If you’re a mobile marketer, then you must have heard about ‘predictive analytics’ and ‘predictive marketing’. And, if data is the lifeblood of your marketing strategies, then you have definitely used machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to build smarter marketing campaigns.
In today’s ever-changing, dynamic marketing environment, user behaviour and their trends change in the blink of an eye. Hence, it is only fitting that next-gen mobile marketers – like you – need to focus on what your users are and aren’t doing on your web or app platform.
That’s where predictive marketing helps you.
What is Predictive Marketing?
Predictive Marketing is the practice of extracting data from your existing database in real time and using it to identify patterns and to predict the outcome of your marketing actions. Using these data sets, you can make SMART (Specific – Measurable – Achievable – Realistic – Timely) decisions by predicting which action is most likely to succeed and which is likely to fail.
Predictive marketing allows you to leverage machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to deliver to your users highly researched and targeted product/service recommendations, whenever they engage with your brand.
Machine learning algorithms have made it possible to automate the most repetitive marketing activities and make it predictive. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have made an impact in mobile app marketing. They also enable you to perform marketing actions based on your user’s historical behaviour, without any explicit instructions.
What exactly is Predictive App Marketing?
Predictive app marketing is the modern practice of using all of the app user data you have, and all possible ways they engage with your app, to predict user behavior. This enables you to proactively engage them with personalised, relevant, and timely communication through targeted channels.
Think of predictive app marketing as existing at the intersection of user action/non-actions, captured data, advanced analytics, and effective engagement.
Predictive app marketing makes your push notifications and in-app messages more meaningful and deepens the relationship with your users. The data that you collect plays an important role in helping you unearth previously hidden user behavioural patterns and eventually predicting the user action based on your multi-channel campaign objectives.
Why do Mobile Marketers Need Predictive App Marketing?
As a marketing professional, you may have had a taste of leveraging predictive analytics to analyse which prospect is most likely to become a customer. Predictive analytics lets you take huge sets of data and analyse them for actionable insights using specific types of machine learning algorithms.
As your mobile app users become more tech-savvy and brand-aware, they become more difficult to retain given the competition in the app market. As a mobile marketer, you need to ensure your mobile app doesn’t get lost in the swarm of other apps on your user’s smart device.
The challenges that mobile marketers – like you – face today are consistent across the industry. You might find yourself asking the following questions:
- Which channel should I spend my next dollar to drive higher user acquisition?
- How can I draw insights from the way users are engaging with my app?
- How can I use all the data at my disposal to create a unified view of my users?
- How can I leverage this data to deliver personalised messages to the right user at the right time?
- How do I know which users are at the risk of churning?
Predictive app marketing is the solution to all these persistent problems.
It helps you understand where to optimise your ad spends on user acquisition, which are the highest-value users, what type of users are most likely to churn, what specific characteristics these users tend to display over a period of time, and how to orchestrate push notification or in-app message campaign to boost user engagement and retention.
For instance, a media OTT app might discover that free subscribers (with restricted access to media content and bonus features) are much more likely to churn as compared to paid subscribers (who have unlimited access to media content and paid features).
How Can Predictive App Marketing Help your App?
Let me illustrate this with a quick example!
Let’s assume that you’re a growth marketer with an e-commerce app and it has over 50 million downloads and having sold products worth $100 million, till date, across geographies. How does predictive app marketing fit into the scheme of your overall marketing strategy?
Case #1: Acquire
Let’s say you want to understand who your most valuable users are, i.e. the power users of your app, making frequent purchases of significant order sizes. Predictive app marketing gives you insights into specific user behaviour and characteristics.
This helps you understand where your users are coming from and which channel is effectively giving you these paying customers. Use these insights to double down on your paid acquisition efforts.
Case #2: Timing
You’ve figured out which channel works for user acquisition, but what about engaging these users?
Predictive app marketing helps you with insights like the most active time of users on any given day, the kind of messages users are receptive to, when is he likely to open a message. Use these insights to send a push notification or a reminder email after the cart abandonment at the right time, based on their past behaviour.
Optimising your campaigns based on send times can exponentially increase your CTRs and conversions.
Case #3: Channel
As a marketer you’ve predicted which users will be receptive to your marketing campaign and are likely to open your message. But, it is also important to understand which engagement channel works best for your app.
With predictive analytics, you can deliver messages through the best engaged channel when users are most likely to convert. This adds another dimension of personalisation to your multi-channel campaigns.
Case #4: Cross-sell and Upsell
You want to know which users are likely to purchase next. With predictive app marketing you can create smart segments that help you in determine which users are likely to purchase next. These insights will help you target only those users with an in-app offer that are most likely to make a subsequent purchase.
Use these insights to send a timely in-app notification with a discount coupon code or a bundled offer to upsell a particular product category.
Sounds simple enough?
It really is!
What are Some Other Benefits of Predictive App Marketing?
- Grow your app user base: Predictive app marketing gives you insights into identifying and understanding the users that are most likely to convert. You can leverage these characteristics, demographics, and behaviors of these users and decide how to allocate your digital marketing spends.
- Identify your best user acquisition source: Predictive app marketing plays an instrumental role in determining the best sought user acquisition channel for your mobile app. It helps you identify the highest converting user acquisition channel, so that you can double-down on your campaign spends accordingly.
- Drive higher user engagement and retention: It is always important to know what your users are going to do next with your app. Predictive app marketing helps you with all kinds of insights that help you in determine which users have the potential of going dormant, often based on the recency, frequency, and monetary value of their transactions. It also helps you predict the right time to send a communication to the user that helps hit higher CTRs. These insights help you in plan effective retention marketing campaigns.
- Convert your free users into paying customers: Having a larger user base is euphoria for most mobile apps. But, what about the app conversions and the objectives you develop and promote for? Are you sure your users will be going for them?
Predictive app marketing gives you exceptional insights to determine which users are most likely to convert. These outcomes help you plan your marketing campaigns more effectively.
Is Predictive App Marketing the Future of Mobile Marketing?
No!
Predictive app marketing is the present and the future of mobile marketing!
Predictive app marketing gives you a unified view of your app users, harnesses all of your data to predict what is next in an individual user’s journey, and addresses it with personalised marketing campaigns in real-time through a multi-channel approach.
It provides you a great opportunity to bridge the gap between unspoken user expectations and actual reality of their mobile app experiences. The leaders in the future of marketing are going to be those who act immediately on what their app users actually want.
In order to make the next leap with your mobile marketing strategy, schedule a demo, to learn just how you can leverage the power of predictive app marketing!
