This Tool Will Get Rid of Bias Errors in Your Marketing

Ever observed a trend when reviewing your analytics, tried to tweak your strategy accordingly, and then, disappointingly, didn’t see the needle move the way you expected? The elbow grease and sweat you put in as a marketer can help you develop strong gut feelings worth paying attention to, but there are times when data will win out in the data vs. intuition faceoff. What you’ve fondly thought of as your sixth sense could really be bias, bias that’s holding you back from making decisions that truly deliver, or you might just be overlooking an unseen possibility.

Predictive analytics tools as part of a marketing automation platform can help eliminate these issues by incorporating often overlooked but critical data points, particularly by getting personalization right. Predictive analytics tools allow you to act on what works at the individual level rather than simply learning what generally gels in the aggregate, refining, and repeating.

Put simply, you’ll finally target the right people, with the right message, at the right time. And the longer a customer has been using your app or website, or been a part of your email list, the more accurately you’ll be able to do so. Within the first week of a user’s lifecycle, the data may be more limited but even this data is likely to be more telling about this unique person than stats about your overall audience.

The right people

While one-size-fits-all marketers are busy sending the same message to customers who spend little to no time or money with their brand as they send to the most active, valuable customers, you can instead use data mining tools driven by business intelligence to effectively target key customer segments with your campaigns.

The right message

With multivariate testing, as the name suggests, you can test multiple variables at once—trying out factors like channel, messaging, and images. Then you can compare the results and utilize the winning combination—the right message—for the rest of the campaign. With predictive analytics, the tool can do this grunt work for you. Appboy’s Intelligent Selection analyzes variant performance twice daily and automatically redistributes top-performing variants to more users.

The right time

Seeing high open rates at a particular time of day on a particular day of the week could lead to routinely scheduling campaigns during that sweet spot. But in reality, maybe the real winning campaign formula hasn’t been discovered or tested yet. Marketing automation tools can get there by concluding the best time to send given statistical analysis of the history of a unique user’s engagements with your brand.

If you’ve been relying on your gut more than is practical in this data-driven marketing age, it may be time to consider predictive analytics-based automation and take a lot of the guesswork out of scheduling marketing campaigns.