Believe it or not, proactive marketing revolutionized baseball. In 2002, the Oakland A’s were the only team using predictive analytics to make decisions about their roster. The benefits of proactive marketing? A 20-game winning streak. Scouting went from a guessing game to strategic data analysis. By 2004, every baseball team was using proactive marketing. So why aren’t you?

Finding proactive strategies that will produce results can seem like an impossible task. When every marketing campaign is different and each company has different objectives, what proactive strategies can be applied across the board?

Think in the long term. What is the objective of the campaign? The mindset of ‘measure twice cut once’ is the start of a great campaign that will produce results. Do as much preemptive planning as possible before launching campaigns. Run test, have test groups, focus groups, research similar campaigns to optimize results.

Analyze. The most powerful data is the data you have. Analyze your competition, what strategies do they use to reach their audience effectively. Head in that direction, and optimizing your marketing to become faster than your competition. 

Personalization. Acquiring customers is difficult and expensive, and if you’re not proactively engaging them with smarter emails, you’re going to lose a lot of value. Nothing is more proactive than anticipating the needs of an individual customer.

You need technology that can rapidly personalize and disseminate content based on individual user behavior. You need technology that can help people find what they want before they know they even want it. The more pampered and specific your personalization is the more referrals you will generate.

One specific rule you can follow is the 4×4 rule: target users who have visited at least 4 times in the last 4 months, but had no activity in the last 4 weeks. Perfect opportunity to send an email campaign to generate sales.

Work smart, not hard, use proactive marketing.