Real-time marketing

Last updated

Real-time marketing is marketing performed "on-the-fly" to determine an appropriate or optimal approach to a particular customer at a particular time and place. It is a form of market research inbound marketing that seeks the most appropriate offer for a given customer sales opportunity, reversing the traditional outbound marketing (or interruption marketing) which aims to acquire appropriate customers for a given 'pre-defined' offer. The dynamic 'just-in-time' decision making behind a real-time offer aims to exploit a given customer interaction defined by website clicks or verbal contact centre conversation. [1]

Contents

History

Real-time marketing techniques developed during the mid-1990s following the initial deployment of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions in major retail banking, investment banking and telecommunications companies. The intrinsic and prevailing 'heavyweight' nature of the key CRM vendors at this time, who were generally focused on major back and front office system integration projects, provided an opportunity for niche players within the campaign management application arena.

Solution delivery

The implementation of real-time marketing solutions through the late 1990s would typically involve a 10- to 14-week delivery project with 1-2 FTE expert consultants and often would follow an earlier outbound marketing solution implementation. This relatively lightweight delivery model had obvious appeal within the vendor sales cycle and customer procurement context but was ultimately to prove a disincentive for major systems integration services providers to partner with real-time marketing vendors.

Technical overview

Real-time marketing solution implementation classically involves the server-side installation of a multithreaded core decisioning application server / interaction transactional-biased schema and supporting client components such as a fat-client desktop campaign studio / rules editor, browser-based marketing user reporting interface and enterprise application APIs such as web services / Java components. Vendors typically will also provide legacy interfaces for COM, sockets and HTTP integration.

Vendor solution approaches to real-time learning naturally vary but commonly, the underlying models utilize a naive Bayesian probability classifier, recognizing that despite their apparently oversimplified assumptions, these classifiers have worked well in many complex real-world situations. To help gain acceptance with in-house specialist data mining stakeholders, the real-time solutions also support external model scores and execution within offer decision making.

The dotcom bubble 'bust' of 2000 inhibited the further development and implementation of item-based collaborative filtering techniques. Having been incorporated within real-time marketing solutions through the 1990s, these filtering techniques should have been immediately attractive to online retailers managing hundreds of thousands (or millions) of products as opposed to a retail bank with a hundred propositions across savings, credit card and mortgage product lines.

Marketing vision

Over time, it became apparent to solution vendors and maturing customers alike that 'traditional' outbound and emergent inbound marketing initiatives should be consolidated within a coherent and coordinated enterprise marketing strategy. To this end, a class of marketing application known as marketing resource management (MRM) which 'sits above' real-time marketing, began to emerge during the early 21st Century, albeit in a fairly bespoke and implementation-specific guise. The essence of this abstraction layer is that the MRM application orchestrates strategy, stakeholder sign-off, budgeting, program planning, campaign execution and effectiveness reporting across inbound real-time and outbound marketing disciplines.

Unrealized promise

The term "real-time marketing" has the potential weakness of self-limiting the underlying decisioning server capability to cross-sell and up-sell despite the observation that this particular function is generally the most compelling aspect of the application class. Vendors therefore found themselves re-branding real-time marketing products to suggest a more holistic appreciation of enterprise interaction decision management.

In some respects, these early real-time marketing customer implementations were ahead of their time despite acknowledged revenue realization within the early adopters. [2]

Hosted real-time marketing solutions are an obvious and increasingly prevalent means of provisioning organizational demand for this critical enterprise capability. A remaining challenge for such solution vendors is to fully convince enterprise clients that the customer data profile (often comprising up to 1000 source or derived attributes) involved in the decision making and targeting processes is fully secure. Packaged 'private' cloud solutions are already appearing alongside 'cloud sourcing' management consultancies.

Gartner's predictions for the Gartner Top 10 Technologies for 2011 [3] suggest that whatever the nomenclature, real-time marketing will continue to evolve, crucially to embrace mobile platforms underpinned by an awareness of customer context, location and social networking (collective intelligence) implications.

See also

Related Research Articles

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or another organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enterprise resource planning</span> Corporate task of optimizing the existing resources in a company

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of business management software—typically a suite of integrated applications—that an organization can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities. ERP systems can be local-based or cloud-based. Cloud-based applications have grown in recent years due to the increased efficiencies arising from information being readily available from any location with Internet access.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sales</span> Activities related to the exchange of goods

Sales are activities related to selling or the number of goods sold in a given targeted time period. The delivery of a service for a cost is also considered a sale. A period during which goods are sold for a reduced price may also be referred to as a "sale".

A management information system (MIS) is an information system used for decision-making, and for the coordination, control, analysis, and visualization of information in an organization. The study of the management information systems involves people, processes and technology in an organizational context. In other words, it serves, as the functions of controlling, planning, decision making in the management level setting.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the use of software and computer systems' architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.

