Utilizing Real-Time Marketing To Increase Sales

With more and more data at our fingertips, the pressure for marketers to utilize that data to positively impact sales has also increased. 80% of CEOs expect marketers to drive company growth, according to a white paper by Hitachi Solutions, a global cloud-services systems integrator. And with real-time marketing, that means responding to customers in the moment, ensuring that their needs are met no matter what stage of their purchasing journey they are on, or which platform or device they are choosing to use to interact with the brand.

Let’s take a look at how companies can utilize real-time technology to optimize marketing spend and improve conversions.

Utilizing Data To Deliver Personalization

Data is the key to delivering personalized messaging and recommendations to consumers, and allows companies to address customers at the appropriate times in their purchasing journey, whether that be in any of the five stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, or advocacy.

When data is utilized effectively, it can reduce marketing costs while also providing a better customer experience – not to mention a seamless omnichannel experience as well.

“The end goal is to reduce noise in marketing communications and optimize the cost of campaigns. Real-time marketing has been the most influential trend in marketing over the past few years,” said Luke McGrath, Chief Technology Officer at Hitachi Solutions. “If we can identify the signals that customers are sending in real time, it allows us to deliver a more targeted and relevant message.”

Real-Time Technology Solutions

Real-time technology provides many benefits to retailers and consumers alike. From online chats that provide immediate customer service, to discount codes sent to customers as they abandon their online shopping carts, there are many ways that this technology is a win-win scenario. The key is to trigger content at the time that it will be the most effective to impact customer behavior.

This requires effective data collection from many different touchpoints – whether that be mobile, email, in-person at the point-of-sale, through social media, or any of the other platforms consumers frequent today.

“Brands should evaluate where real-time data will make the most impact versus the cost of providing the real-time data,” advises Deb Marotta, Vice President of Retail & CPG Industries for Hitachi Solutions.

Customer Experience

“The stakes are high for businesses to become in sync with consumer behavior and interests,” said Brittany LeMaro, Senior Architect and Capability Lead for Dynamics 365 Marketing at Hitachi Solutions Canada. She adds that customer experience is now more important than price and product when it comes to brand differentiation. “Customers are interacting with brands on a variety of channels including email, social, surveys, website and virtual chat. High-performing marketing teams are required to map out these touch points and create dynamic and personalized experiences that span the entire lifecycle of a contact. A poor experience has become easier to spot and more difficult to tolerate. Speed and convenience are baseline expectations.”

Real-time marketing doesn’t come without its challenges. First, there are security and compliance issues to consider any time data is being captured and utilized, and then there are also the technological demands of storing and processing the data. But when done right, the benefits far out weight any of the hurdles.

“Today, technology such as chatbots, virtual agents, customer data platforms, Delta Lakes, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and natural language processing give brands the tools to create personal interactions with their marketing,” says Marotta.