Predictive data science will soon be a widespread strategy for business of all sizes.This guide contains the 7 most important action items that can give you clearer guidance about the tools.

1. 7 Strategies to Adopt A
Proactive Approach
Towards Marketing

2. Table of Content § Introduction
§ Strategy 1: Dynamize Your Segment
§ Strategy 2: Provide Real-Time Rewards
§ Strategy 3: Provide Service Enhancement
§ Strategy 4: Set Automated Reminders
§ Strategy 5: Browser Abandonment
§ Strategy 6: Set Personalized Search
§ Strategy 7: Optimize Your Web Assets
§ Metrics & KPIs to Track
§ Tools & other resources to help you get started
§ About CommerceBlend

3. Introduction
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Technology and big data allowed retailers to harness customer data to
launch campaigns with customized offerings, boosting revenues and
retention. Amazon attributes 35 percent of its revenues to onsite
recommendations, which is enabled by predictive analysis. The year of
2017 is destined to be more data-driven.
Also, the 2016 Internet Retailer Predictive Marketing Survey indicated
that the sweeping adoption of marketing automation and predictive
science could be within one or two years, extending to businesses of
all sizes.
This ebook is to provide seven crucial strategies that will help your
organization to act less reactively and more proactively, in the coming
year of 2017.

4. Strategy 1:
Dynamize Your
Segments Why It Matters?
Segmenting by geography and demographics appears to be
ineffective in driving engagement today as online shopping and
mobile search blurred the geographic boundaries. Through statistical
modeling, the segmentation of predictive analysis can incorporate
dozens of behavioral variables and profile customer segments with
more accuracy.
What’s Essential for Strategy Execution?
To select the variables for analysis is an art and closely tied to the
goal of your marketing program. We will focus on three types of data
that are critical to segmentation strategy. But note that there is no
right or wrong variables you must include in your segmentation. It’s
essential to understand the overall business situation and the range
of tactics.
We all know that segmentation is the foundation. Everything else
relies on it. In the old days, segmentation is just a simple task in
excel, but today’s marketing needs more. What if you can dynamize
your segmentation strategy with various behavioral factors?
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5. Transactional data including sales and number
of orders can help you identify high value
customers. With some data mining, you will be
able to create clusters that fit your campaign
range and goal. Who are bargain hunters and
who are willing to pay the full price?
A strong recommendation is to create loyalty
programs around your high value customers.
Create segments of similar behaviors to enable
personalized marketing based on the shoppers
interest.
Besides the products on your website, what
else your customers are looking at that are
related to your brands?
Empower yourself with the right analytical tools to
identify customer sentiment.
Social media is a powerful source of data to enable
your real-time marketing. Empowered with the right
analytical tools, you will be able to identify customer
sentiment, key influencers on a topic on a particular
platform, trending topics, keywords, and so on for one
location, at a time of the day.
Segment your customers based on location that is tied
with purchased product categories, amount spent and
order frequency.
Transactional Data
Interaction Data
It’s important to connect customer’s activities at every
touch points with transaction data. Get to know what
they have looked at, how they found you and what are
the key touch points for conversion.
External Data
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6. ● Create loyalty programs for your
high-value customers.
● Create personalization
marketing for different
segments.
● Analyze social data and
centralize them on one platform.
Actions To Take
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7. Strategy 2:
Provide Real-Time
Rewards
Real-time marketing is a trend and it requires marketers to think
ahead of what your customers desire, and today’s customers are
picky. It’s time to innovate your rewards by leveraging data such as
customer’s purchase history and make it unique for each consumer.
Why It Matters?
In today’s digital world, data is the price that online users are
paying in return for service. Thus, the minimum they expect to get
out of this payment is that brands are capable of making good use
of their data to improve services.
Using customer data and dynamic segmentation will allow you to
strengthen the relationship with your customer since customers will
feel that they’re receiving immediate recognition.
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8. What’s Essential for Strategy Execution?
In the end, the goal with this strategy is to identify
your customer’s interests in order to create a richer
set of experiences that help you to differentiate
your value proposition from the competition.
Make sure you accomplish three things. First, serve
content at the right time in the right way.
