• by Jess Nelson , November 18, 2015

Salesforce on Wednesday announced Predictive Journeys, a new suite of predictive intelligence solutions for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to help predict the likelihood of customer engagement. 

The new suite currently features two products: Predictive Scores and Predictive Audiences.

Predictive Scores leverages customer data to predict the likelihood that the customer will engage with an email promotion on a percentage scale from 1% to 100%. Predictive Scores can be applied on an individual customer basis and across entire audience segments.

“Backwards looking information is not as dynamic as future looking information,” says Leslie Fine, VP of data and analytics for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “It’s about every piece of data and how they interact. Taking in account every piece of info and plotting the best course of action as time goes on.”

Predictive Audiences automatically creates customer segments based on their Predictive Scores. Salesforce users can then sync these audience segments to Journey Builder and send emails directly from the dashboard. 

The user interface is clean, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of data science. Email marketers can test a customer segment’s likelihood to engage, create a marketing message, send emails and check on the health of their audience, all within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud dashboard.

Predictive Journeys predicts the likelihood that a customer will click or open an email, but does not offer channel or product recommendations.

“This opens the door,” says Fine, “but as we role forward machine learning will learn best channels and best product.”

There are many solutions on the market today that offer email marketers the ability to predict customers’ preferred marketing channels and products. Boomtrain recently integrated its predictive intelligence solution with Marketo, Sailthru’sPersonalization Engine offers content recommendations, and Mintigo announced Predictive Campaigns last week.

IBM and SAS are current leaders in big data predictive analytics solutions, according to Forrester Research.

The value of predictive technology is “about engagement and relevancy,” says Nick Edwards, CEO of Boomtrain. “That’s where the competitive battle between marketers will be fought. Automated marketing is no longer relevant -- it needs to be predictive and on a one-to-one level.”

Over the next five years, the predicted analytics market is expected to grow 25% annually in the United States and 32% globally according to Micromarket Monitor. Applications with advanced and predictive analytics are expected to grow 65% faster than apps without predictive functionality, according to a 2014 IDC report.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Predictive Scoring and Audiences are in beta for the first half of 2016. Current partners includeDonorsChoose.org, Life Time Fitness and Rue La La.