Make Friends with Real-Time Marketing Just in Time for Back to School

Real-time marketing allows marketers to capture real-time consumer interactions to deliver contextual and personalised experiences. However, it’s not an easy marketing strategy. As Gartner noted, marketers still struggle to stay relevant in managing real-time customer engagement. The challenges faced today are not just around data and understanding behaviours, but in taking the right actions with the right tools to actually deliver real-time actions at scale. 

Marketing in real-time helps to extend cross-channel orchestration, armed with capabilities to listen and react to user signals on web, online store or mobile app. With these insights, marketers can then decide on the next best action and trigger actions in real-time as part of their overall marketing strategy. Some key actions marketers can take are personalising the customer experience, supporting online actions via messaging and ensuring the right incentives are in place for each user.

Getting ‘schooled’ in true personalisation

The opportunity to ‘wow’ customers with truly personalised, back-to-school content and products that fit their distinct needs starts with data. However, initiatives that only purport to be personalisation are commonly limited to remedial efforts like retargeting ads, knowing your customer’s first name or employing a curation algorithm. It’s these techniques that have led to personalisation efforts that yield less-than-impressive results. They fail to prove ROI and leave consumers feeling apathetic about the personalisation they receive. 

Even more, they leave consumers feeling annoyed. According to Cheetah Digital’s 2022 Consumer Trends Index, there’s been a near 60% increase in U.K. consumers who feel frustrated with a brand whose personalisation initiatives fail to recognise their unique desires and needs. 

True personalisation is at the core of relationship marketing. It’s about delivering value and relevancy while creating meaningful experiences to individuals based on their own preferences and data – not third-party or inferred data that was likely gathered by purchase or tracking and snooping. According to the same Cheetah Digital report, U.K. consumers are rewarding brands that make personalisation a priority with more than half saying they will trade personal and preference data to feel part of a brand’s community.

Best-in-class marketing

The changes in the buying journey from linear to multichannel have sparked a need for retailers to better understand their customers’ behaviours, past histories and what action they will take in the future. Without this understanding, retail marketers routinely fall short of providing highly relevant, personalised and contextually aware offers and messages.

To truly turn analytics into action you shouldn’t have to ask another team or department about your campaigns’ performance. All attributes, metrics and dashboards should be in both accessible and actionable formats. Adding AI and ML to give a jolt to personalisation efforts, and natively understand and anticipate customer behaviour can take your program to the next level.

The power of intelligent automation, conversational UI and machine learning lies in their ability to help scale and automate the offer selection and targeting process. However, recent research from Gartner indicates that a mere 17% of Retail CMOs are realising this.