Second, offer personalized experiences and
associate with partners that help you raise your
positioning in your market. Finally, make rewards
delivery quick and frictionless for the consumer.
Actions To Take
Invest in people and IT infrastructure that allows
you to keep track of all possible touchpoints with
your clients (CRM), as well as the processes that
directly or indirectly impact the relationship with
them (ERP).
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9. Strategy 3:
Provide Service
Enhancements
Enhancing the service provided to your customers has become
a key point for differentiation and retention. The ability to view
customer behavior shifts in a macro and micro perspective is
critical to a company’s success.
Why It Matters?
Coupons and loyalty points might keep your customers happy
for a while, but they don’t sustain a long relationship.
Thus it is necessary for businesses to use data to identify gaps
between:
(1) the product attributes and service benefits currently offered
by the brand, and (2) the disadvantages, challenges, pain points
or strengths that customers associate as identifiers of your
brand.
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10. What’s Essential for Strategy Execution?
Being able to provide service enhancements
demands a business to mine and analyze data
properly and at the end of the day to identify:
● Behavior patterns that are unique to a
segment of your customers and your brand is
not capitalizing on.
● How customer’s needs have changed over
time.
● Customer’s passion points and whom should
you partner with to leverage the experience
Actions To Take
Collect as much qualitative data as possible from
your customers on media where their voice is
actively heard (e.g social media, forums, reviews,
questions and answers). Track customer sentiment
through keywords monitoring. Later, conduct a
quantitative research (e.g surveys) to support
findings from qualitative data. 9

11. Strategy 4:
Automated Retention
Keeping a customer is always cheaper than acquiring a new one.
The reality is that customers switch sooner than you like, and
retaining them became ever difficult. However, the good news is
that thanks to the data and technology, more retention tactics
can be implemented through automation with more accurate
targeting.
Why It Matters?
A lot of win-back campaigns do not deliver the results as
expected for a number of reasons: lack of understanding of
customer frustration, messaging, irrelevant offers, etc.
Automated retention would ask merchants to re-view the
problems through the perspective of data instead of intuition.
Data can bring clarity by setting up scenarios and tracking down
a problem to one metric.
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12. What’s Essential for Strategy Execution?
Identify scenarios (e.g abandoned carts) where customer
spend and engagement is low. For example, if a customer is
waiting for a deal, you should offer him a discount when
doing a promotion for bargain hunters. In automated
retention, you can create dynamic segments accordingly to
capture thousands of needs that were ignored before.
Track their browsing behavior and identify what has caused a
low spend, a low engagement and what might call their
attention.
Then plan campaigns that tackle the root of the problem and
allow you to stay relevant and capitalize on customer intent.
- Action for current customers:
Create email campaigns for replenishment or
with dynamic product recommendations.
- Action for prospect customers:
Create onsite banners or social retargeting
campaigns.
Actions To Take
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13. Strategy 5:
Smarten Your Search
Search is a second nature for online shoppers. Users who use on-
site search are more likely to convert because they land on the
page with a clear shopping idea. Make sure your on-site search
returns the results most relevant to the customer’s need is crucial
for making the sale and inviting them to come back again.
Why It Matters?
Category isn’t necessarily what persuades a potential buyer to
purchase. Instead, variables such as price, sizes, styles, colors,
capacity, etc have much more weight throughout the decision-
making process. To display the most relevant result and to reduce
the time a shopper spends on looking for a product, merchants
need to go beyond default recommendations by category.
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14. What’s Essential for Strategy Execution?
Some of the tactics for SEO can be used here. Use
proper keywords tools (e.g. Google Adwords,
Webmaster) to identify the products they have
searched for. Identify what can be paired with them.
Based on the insights, you will be able to build a
more diverse catalog of recommended products.
More advanced tools that enable machine learning
can also be applied to smarten your search. As your
customers have more shopping history on your site,
more relevant products cross categories can be
predicted with a higher level of accuracy in relation
to their purchase intent.
Actions To Take
Partner with someone who already has the know-
how and resources to capitalize upon smart search.
Plus, polish content creation and delivery.
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15. Strategy 6:
Conversational
Commerce
We have become digital human. People would prefer to interact
with another human-being on their phone, through messaging
apps. What’s migrating to messaging apps is not only a daily
conversation but also services. People can hail a ride and share
with their friends without leaving Facebook messenger. That’s how
future commerce looks like.
