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CRM2Day suggests that real-time marketing, as it pertains to direct marketing initiatives, "encompasses many discrete activities, from data capture to offer development and targeting, to measurement and analysis." As a result, "each company must determine which discrete marketing activities are expected to be performed in real time." Moreover, when companies focus on a real-time marketing initiative, they are often concerned with "one or more of the following: real-time data capture, real-time insight development, and lastly,
real-time interaction enablement."

That's quite a mouthful. But it's thorough. In layman's terms, I like to define
real-time marketing as the ability to bring the product catalog to life and create a personalized shopping experience for each consumer. Effectively, this requires leveraging customer data along with order history, product information, inventory data, catalog imagery, and other creative assets, to deliver customer specific content, as consumers demand it, across multiple points of contact.

At the recent National Retail Federation's Retail Innovation and Marketing conference, real-time marketing was an underlying theme to such topics as customer retention, as well as adjusting to a new world where the consumer dictates both how they want to be sold to and how they interact with a merchant. With real-time marketing, merchants are now able to be more accessible to consumer inquiries and demands, as well as have the ability to tailor the marketing event so that it is both relevant to the consumer and in line with current merchandising and marketing objectives. For instance, here are just a few real-time capabilities that can be valuable to both the merchant and the customer using real-time marketing and merchandising:

• Market basket analysis/product recommendations
• Cross-sell/upsell
• Promote specific products / product categories
• Remind customers of abandoned shopping cart items, as well as items in gift registries and wishlists
• Real-time, inventory-overstock marketing
• Exclusive product offerings
• Limited-time promotions like deal of the day/week
• Targeting most-frequent/most-valued customers
• Real-time best-sellers list
• Real-time customer reviews
• Integrate social media/peer product recommendations and commentary

Additionally, given advances in print-on-demand technology and variable data printing, this type of personalized outreach is no longer limited to the Web. In essence, print-on-demand enables merchants to bring the suggestive selling and product recommendation model from the web over to print. In fact, another emerging trend discussed at the NRF event was using offline media as a means to drive online engagement. In my view this means integrating suggestive selling and target marketing with bar codes, purls, coupon codes, and other unique triggers to increase engagement online where the retailer can offer even more personalized and relevant content. This is an important aspect of real-time marketing, for it is the triggers that provide the necessary tracking and measurement that yields ROI analysis.

Customer retention is becoming priority number one for many retailers. As a result, real-time marketing practices will ensure each consumer is treated individually, facilitating an intimate connection with the brand. By leveraging robust e-commerce platforms and next generation marketing solutions, merchants can ride the crest of real-time marketing to provide a concierge like experience for frequent and loyal customers, resulting in long-term value and a healthy bottom line.

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About the Author: Erik is Co-founder and CEO of PackStream