Since the term ‘real-time marketing’ was first introduced in 1995 by marketing guru Regis McKenna, it has long been regarded as both a slick marketing philosophy and a controversial concept, which is constantly being developed by business and academia. It advocates continuous data capture and a commitment to understanding the ever-changing needs of individual customers as well as a need to engage them with personalised offers in the right place and at the right time.
What’s so great about real-time marketing? Traditionally it would take weeks or months to carefully plan and implement a campaign based on the annual or seasonal marketing calendar. But today’s consumers have an increasing knowledge and power and are no longer likely to wait for an age to let your delicately planned and produced TV commercials to tell them what to buy.
Consumers are constantly moving targets who annoyingly won’t co-operate with your established marketing calendar. From the newly-registered online shopper ‘stella123@gmail.com’ who is browsing several fashion sites at 2am and wondering if she can find a party dress for Friday night, to Peter Jones who’s looking for an alternative to his current mobile phone contract, which is due to expire in three days.
In order to acquire ‘stella123@gmail.com’ or retain Peter Jones before they are enticed by a competitor’s offer, the marketer is expected to constantly catch up with the customer footprint, obtain intelligence and deliver exactly what they want, when they want it; in real-time. Sounds like a job for a character somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter. So how can you accomplish this?
In the age of big data and data-driven marketing, real-time marketing has been reinvigorated. An extensive amount of customer data, combined with cutting-edge technology, has transformed real-time marketing from an academic concept into a feasible technique in practice. In order to deploy dynamic decision-making at an individual level, an enhanced view of the customer is required and the right data should be distributed to a companies’ marketing environment in real-time.
Real-Time Marketing is often triggered when a new customer record enters your CRM system providing basic information or PII data (i.e. Personally Identifiable Information), e.g. name and e-mail address. Since you will need additional information from a 3rd party data supplier to enhance your understanding about this customer, the first step is to accurately find the individual within the reference database (i.e. 3rd party) in real-time so as to pull out the relevant data for the right person.
Companies face a challenge in judging the authenticity of data and preventing fraud immediately when they receive customer information. However, it would not be difficult to determine whether a record is valid or not when a reliable data matching process has been completed by comparing the incoming record in your CRM database with its counterpart in the robust and trustworthy reference database. Additional technologies such as matching IPs with the addresses provided or recorded for that individual are also essential.
After the customer record is validated, it is vital to add breadth and depth, with additional information, to your limited knowledge on every customer. You need to do this for every prospect who enters your CRM system or leaves a footprint on your marketing environment (e.g. cookies that indicate their online behaviour and intent). The supplementary data and insights can be socio-demographic, lifestyle and behavioural data and also predictive segmentation data that effectively reflect the customer’s real life. With real-time data enhancement accomplished, decisions can be made on targeting, segmentation and personalisation of your marketing offer, message, creative and channel. All these data and results can be distributed to your marketing environment in a timely manner.
So, Real-Time Marketing is not a chapter from a story book after all. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that in this the age of big data, it’s a reality happening right now!
By Yanbin Wu, Product Marketing Associate at Acxiom.
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