Predictive Marketing

Chapter 1Big Data and Predictive Analytics Are Now Easily Accessible to All Marketers

Predictive marketing is the evolution of relationship marketing defined and practiced by many direct marketers in the last few decades. Predictive marketing is not a technology, but an approach or a philosophy. Predictive marketing uses predictive analytics as a way to deliver more relevant and meaningful customer experiences, at all customer touch points, throughout the customer life cycle, boosting customer loyalty and revenues.

The rise of predictive marketing is fueled by three factors: (1) customers are demanding a more personal, integrated approach as they interact with marketing and sales through many channels, (2) early adopters show that predictive marketing delivers enormous value, and (3) new technologies are available to capture new and existing sources of customer data, to recognize patterns, and to make it easier than ever to use customer data at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds.

Predictive analytics is a set of tools and algorithms used to make predictive marketing possible. It is an umbrella term that covers a variety of mathematical and statistical techniques to recognize patterns in data or make predictions about the future. When applied to marketing, predictive analytics can predict future customer behavior, classify customers into clusters among other use cases. Other terms you might hear in the media to describe this process include machine learning