Complex sales, also known as Enterprise sales, can refer to a method of trading sometimes used by organizations when procuring large contracts for goods and/or services where the customer takes control of the selling process by issuing a Request for Proposal (RFP) and requiring a proposal response from previously identified or interested suppliers. Complex sales involve long sales cycles with multiple decision makers. Multiple stakeholders and stakeholder groups contribute to every complex sale. These types of sales can take up to 8 to 18 months as multiple people from higher management are involved.

The eCRM or electronic customer relationship management coined by Oscar Gomes encompasses all standard CRM functions with the use of the net environment i.e., intranet, extranet and internet. Electronic CRM concerns all forms of managing relationships with customers through the use of information technology (IT).

Appointment scheduling software or meeting scheduling tools allows businesses and professionals to manage appointments and bookings. This type of software is also known as appointment booking software and online booking software.

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is a system of processes and software that enables organizations to centrally manage deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization. EFM systems typically provide different roles and permission levels for different types of users, such as novice survey authors, professional survey authors, survey reporters and translators. EFM can help an organization establish a dialogue with employees, partners, and customers regarding key issues and concerns and potentially make customer-specific real time interventions. EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting.

A service delivery platform (SDP) is a set of components that provides a service(s) delivery architecture for a type of service delivered to consumer, whether it be a customer or other system. Although it is commonly used in the context of telecommunications, it can apply to any system that provides a service. Although the TM Forum (TMF) is working on defining specifications in this area, there is no standard definition of SDP in industry and different players define its components, breadth, and depth in slightly different ways.

In information systems, applications architecture or application architecture is one of several architecture domains that form the pillars of an enterprise architecture (EA).

Next-best-action marketing, as a special case of next-best-action decision-making, is a customer-centric marketing paradigm that considers the different actions that can be taken for a specific customer and decides on the ‘best’ one. The Next Best Action is determined by the customer's interests and needs on one hand, and the marketing organization's business objectives and policies on the other. This is in sharp contrast to traditional marketing approaches that first create a proposition for a product or service and then attempt to find interested and eligible prospects for that proposition. The practice, direct marketing, is typically automated in the form of a campaign management tool, is often product-centric, and usually always marketing-centric.

Aptean CRM, formerly Pivotal CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) software system offered by Avolin, an enterprise software and service company headquartered in Austin Texas. Pivotal CRM includes software tools for sales force automation (SFA), marketing automation and lead management, and customer service automation, as well as partner management, mobile CRM, analytics and call scripting. Industry specific versions of the Pivotal CRM suite are also offered for several industries, including institutional asset management, mutual fund wholesaling, capital markets, commercial banking, private banking, home building and real estate, healthcare, and legal services, among others. Built on .NET Framework, Pivotal CRM embeds several commonly used Microsoft business products within the CRM system, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Data virtualization is an approach to data management that allows an application to retrieve and manipulate data without requiring technical details about the data, such as how it is formatted at source, or where it is physically located, and can provide a single customer view of the overall data.

Social CRM is the use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organizations to engage with their customers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Act-On</span> American software company

Act-On Software is a software-as-a-service product for marketing automation. The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon and was founded in 2008, originally retailing its software exclusively through Cisco, which provided $2 million in funding.

There are, in essence, three kinds of Cloud printing.

A software-defined perimeter (SDP), sometimes referred to as a 'black cloud' is a method of enhancing computer security. The software-defined perimeter (SDP) framework was developed by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) to control access to resources based on identity. Connectivity in a Software Defined Perimeter is based on a need-to-know model, in which device posture and identity are verified before access to application infrastructure is granted. The application infrastructure is effectively 'black', lacking visible DNS information or IP addresses. The inventors of these systems claim that a Software Defined Perimeter mitigates the most common network-based attacks, including: server scanning, denial of service, SQL injection, operating system and application vulnerability exploits, man-in-the-middle, pass-the-hash, pass-the-ticket, and other attacks by unauthorized users.

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations automate repetitive tasks and consolidate multi-channel interactions, tracking and web analytics, lead scoring, campaign management and reporting into one system. It often integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platform (CDP) software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Dynamics 365</span> Microsoft software

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an integrated suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications offered by Microsoft. Combines various functions such as sales, customer service, field service, operations, finance, marketing, and project service automation into a single platform.

References

  1. Haanstra, G., & Emmerik, M. van. (2000). Online scoring: A missing link in customer relationship management. Journal of Database Marketing, 7 (3), 275-279.
  2. Herschel, G., (2000). Spaarbeleg’s Contact Center Scores Real Time.
  3. Cooney, Michael (2011). "Gartner's Top 10 Tech Trends for 2012". itworldcanada.com. Retrieved November 3, 2011.