Digital Multi-channel Real-time Marketing Risks and Challenges

Digital Multi-channel Real-time Marketing Risks and Challenges

As with any solution there are challenges.  First and foremost, the key challenge is to deploy a real-time solution across all interaction channels.  This can be a daunting task, especially for long-time established companies.  However, having a tool that can be deployed incrementally is a must.  Rolling out real-time marketing solutions to the most used channels first is the most common approach, but challenges can be encountered.  Companies do not always have the same business drivers across functional areas or the same kind of success criteria.  Overcoming these types of challenges can be done, but it takes a good governance program and buy-in at all levels of the company.  The vast amounts of data, data access and data quality can also be a challenge for companies when implementing real-time marketing solutions.  These can be overcome with a focused and logical approach typically driven by marketing use cases that are prioritized.

Like challenges, risks are also top of mind when rolling out real-time marketing solutions.  A common risk that marketers tend to worry about is the real-time black box syndrome.  They sometimes view the real-time and self-learning nature of the solution as something they cannot control or fully understand.  While real-time analytical algorithms are in some cases built on proprietary or unique models, there are real-time reporting tools that can provide the insight as to why certain things are happening on a specific channel, with a specific customer segment or specific product offerings.  These risks can also be mitigated using business rules in conjunction with real-time marketing that lets marketers be in more control.

Put a strategy in place, execute that strategy and be willing to adjust and fine tune the strategy as the marketing environment and conditions change and the following benefits can be achieved:

• Better customer profiling and targeting
• Self-leaning analytics
• Flexible combination of rules, analytics, and arbitration
• Multi-channel communication execution
• Collaboration across divisions
• Real-time performance to make decisions in real-time
• Integration and access to enterprise systems
• Unprecedented ROI and payback

More on best practices in a future post...

Until then, enjoy the reading and have a great day!

Digital Multi-channel Real-time Marketing

Digital Multi-channel Real-time Marketing

Real-time marketing, if done right, will be the key driver to deliver a second-to-none experience to customers and visitors alike.  Using real-time solutions to ensure that all interaction channels are managed properly will allow a company to:

• Deliver the right message, offer, next best action or other marketing communication across all channels
• Provide channel consistency, to ensure customer preferences and previous interactions are holistically managed
• Improve customer satisfaction (CSat) and net promoter scores (NPS)
• Drive brand awareness and promote a positive brand
• Determine neutral or negative sentiment and prepare a marketing campaign to change to positive sentiment
• Find the good, the bad and the ugly things about their products or brands

Furthermore, social media is allowing customers to be connected now more than ever.  These additional channels are demanding that companies interact in a new and different way; this new age digital consumer expects it.  Leveraging social channels in addition to traditional CRM channels (e.g. call center, web, kiosk, IVR, POS, set-top-box, e-mail, etc.) will allow a company to be ready for the wallet share that is controlled by the Gen X and Gen Y buyers.

Most marketers are still working in a world of RFM analysis (recency, frequency, monetary) commonly used to determine which customers are the best ones to market to and to find like prospects to try to acquire.  This approach assumes 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers.  While this has been a fine approach in the past, it inherently uses stale and data analysis that is typically done via batch processing, not taking into account contextual and moment-in-time data that is readily available using real-time solutions.  The key to real-time tools is the ability to build a customer/prospect profile in real-time and at the same time leverage contextual data about what that person is doing ‘now’.  Another key capability for real-time marketing is the notion of real-time arbitration.  Real-time arbitration selects and prioritizes communications based on likelihood of acceptance, benefit score, best expected benefit, or other custom decisioning methods. These types of capability are changing the way marketers think about their marketing programs, how to build awareness and ultimately how to close business.

More on the challenges and risks in a future post...

Until then, enjoy the reading and have a great day!