Why It Matters?
Messaging-apps such as Facebook Messenger have more than
one billion active users. The size of the audience is immense. In
the near future, the usage of messaging apps is likely to surpass
social media. Moreover, by analyzing the messages and the
context that surrounds the customer and the brand, a rich
understanding of his needs can emerge. Consequently, brands can
offer remarkable personalization as well as product support on-
the-go.
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16. What’s Essential for Strategy Execution?
Messaging Apps & Virtual Assistants
You may already be tracking transaction data and engagement
metrics for your traditional marketing channels. However, as more
user activities are happening on messaging apps and virtual
assistants like Siri, you are missing out a lot of valuable information.
Conversational commerce can analyze, predict and act upon large
volumes of conversations that other channels wouldn’t incur for you,
to analyze what customers are interested in, what their challenges
are and more.
Chatbots
Chatbots is a service powered by rules and artificial intelligence.
They greatly reduced the workload of customer service teams by
interacting with users through a chat interface. Since it can be
tracked, brands can measure engagement. Having a chatbot in
messaging app saves customers from downloading a separate app
that they may never interact with.
Chatbots are not new but the booming messaging app usage makes
it appear back on the marketer’s radar. There are still some IT
challenges like integration difficulty and security concerns around it.
Actions To Take
Work closely with key partners, such as payment
gateways, to enable mobile transactions through
messaging-apps.
Keep in mind that conversational apps are set
around the way customers organize their lives.
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17. Strategy 7:
Create Your
Predictive Model
Data Science is not futuristic any more. Through statistical modeling
(multivariate regression, logit regression), merchants can transition
from reacting to customer requests to predicting customer needs
with data insights, taking personalization to another level.
Why It Matters?
Consumer analytics is crucial to business. Most analytics gives you
an idea what the customers have done, but predictive analysis tells
what customers are likely to do. It depicts the relationship between
two data points and removes a certain amount of guess work on
future sales. Today’s predictive models have proved to be more
accurate but were adopted only by large companies. However, this
analytics technique is projected to spread further to small
businesses in the coming two years.
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18. What’s Essential for Strategy Execution?
1. To prepare your business for predictive science,
you need to ensure an organizational culture where
data is democratized.
2. Predictive analysis can predict almost anything,
even to reveal a customer’s personality traits,
purchase needs, gender, age, interests, political
views etc by analyzing data collected and aggregated
from various sources. That requires merchants to
explore the relationship among factors and constantly
inquire the reason behind the numbers.
3. Be open to act on insights that may seem
counterintuitive. This sets the breeding ground for
innovation and differentiation.
Actions To Take
To uncover the ‘next best action’ scenarios,
using customer data to indicate the best offer or
communication to send.
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19. Metrics & KPIs to
report on each
strategy success
We identified three activities that
you should monitor and three
types of data to collect on each
activity.
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20. Customer Experience, Engagement and Brand Sentiment
WEBSITE
Time spent on site
Bounce rate
Page depth
Pageview by product/category/content
Traffic peak time
Returning visits
EMAIL
Open rate
Click through rate
SOCIAL MEDIA
Mentions across social media per brand
Mentions across social media per keyword
Applause rate per social post
(# of likes / total reach)
Conversation rate
(# of comments / total reach)
Amplification rate
(# of shares / total reach)
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21. Revenue
WEBSITE
AOV per customer/segment
(total revenue/# of orders)
Purchase frequency per customer/segment
CLV per customer/segment.
(simple formula and complete calculation)
Conversion rate
(# of conversions / clicks on ads,email,landing
page)
Number of visits to conversion
Top conversion channels
EMAIL & SOCIAL MEDIA
Revenue uplift per campaign
ROI uplift per campaign
Number of visits to conversion
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22. Retention
WEBSITE
Churn Rate per year
(# of churns / initial customer #)
Repeated frequent visits per
segment
Visitor recency
Net Promoter Score
Retention Rate
(1- churn rate)
EMAIL
Contact list growth
SOCIAL MEDIA
Follower growth
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23. Tools & Resources
to Use
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24. Media Metrix
Knowing the size of your site’s audience just isn’t
enough. Media Metrix provides a complete view that
goes further than the mere size of your site’s audience.
