When asking yourself, what is real-time marketing? Are we delivering content in seconds? milliseconds? Even faster?
It may seem like marketers need to live in the world of Oscar contender Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not necessarily. What matters is that you reach your customers when you need to get there, with the right experience. Real-time marketing isn’t so much about having all the answers all the time, it’s about giving customers what they need, when they need it.
Let’s look at the concept of real-time marketing and show some ways major brands use it to win customers.
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What is real-time marketing and how does it use real-time data?
A search for “real-time marketing” reveals a bag of definitions. They range from the vague (“systematically responding to your customers”) to the prescriptive (“focus on… customer feedback”). Nobody seems to know what time it is.
Let’s start with the difference between real-time data and real-time marketing. Real-time data is processed and available for use right after it is captured. That’s milliseconds. For example, your phone’s GPS captures your location and recommends a driving route in real time.
But while it’s important to capture and process data quickly, it’s not always necessary to act immediately. This is especially true in marketing, when the customer drives the journey. Real time doesn’t have to mean right now. It is delivering the information when the end user needs it. This could happen seconds or even hours later.
Travel and hospitality is a very time-sensitive business. If a customer’s digital profile is not accurate at this point, it can lead to unfortunate events. When this happens, a passenger misses their flight or doesn’t get the right seat and airs their complaints on social media.
When a customer changes their seat or flight on the airline’s app or website, they expect it to appear immediately in their experience. When they next go to a kiosk or service desk, or call customer service, they expect, quite reasonably, that the service agent will be up to speed. The customer is also likely to assume that the airline will not send them irrelevant emails or offers.
This example shows us the difference between real-time data and real-time marketing. Real-time systems should update customer profiles immediately. On the other hand, real-time marketing should be done at the speed that is right for the customer, whether it’s today, in five minutes, or next week.
There are implications for back-end data processing systems and vendor resource requirements.
When the customer is on the website or app, they expect their actions to be processed in milliseconds (less than a second). But there’s no reason why the contact center can’t be updated in seconds and the email system in minutes, right?
Managing response rate requirements can reduce costs and complexity, as long as they don’t impact the customer experience.
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What do marketers mean when they say “real-time”?
Most of the time, when marketers say real-time, what you really mean is the right time. What exactly is real-time marketing? It’s delivering the right data at the right time, to the right systems better connect with customers.
The right moment is doing what it takes to make every moment count for the customer. In real time data is being collected and processed without delay.
The only reason for making this distinction is that there can be significant technical and organizational costs to imposing real-time requirements on the marketing team. Some teams have the resources to handle it and some don’t.
It’s more important to make strategic investments in the systems that need to be real-time (for example, your personalization platform and customer data platform (CDP)) and understand what’s required elsewhere.
How can you set your real-time data priorities? It is useful to remember that marketing has two basic modalities:
answer: You are reacting to customers when they are already engaged. They’re on your website, in your app, browsing a kiosk in your store.
to inspire: You’re trying to get the attention of customers and prospects when they might not be thinking about you. Send emails with offers, show ads on Facebook and Instagram, etc.
In most cases, it’s the “Respond” mode that needs you to address customer concerns quickly. On the other hand, most “Inspire” activities are pre-planned and benefit from complete and curated data that do not require the investment of hyper-warp speed.
But in some cases, real-time responses can even be counterproductive. Catch an abandoned cart email. Not many of us would calmly react to a reminder email, or even worse, a text, just a few milliseconds after deciding to leave. This is what we mean when we talk about real-time marketing.
What can you do with a CDP using real-time data?
When you make decisions based on real-time data, you can respond to customers in a way that makes sense to them. Upgrading your customer data platform to one based on real-time data can help ensure you have the answers your customers want, when they want them.
Doing this not only makes customers happier, but also improves your bottom line in a cost-effective way. After all, what is real-time marketing but a timely way to meet customer needs?
For example, a customer may make a purchase on an e-commerce website that places them in a high-value segment. The segment change can immediately trigger that person’s entry into a journey tailored to high-value customers. You can then target them with the right ad the next time they scroll through Instagram.
We recently announced it data cloud, our CDP that uses real-time data to facilitate real-time marketing for businesses. Making the most of real-time data can help you improve customer journeys.
Anyone considering a CDP to support real-time data management should ask themselves how well it will support their “just-in-time” requirements. It may not be enough to have parts of the customer journey in real time. For example:
First party data: Many companies already have one first party data pooland it should be easy to make use of it in real time with your CDP.
Data actions: Marketers have different ways to communicate with customers, and these different methods (or channels) need to receive fast signals from the CDP in real time.
Collaborations: Reliable and easy-to-use integrations with key partners also help remove friction in the data transfer process, where third parties are needed (such as data enrichment, media activation, and auditing). For example, we recently announced integrations with Snow flake, Amazon SageMakerMicrosoft Azure and others AppExchange.
Any lingering confusion about what is and isn’t real-time fades in importance when we ask a better question: What does the customer really need from us right now?
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Originally published on Salesforce.com on February 28, 2023.
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