Predictive Analytics? IBM finally gets the memo.

predictive_analytics_memo_blogIn the Wall Street Journal recently, we read that IBM is about to invest $4 billion in “strategic imperatives,” including our favorite subject analytics. $4 billion is number that gets your attention (if you had the time and the patience to lay 4 billion dollar bills end-to-end, they’d go ‘round the earth approximately 16 times)!

Stories like this WSJ piece warm our hearts. They lend weight to the conversations we data-driven marketing enthusiasts have with prospects and customers – emphasizing that predictive analytics is now a mainstream marketing technology.  It is not a fad and its not going away. Marketing will never again lean on back-of-the-envelope calculations, intuition, and individual genius.

Predictive analytics is not complicated, as this video explains. It simply uses data from the past to predict the future. There are, however, many different ways to turn the concept into a working system, some of them involving a ton of data collection, big data integration projects, a lot of computing horsepower and a team of data analytics scientists. In other words: expensive.

At the other end of the spectrum lie companies like ours, Loyalty Builders, who have automated the process and curbed the cash outlay so that anybody who can use our system can afford it.

Believe it or not, with four pieces of data, and our ‘secret sauce’, we can increase the revenue you see in your cross-sell, up-sell and win-back marketing campaigns. Who will buy? What will they buy? What might they buy that they’ve never bought from you before? Which customers are at risk of defection? How much revenue will you lose if they do? And a good deal more.

Loyalty Builders offers a genuinely affordable, thoroughly scientific, made-for-marketers, totally modern way to help manage some critical risks marketers face. Therefore I predict that if you’re not using predictive analytics now, you will be soon.

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