For those who are new to the concept, real-time marketing is the process of engaging an audience with content and advertising using relevant events or offers that are specifically targeted and personalized for the prospect or client’s current profile and needs. It is becoming one of the most utilized strategies for retailers, and for good reason. Our clients are typically experiencing an average 18% increase in conversion rates and a 23% increase in average order value. In addition, merging the real-time approach with social as networks have become inescapable and dominate our attention and time, the logic is simple: Why wouldn’t you use these events and strategies to help sell your products?
As great as real-time marketing can be, it takes some work to get it right. You have to act fast and act smart, and unfortunately the two don’t often go hand-in-hand when it comes to marketing. Our answer to this is that we’ve built a service that helps retailers make intelligent sales offers, executing smart strategies that leverage the concept of big data; simplifying the entire process. To really be successful, it’s important to have a real-time marketing plan in place so you’re ready to go when the time comes.
Before jumping into how to be successful in real-time marketing, consider some of the other benefits of the strategy:
First, real-time marketing is great for increasing order value and helping customers enjoy a better all-around experience. Spending time and resources to come up with smart offers while targeting customers more effectively and intelligently can help create a better overall experience that can lead to more engagement for customers; possibly turning them into repeat customers and also increasing sales volume and order value.
Second, You can also have a lot of fun with your real-time marketing strategies. It always helps to be tuned in at all times on social media because you have no idea when a potential opportunity can arise. Take this Jim Beam tweet, for example, from the 2013 Super Bowl when the stadium experienced a blackout:
That’s simple, fun and incredibly relevant and timely. Something like that should elicit a lot of engagement and shares, increasing the range of your company and appealing to the specific target audience at the time—football fans.
With the holiday season upon us, real-time marketing may be at an all-time high. There’s a natural tie-in for any store or company this time of year because it’s so easy to create memes or sponsored posts to help advertise your latest deal / event / product, etc. However, this time of year also brings about more competition. Many companies are offering deals and specials and releasing new products, so it could be easy to get lost in the shuffle.
This is where Fanplayr can come into play to help ecommerce businesses find success. Fanplayr is powerful for segmenting site visitors and can help you deliver your products to the right customers, eliminating some of the hassle and difficulties they experience in finding the right items during holiday shopping – narrowing their focus. In other words, you can use Fanplayr’s feature set in three major ways:
To analyze visitor traffic. This helps yousee where and how customers are getting to your site, who they are, where they’re from, their click behavior, time since add to cart, cart abandonment rate, conversion stage, total time on site and many other relevant metrics for studying your visitors. With that information, you can also gain insight into how to convert visitors into actual paying and repeat customers.
Utilize data points to segment site visitors. Our service helps narrow down the focus for your real-time marketing campaign, differentiating from first-time customers to repeat customers to more specific demographics like area of the country (or world), type of customer, family status, purchase history, etc. These kinds of details can not only help hone in on potential customers by hitting specific groups of people with exactly what they’re searching for, but segmenting site visitors can also turn a repeat customer into an upsell, convincing them to purchase more items or products that are more expensive than the ones that initially brought them to your site.
Present targeted offers and optimize your sales campaigns. Pretty self explanatory, but consider the example below.
Let’s take a shoe or clothing store company for example. At any point in the year, the company can market everyday products like jeans, shirts or jackets. But with winter upon us, it makes sense to hammer home heavy apparel like big jackets, scarves, knit hats, gloves, etc. Earmuffs might be a great item for a businessperson who only has to walk outside when walking to and from the office, but a construction worker who spends most of his/her day outside would be better served with an actual hat. This is where smart targeted offers can help you earn more customers.
Real-time marketing is powerful for executing intelligent sales strategies that compliment all aspects of your marketing campaigns responding to seasons, demand, social media and more. In addition, aligning your social media messages or advertising with the interests of avid skiers, for example, could bring that customer into the site for one product and lead them to fill their cart with extra, unplanned products like a new hat or state-of-the-art ski goggles; thus turning that one customer into an upsell and a potential repeat customer. It’s a focus on giving the customer precisely what he/she needs at that moment versus running ads en masse hoping that the “fish will bite the bait”. Instead execute with certainty with a clear and accountable focus on conversion.
The moral of the story is this: Real-time marketing can help set your company apart if done right, so it’s important to keep things current and fresh; converging social media and other inbound marketing strategies with intelligent targeting onsite.
Want to learn how your business can take full advantage of real-time marketing and see it in action for yourself? Request a free demo of our service and we’d be happy to get you on board.