Their reports go into the consumption habits of your
audience along with demographics and cross-visitation
information. Media Metrix measures audience
composition and performance within key user
segments, to target based on a variety of product
ownership, lifestyles,demographics and behavior.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics creates detailed reports on insights
and statistics about a site’s traffic along with its
conversions, sales and users’ flow. Customized
dashboards are also an interesting choice to improve
reports on specific variables. Some examples on
existing customized reports are based on browser,
device, social media acquisition, page timing, customer
behavior, SEO referringpages or keywords and more.
Cision
Cision is the world’s largest database and an all-in-
one media intelligence platform to analyze and
monitor your campaign’s impact on digital media.
With Cision you can quantify the reach and coverage
of your campaign, identify relevant social interactions
and conversations, benchmark effectiveness with real
time reports and measure your releases’ impact.
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25. SproutSocial
This popular social media business tool allows you to
draft, schedule and post content on different platforms
while tracking growth, content performance and progress.
It also gives you the option to create reports based on
user interactions, engagement metrics and trends. You can
manage different accounts for different clients in a user-
friendly platform with team and workflow management
features.
Adobe Target
Adobe Target allows you to deliver automated
personalized content based on real-time data. This
platform creates unique profiles based on click scoring,
visitor data, insights from algorithms, event responses,
past, current and changing interests. Also, setting up
specific algorithms to create content options for
automated targeting activities is easy thanks to their step-
to-step guide.
BrightInfo
BrightInfo is a platform with a self-learning algorithm
that scans your website and performs real-time semantic
analysis of all pages and individual behaviors to show
the most relevant content to each visitor through his
natural navigation path.
SAP Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions
This software is the best user-friendly access to
business intelligence (BI) and big data mining. It is an
all-in-one platform to work with different departments
within the same organization. Some of their features
include predictive analysis insights and reporting, self-
service data visualization, mobile BI applications, ad
hoc reporting and more.
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26. Seldon Server
Seldon Server is an open predictive intelligence platform
that listens to all of your customer data in order to provide
content and product recommendations and general
predictive functionality. Seldon works with different cloud
services options and it can scale to the demands of large
enterprise installations.
Windsor Circle
Windsor Circle is a platform that automates predictive
and lifecycle marketing campaigns. It has an experienced
Customer Success Team that works directly with clients in
order to build customized marketing retention email
templates, provide ongoing support and design services
to generate proved revenue. Windsor includes welcome
emails, best customer rewards, post-purchase and cart
abandonment campaigns, product education,
recommendations, replenishment and more. Optimove
Optimove is a customer marketing cloud that empowers
brands to drive growth through CRM automation by
creating insight-based brand interactions to boost
customer engagement and lifetime value. Optimove
customer cloud includes an outstanding predictive
marketing software, real time hypertargeting, multi-
channel campaign automations and self-optimizing
personalization.
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27. CrossPromo
This is the first tool to find, plan and create email cross-
promotion initiatives via qualified partnerships
dedicated to increase your services and products’
visibility in other platforms from the same industry.
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RichRelevance
RichRelevance is a popular omnichannel personalization
platform for online product recommendations. They
recollect all the data and use powerful machine-learning
engine to select the most relevant data driven
recommendations for each customer interaction.
Findify
Findify is a smart searching platform driven by
machine learning to generate recommendations and
increase sales. Findify improves search results based
on user trends, helps customers discover new
products with cross-sell and upsell recommendations
and provides powerful analytics.
Kit
Kit is a great addition to drive sales on a Shopify store,
through conversational commerce. With Kit you can
send personal thank you emails, create highly-targeted
Facebook campaigns, showcase best selling or new
products, connect other Shopify apps to control more
marketing tasks and receive quick updates on ad
performance or store sales.
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28. About CommerceBlend
CommerceBlend is an exclusive community for e-
commerce directors, managers, CEOs and CMOs.
Our mission is to connect ecommerce merchants with
opportunities and resources that propel online revenue
growth, and allow you to scale your business.
We are also a learning and support network that gains
ground in all aspects of the digital realm.
Join our community for free and enjoy all
the membership benefits!
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