Words by Redickaa Subrammanian
Think about the last promotional message you received from a shopping app. Chances are you either ignored it, or it quickly got lost and forgotten about among your daily deluge of notifications.
Not surprising given that one study found people receive an average of 46 phone notifications per day. So, how can brands realistically reach customers through a channel that runs such a high risk of being ignored – or worse, causing customers to opt out of notifications altogether?
Whenever brands talk about real-time marketing, it’s typically in the sense of speed and rolling out new promotions quickly, but this is a narrow interpretation. The real value of real-time still remains unrealised by many brands. This is why in a recent study by Resulticks, 59 percent of local brands in the Philippines highlighted real-time marketing as a priority in 2019.
If done right, real-time marketing isn’t about speed, but creating timely and contextually relevant messages that resonate with audiences. And of course, this isn’t just limited to in-app notifications, but across all marketing channels. The first step is understanding the concept of a rules-based engine – i.e. because of this, you get that – which ties into what customers actually want
In a nutshell, the foundation for real-time marketing is actually the interaction between external cues (such as price drops, seasonal holidays and new product launches) and customer journey data (including purchase history, shopping carts, search histories and customer preferences). The most basic real-life example of this interaction is a store giving a discount on umbrellas when it starts to rain.
The challenge here is creating a rule that is useful to customers, and creative enough to grab their attention. Take a travel app, for example. If a customer is known to frequent Bangkok regularly, and the hotel they stayed at during the last two visits is running a discount on accommodation, the brand can set up a rule to automatically share this promotion with the customer. This ensures the message is both contextually relevant and is timely for the customer.
But taking a step back – in order to do this well, brands need to first understand their customers better. After all, is there any point in running a discount on umbrellas when it’s raining when your customers simply choose to stay home instead?
The challenge is less in finding the data, but consolidating and analysing it to be able to create valuable insights from a unified customer database. Once this has been done, brands should invest in an analytics engine to provide context on the data and to build out the customer journey.
With these accurate customer profiles, you can then identify event triggers for the rule-based system. These triggers could be generated by your customers, such as when they abandon their online shopping cart or search for a specific item. Event triggers can also be external to a customer’s journey, such as new product launches, promotions, price drops, holidays or inventory changes. In terms of execution – particularly at scale – having a single consolidated platform is essential to combine customer data, apply triggers and automate rules.
The creative challenge comes in matching triggers to your customers’ journey and deciding on the action to be activated. One way to consider this is to identify triggers that would signal a customer need, and then match that with a relevant action to help meet that need.
For example, a bank customer could change his relationship status from single to married, and perhaps other profile data indicates he is looking at properties. This signals that he potentially needs a housing loan for an upcoming property purchase. To meet this need, an automated marketing campaign on housing loans could be triggered and targeted at this customer. In the telco industry, another example could be a customer who usually travels during the school holidays, signalling that this individual could benefit from a travel data plan during the next school holiday. A promotional message can be triggered in the lead up to the break, meeting their immediate needs.
In both these examples, the marketing outreach is both timely and contextually relevant to the customer. This not only drives the likelihood of sales conversions, but also reinforces overall branding.
The more you display your understanding of a customer’s specific needs, the more willing they will be to listen to your offers the next time you reach out.
About the Author
Redickaa Subrammanian is the Co-founder and CEO of Interakt Digital Group and Resulticks. During her 25-year career as a global advertising, marketing and technology expert, she has developed winning strategies and campaigns for some of the world’s most respected brands. She holds an MBA from the State University of New York, Buffalo, was recognised as the 2013 Gold Stevie Award for Global Female Entrepreneur of the Year, and was named to Axial’s Growth 100 middle-market CEOs in the United States (2016).
