Marketers’ Views of What Qualifies as Real-Time Marketing

March 27, 2014

Evergage-What-Qualifies-as-Real-Time-Marketing-Mar2014A recent survey from Econsultancy found respondents claiming an average uplift in conversion rates of 26% from real-time marketing activities. But what constitutes real-time marketing? A recent study [download page] from Evergage examines the attitudes of a small (114) subset of digital marketers around the world, finding that of the options listed, most identified real-time marketing as personalizing content or creative in response to customer interactions (76%) and responding to customers in the context of their web interaction (74%). Respondents were similarly inclined to view real-time marketing as responding to trends and specific current events in social media (68%) and live website chat (66%).

Overall, roughly three-quarters of respondents believe that they’re using real-time marketing today, most commonly via social (48%), website (45%) and email (39%).

There seems to be fairly broad agreement about the benefits of real-time marketing. In the Evergage survey, 81% cited increased customer engagement as a perceived main benefit, with many also pointing to an improved customer experience (73%) and increased conversion rates (59%). Those latter two were the top benefits in Econsultancy’s recent survey, which did not include customer engagement as an option.

But the survey results differed when it came to the main obstacles of implementing real-time marketing. For the Evergage respondents, lack of resources (43%) and the time to implement (39%) were seen as greater hindrances than others such as lack of knowledge/skills (30%) and relating data to customers (27%). Company respondents to Econsultancy’s survey, though, were most likely to see the lack of a unified customer database as their biggest obstacle, with agency respondents most concerned with the lack of knowledge/skills.

Other Findings:

  • 35% of Evergage survey respondents feel that real-time marketing is either very or extremely important to their organizations this year.
  • 4 in 10 say real-time marketing is in their budgets for the coming year.
  • Among those who have implemented real-time marketing, 36% measure ROI.

About the Data: The survey was conducted in association with The Realtime Report and was conducted among 114 digital marketers across 18 countries, though primarily from the US. Close to two-thirds of respondents came from organizations with revenues of less than $25 million.

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