If you feel like you’ve had to become an expert in best practices for marketing across channels to keep your place as a top performer at your company and in the industry, you’re not alone. From the good old days of email marketing for desktops, channels have exploded: push notifications, in-app messages, and more. As new channels arise or come into favor with customers, marketers have to acquire new areas of expertise, and fast. Case in point: LinkedIn’s yearly ranking of the top skills that get job-seekers hired has seen the most in-demand marketing skills change from year to year.

It’s no secret that different channels have different guidelines. In fact, we’ve written several how-to posts for getting started in mobile email marketing, push notifications, in-app messaging, and web push notifications, to name a few. If you’re wondering if there’s anything else you can do besides study to up your marketing game as you branch out to new channels, it may be time to consider predictive analytics.

How to launch a new marketing channel faster

Predictive analytics tools leverage customer data to predict future behavior and automate the selection and sending of the most successful campaigns. So while you’re working at becoming a pro at a new channel, you can get up and running much faster by using a predictive tool to help you optimize communications to the right people, at the right time, with the right message, regardless of which channel is new to you.

Do away with preconceived notions

There are a lot of marketing myths. While some are likely based in truth (for some customers for some companies), take these with a grain of salt. With predictive analytics tools, patterns and likelihoods that are undetectable to the human eye or insight (especially early on) become seen. A toolset like this will help you connect with your customers in the best and most relevant ways, based on both their individual behavior and overall audience interactions.

Don’t worry about what you might not yet know

Predictive tools, as part of a marketing automation platform, will use customer behavior to shape the best interactions between your customers and your messaging. Don’t know what time of day or day of the week performs best? Don’t know which call to action or image will be the most compelling? Don’t worry about getting it all 100% correct before hitting “send.” Appboy’s Intelligence Suite, for example, is not only designed to help marketers send messages right at the moment of peak engagement at the individual level for push notifications, email, and in-app messages, it also helps determine which campaign elements, including messaging and design, are driving more engagements.

Looking ahead

There’s one more advantage of predictive tools to cover: if you watch your results and analyze which campaigns are performing best, over time, you’ll be able to glean best practices for your own brand. You’ll start to gain insights that will help you understand your users, what makes them unique, what their interactions with your brand look like in this new channel. From there, you can map out a strategic plan for continuing to use the channel in the future.