We live in a time where we can have become increasingly familiar with accessing persistent updates on the world and the status of our friends. One report says 80% of business buyers expect companies to respond and interact with them in real time. As consumers, we’ve also become accustomed to direct access to brands, interacting with them with the immediacy that used to be unique to person-to-person interactions.
These developments have made the use of real-time personalisation in marketing a dynamic and valuable tool for businesses to develop conversations and build lasting relationships with their customers.
Personalisation creates an experience that builds a consumer’s trust in brands, and real-time employment of these strategies enhances that bond. It means serving unique and relevant content that caters to a customer’s individual needs, with real-time marketing meaning delivering these engagements at the optimal time.
Real-time marketing in action
The travel industry, for example, is making good use of real-time marketing tactics.
Not too long ago, searching for a holiday was an unpredictable and frustrating process, with hotel and flight ticket prices constantly changing. Today, holidaymakers can be provided with consistently up-to-date information about pricing and availability in accommodations, delivering engaging, personalised offers and packages using relevantly retargeted ads, custom web pages and triggered messaging. Marketers can also drive purchases with timed offers and real-time availability updates to motivate action.
With triggered messaging alone (in this case, basket recovery messages for abandoned tickets), we have seen a travel company recoup millions in otherwise lost revenue.
Real-time strategies can be used during many stages of the customer journey to build loyalty. If a brand has data regarding a customer’s needs and interests, it can provide marketers with strategic opportunities to intelligently intervene in those journeys to ensure those needs can be met.
For example, did a customer view an item online that was out of stock? Consider notifying them once units are available. Has a customer previously purchased tickets to events at a venue? They might want traffic or parking updates so they’re able to plan ahead. Customers taking a ferry or airline may benefit from real-time weather data for their destination, while those considering larger purchases (such as a car, software or appliances) could benefit from a real-time chat option to discuss any questions they might have.
Real-time strategies can also prove useful to develop customer loyalty, such as enhancing a customer reward scheme. By implementing a real-time system that gives loyalty points to customers who reviewed its products or recommended them to others, it recognises and incentivises advocacy as well as build positive brand sentiment.
When it comes to the efficacy of real-time personalisation, the limits only reach as far as your creativity, and your ability to understand the experience from the customer perspective: to consider how real-time personalisation might have improved your own experiences as a buyer.
Though only one tier of a larger effective marketing strategy, real-time personalisation can make an immense difference, especially now, when customers are so accustomed to the seemingly ever-updating digital environment. More and more, we all expect our personal digital environments to conform to our minute-to-minute interests and needs, and real-time personalisation can allow a given brand to seize on that desire.
The want for total convenience is, of course, nothing new. However, real-time personalisation can now allow you to come closer to that experience for your customers than ever before. It would be a shame to let that opportunity go to waste.
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How Amazon’s weather personalisation tool spotlights a hot trend in marketing