3 Ways to Make Real-Time Marketing Work for Your Brand

For marketers, the notion of a “sales funnel” — where we could monitor customers and prospects from stage to stage through conversion — is all but obsolete. Today’s empowered consumer can move without warning between platforms, across devices, and more. They often come into contact with your brand in a variety of unpredictable ways and are essentially customizing customer journeys through their own actions.

What this means for the marketer is to be ready. Be ready with an engaging and positive customer experience — no matter how they interact with your brand — whether it’s in person, online, or via mobile. This will help drive engagement, as well as conversions, loyalty, and brand advocacy. To be ready, marketers must be able to access the insights gained through analytics in real-time, which is taking into account where, when, and how a customer is engaging with your brand.

Geolocation-Suggested Timing
Analytics can provide information on where your customers are located based on geolocation services. From there, you can decide whether it makes sense to contact them at that time. Are they watching movies at home? That may be a great time to send them messages — they are relaxed and able to pause their activities if they’re interested in your information. But, what if, instead, they are watching movies in theaters? That may not be a useful time to message them, as their attentions are focused somewhere other than their phones. Knowing where your customers are can help you understand whether your real-time messages will be seen — or overlooked.

Push Notifications
If you know some customers have been researching particular items, it may be well worth your time to send them push notifications when those items are on sale. They’ve already shown interest in these items and have been moving through the sales pipeline on their own. Using that data to help them — by saving both additional research time and money — can help you to convert to sales. Push notifications are strong ways to increase this conversion rate. To make things even more real-time, you can send push notifications by location when geolocation services indicate they are close to one of your brick-and-mortar stores.

Suggested Products
Another great way to implement real-time marketing is through suggested products. If you know that people in their audience group tend to eventually buy “product x” or always buy “product y” in conjunction with “product x,” you can capitalize on this audience information. Showcasing related items — while your customers are already warm leads who are doing their own research — can help to convert sales as well as increase the average spend per customer. This is a great way to use analytics to understand which products certain audiences prefer and to help guide them to those choices as seamlessly as possible.

There are so many ways to implement real-time marketing well and create positive, personalized brand experiences for your customers. The question before you is not whether you need to start marketing in real-time — it’s how you should begin implementing a real-time marketing strategy. There are some critical elements to making this work, including transparency and data stitching. Find out more about implementing real-time marketing solutions by downloading our whitepaper or contacting us to learn more.

For more real-time marketing tips, be sure to read through our full whitepaper, “Making the Most of Your Customer’s Journey in Real-Time.”

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/3-ways-make-real-time-marketing-work-brand/