OREANDA-NEWS. September 02, 2015. With every interaction—whether it’s a click, download, view or purchase—customers provide brands with the opportunity to understand their wants, needs and lifestyles. The ability to detect and respond to these types of customer behaviors is key to providing seamless customer experiences across the marketing, sales and service lifecycle.

As we recently described in Part One of this series, Predictive Intelligence empowers marketers to engage customers in highly personalized, two-way conversations at scale—whether they are interacting on the web, email, mobile or even a call center. In Part Two, we examined how Predictive Intelligence influences customer journeys, and looked behind the scenes to see how it drives 1-to-1 conversations.  

Next, let’s see how easy it is to configure a predictive journey with Marketing Cloud. To illustrate, imagine you’re an outdoor clothing retailer looking to deliver personalized emails with product recommendations based on how customers engage with your website.

1. Observe Customer Behavior

The first step is to understand how each customer is interacting with your brand,  whether online or in store. Predictive Intelligence makes it easy to monitor web behavior—you simply need to add a small piece of javascript to each page you want to monitor. This will help you to identify the customer and track data such as pages visited, user location, session length and time, referring site, and more. Offline data can also be readily consumed via an upload process.

2. Identify the Recommendations

Next you’ll need to create your catalog—this enables you to define the collection of products, offers and content customers can receive. Since winter is approaching, you could opt to include your new line of down jackets and overstocked backpacks. With Predictive Intelligence, a wizard walks you through each step.

3. Construct the Offers

Now it’s time to determine what information will be displayed in your recommendation. You simply select descriptors taken from the catalog such as the product name, regular price, sale price, colors, etc.

4. Configure the Scenarios

Here’s where you determine which offer from the catalog each customer receives based on his or her behavior. For example, you can define logic to deliver your down jacket recommendation based last item purchased (such as down bibs), last item viewed (like ski goggles), or last page visited.

5. Customize the Template

Easily modify any of your existing email templates to deliver personalized recommendations with the click of a button. To determine the product offers the customer will receive, all you need to do is drag and drop a Predictive Content Block onto the canvas.

6. Preview and Send

The last step is to preview your email. You can customize the content, as well as the rules that determine the offers. Once you’re done editing, you’re ready to send!

Get Started Today

Predictive Intelligence simplifies personalization through seamless integration and marketer-friendly tools. It’s easy, and best of all, highly effective. Are you ready to take your digital marketing to the next level of personalization? Contact us today, or check out Forrester’s take on Predictive Intelligence in Refresh Your Approach to Marketing: How Real-Time Automation Elevates Personalization.