NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE CHANGING THE FACE OF PERSONALISATION

Recently, I presented at Marketo’s Marketers First virtual conference on the topic of new opportunities for marketers to provide integrated digital experiences. My session discussed the evolution of digital marketing and how new technologies have opened the door to real-time access to the customer journey across digital channels and devices – allowing for the creation of powerful personalized experiences.

Up until now, the path to action for marketers started with a report or dashboard, identifying a pattern, trend or anomaly, and then, manually taking an action. And while measuring the digital journey on each digital channel, using ad-hoc analysis, segmentation, scenario and path analysis are all foundational tools and here to stay, the playing field is changing. The demands on marketers today have mandated a new digital intelligence wave enabled by big data technologies that leverages predictive, real-time and action-oriented techniques.

Marketers can now collect and make sense of a massive volume, variety and velocity of data in the moment.  But collecting the data in real-time is only half the battle. Putting insights and data to work immediately is now critical to the success of targeting, personalisation and behavioral remarketing programs. The common data-driven methods of exporting and pushing a file-based list of your customer segments to your messaging or content partner results in a time lag between the event and when the action is taken. This delay stands in the way of a successful re-engagement with your customer because it is too late.

In-the-moment technologies are what drive this new wave of digital intelligence through a combination of visitor-level data and in-the-moment availability – enabling immediate action at the individual level. Push-APIs complete the solution by automatically pushing the data to the marketing or analysis program, removing any collection-to-action time delays. This combination of capabilities opens the door to truly data-driven and visitor-level engagement, ad targeting, social interaction, personalization and remarketing to drive as-it-happens action through machine-to-machine systems.

Therefore, the three key pieces needed to enable in-the-moment marketing are:

  • Visitor-level data with session, device and historical context
  • In-the-moment availability (milliseconds following the event)
  • Push-APIs, enabling machine-to-machine action systems

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is an early adopter of these new technologies. KLM recognized the need to identify and quickly retarget visitors who failed to complete a booking. Using a real-time stream of visitor-level data, KLM is able to segment its users based on cart abandonment behaviors in-the-moment. Then, through a connection with KLM’s email service provider, remarketing emails are automatically fired to these customers. The timely and personalised emails even include relevant booking details with deep links that let customers pick up right where they dropped off without re-creating their itineraries. Of the emails sent, KLM has seen a 34 percent higher open rate and a 94 percent higher click-through rate from these targeted messages.

Other Webtrends clients are using the same technology to create real-time dashboards and a whole host of other innovative uses for in-the-moment data. If you are looking for a real-time or in-the-moment intelligence system to produce timely AND relevant experiences for your customers, be sure to look for a solution that provides visitor-level data, sub-second data availability and actionable streams to ensure that you see the same kind of return that KLM has realized. Ask us how.

At each stage, behavioral data has become more democratized, and is now solidly in the hands of the marketing department in many cases.