussion. 

Towards Data Science defines predictive lead scoring as “applying big data and machine learning algorithms to evaluate the key behaviors of existing customers and prospects and rank them against a scale that can distinguish customers and prospects who are more likely to convert, retain, or buy from the company’s products and services.”

Using predictive lead scoring can help take your current lead scoring technique to the next level and provide you with more qualified leads. In turn, you’ll have more successful marketing campaigns and increase efficiency by only reaching out to the audiences who are most interested in your content. 

Once you take a look at the benefits of predictive lead scoring, it’s easy to understand why it’s such a good investment. You’ll find yourself with increased sales efficiency and effectiveness, increased marketing effectiveness, and together marketing and sales alignment. Image courtesy of Marketing Insighter Group.

Here are a few other benefits you can expect to see when using predictive lead scoring: 

• Save time by with automatic data processing through set algorithms 
• Use rules and weights to improve the quality and accuracy of the scores you assign to each lead
• Improve scoring by looking at common and uncommon patterns and traits in your hot leads

If lead scoring is something you use as part of your marketing strategy, then you’ll definitely want to consider investing in predictive lead scoring. It will allow you to understand better who your audiences are and identify exactly who you should be trying to engage with. 

5. Provide Personalized Offers and Incentives 

Last but not least — provide personalized offers and incentives. 

Personalization is something that your customers have come to expect from the brands that they follow. This means you can no longer ignore it and need to start finding new ways to keep your content personalized. 

Luckily, with predictive marketing technology, creating personalized offers and incentives is easier than ever. 

Here are a few examples of how you can create personalized offers for your audiences: 

• Share predictive product recommendations based on previous browsing and purchasing behaviors
• Send cart abandonment messages to remind customers about a product they were previously interested in and include a discount code
• Understand what customers are more likely to purchase with a coupon and how much you need to offer them to make the most out of each sale 

Personalized product recommendations alone can make a drastic increase in your website revenue. So even if you decide not to incorporate abandoned cart messaging or any other customized incentives, you can still make a significant impact on your bottom line. Image courtesy of LinkedIn. 

Personalized offers are much more likely to catch the eye of your customers and encourage them to make a purchase. Making an effort to include these types of offers as part of your predictive marketing strategy will increase revenue and result in highly successful campaigns. 

Start Making the Most of Out Your Customer Data With Predictive Marketing Campaigns

So there you have it. If you’re not already using predictive marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy, now’s the time to get started. 

You’ll be able to provide your customers with more targeted and personalized experiences that they actually want. That will result in higher-performing campaigns and can increase sales and revenue dollars. 

With the right software partner, you’ll be able to quickly and easily implement and manage all of your predictive marketing needs. Now all you need to do is make the decision to get started and build campaigns that will encourage your customers to convert.

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