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and wonders: what is real-time marketing? Do we deliver content within seconds? Milliseconds? Even faster?
It may sound like marketers have to live in the Oscar nominee’s world Everything everywhere at once. Not necessary. What matters is that you reach your customers when they need to be achieved, with the right experience. Real-time marketing doesn’t mean always having all the answers, but rather giving customers what they need, when they need it.
Let’s look at the concept of real-time marketing and show some of the ways leading brands use it to win customers.
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What is real-time marketing and how is real-time data used?
A search for “real-time marketing” reveals a grab bag of definitions. They range from vague (“responding systematically to your customers”) to prescriptive (“focusing on… customer feedback”). It seems like no one knows 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 immediately after it is captured. Those are milliseconds. For example, the GPS on your phone records 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 on it right away. This is especially true in marketing, when the customer determines the journey. Real-time doesn’t have to mean right now. It delivers the information when the end user needs it. That could be seconds or even hours later.
Travel and hospitality is a very time-sensitive matter. If a customer’s digital profile is currently inaccurate, it could lead to unfortunate events. When this happens, a passenger misses their flight or doesn’t get the right seat – and airs their grievances on social media.
When a customer changes their seat or flight through the airline’s app or website, they expect this to be reflected in their experience immediately. When they later go to a kiosk or service desk, or call customer service, they expect – reasonably – that the service employee is aware. The customer also likely assumes that the airline will not send him irrelevant emails or offers.
This example shows us the difference between real-time data and real-time marketing. Real-time systems must update customer profiles immediately. On the other hand: real time marketing should be done at the speed that suits the customer – whether that’s today, in five minutes or next week.
This impacts the back-end data processing systems and resource requirements of marketers.
When the customer is on the website or app, he expects his 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 it doesn’t impact the customer experience.
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What do marketers mean when they say “real-time”?
In most cases, when marketers say real-time, that’s what you really mean right time. What exactly is real-time marketing? It’s about delivering the right data at the right time, to the right systems better contact with customers.
- Right-time is doing what it takes to make every moment count for the customer.
- Real-time is the collection and processing of data without delay.
The only reason to make this distinction is that there can be large technical and organizational costs associated with imposing real-time demands on the marketing team. Some teams have the resources to handle this, others 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 is needed elsewhere.
How can you set your real-time data priorities? It helps to remember that marketing has two basic modes:
- Answers: You respond to customers while they are already involved. They’re on your website, in your app, and browsing a kiosk in your store.
- Inspire: You are trying to get the attention of customers and prospects when they may not be thinking about you. You send emails with offers, show ads on Facebook and Instagram, etc.
In most cases, it is the ‘Respond’ mode where you need to address customer concerns quickly. On the other hand, most ‘Inspire’ activities are pre-planned and take advantage of complete and curated data that does not require a hyper-warp speed investment.
But in some cases, real-time responses can actually be counterproductive. Get an abandoned cart email. Not many of us would calmly respond to a reminder email (or, worse, a text message) just a few milliseconds after we decided to leave. That’s 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. By upgrading your customer data platform to one built on real-time data, you can ensure you get the answers your customers want, when they want them.
By doing this, you will not only ensure happier customers, but you will also improve your bottom line in a cost-efficient way. What is real-time marketing other than a timely way to meet customer needs?
For example, a customer might make a purchase on an e-commerce website, which puts them in a high-value segment. The segment change can cause that person to immediately start 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 Data cloud, our CDP that uses real-time data to make real-time marketing easier for businesses. By making the most of real-time data, you can improve the customer journey.
Anyone considering a CDP to support real-time data management should ask themselves how well it will support their “right-time” requirements. It may not be enough for parts of the customer journey to happen in real time. For example:
- First-hand data: Many companies already have one wealth of first-hand dataand it should be easy to leverage 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 quick signals from the real-time CDP.
- Partnerships: Reliable and easy-to-use integrations with key partners also help eliminate friction in the data transfer process that requires third parties (such as for data enrichment, media activation and auditing). For example, we recently announced integrations with Snowflake, Amazon SageMakerMicrosoft Azure and others on the AppExchange.
Any lingering confusion about what is and isn’t real-time becomes less important 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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