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!
