Have you ever wondered how some companies are able to consistently send millions of highly targeted, personalised emails in realtime? The very nature of email makes sending realtime, personalised messages a challenge for any company. The key to all realtime marketing is speed, but the very infrastructure of email marketing is based on a series of time-consuming tasks, such as list creation, data syncing and batch delays. Each activity introduces another delay, all of which can quickly turn a realtime marketing opportunity into a missed one. If you try to add personalisation to the mix, expect more delays. The more personalised a message is, the more time consuming it is to prepare. So, how are some enterprise marketers managing to send relevant, highly personalised emails in real-time?
The secret
You may have attributed a company’s email marketing success to a huge marketing budget or a massive marketing team the size of a small army, but this only takes a company so far in eliminating roadblocks to personalisation and the inherent delays that are built into the email marketing process. The real secret often lies in how these companies manage and access their customer data.
Years of fragmented marketing have resulted in data silos that make realtime, personalised email marketing a pipe dream for many companies. The fragmentation is often a result of the heavy reliance on cloud software as a service (SaaS) to manage customer data. With every new cloud platform deployed, a new database is created that updates independently and allows little flexibility in the way data can be integrated. The alternative to data silos is to house data in a centralised database that can be accessed by various cloud applications via hybrid cloud computing.
Despite the benefits of centralising data, it is still far from the norm. A 2015 report by The Relevancy Group found only 37 per cent of enterprise organisations share a centralised data repository. However, marketers who centralise their data gain a unified view of the customer journey that paves the path for personalised, true realtime email marketing. Below are three benefits of centralising your data as it relates to realtime email marketing and micro-personalisation.
1) Be ready for real-time marketing opportunities without having to predict the future
Unless you have a crystal ball, you may find it difficult to choose the right data to upload to your email service provider in preparation for the next, impromptu, real-time marketing opportunity. It’s nearly impossible to push all of your data to an email service provider when you factor in inventory or purchase information that requires constant synchronisation. Even if all of your customer data could be uploaded to an email service provider, the data security concerns alone would stop most companies from pushing all of their data to the cloud. As a result, marketers often find themselves cherry-picking data to be uploaded to a SaaS provider for specific campaigns, which may work well for planned campaigns, but becomes tricky when trying to take advantage of unpredictable, real-time marketing opportunities.
The demands of real-time marketing mean data isn’t always uploaded to the email service provider when you might need it. By the time marketers are able to get data uploaded and synced in the cloud, it can be days or even weeks old. Not exactly what you would call real-time marketing. To avoid the delays caused by syncing and uploading large amounts of data, structure your database as a hybrid model that allows your email service provider to tap directly into your centralised database without having to sync or store data in the cloud. A hybrid model gives you full access to all of your data so whenever a real-time marketing opportunity arises you do not have to spend time uploading data that might not be stored with your email service provider. With a hybrid email marketing model, you no longer have to predict the future and anticipate exactly what data you might need to be located in the cloud at any given time.
2) Segment based on data too sensitive to store in the cloud
Is there customer data you would like to use to send micro-personalised messages, yet is off limits because it is too sensitive, or perhaps against regulations, to store in the cloud with an email service provider? SaaS marketing tools that make personalisation and data segmentation possible often elicit security concerns related to uploading and storing sensitive customer data in the cloud, but data security and personalisation don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
It is possible to create highly personalised messages based on sensitive customer data without uploading the sensitive data to the cloud. The dynamics of how you segment data change when the segmentation takes place behind your company’s secure firewall in a centralised database and an on-premises email solution. You would probably never dream of sending data with your customer’s credit scores, purchase history, or medical records to the cloud, but that doesn’t mean you can’t segment customers based on sensitive categories that already exist within your database and then send only the necessary information (sans the sensitive data) to your email service provider for processing and delivery.
3) Improve personalisation and real-time marketing with a unified global customer view
We’ve all had it happen. We make a transaction with a company, and then we receive an email that makes it appear as if the transaction never took place. For instance, I recently received an email from an event venue asking me to renew seasons tickets that I renewed the week before—a real-time marketing fail. A key step toward real-time email marketing means transitioning from disconnected customer interactions to a unified view of customer engagement, but fragmented marketing means many companies have data stored in silos that prevent marketers from having a complete view of customers. The result is customers often receive messages that are irrelevant to their situation.
The adoption of multiple platforms that all require their own database limits how organisations can use their data. For businesses that want to successfully incorporate personalised, real-time marketing into their strategy, storing all facets of marketing data in a single database is a must, but customer data is not the only data marketers need to access. Marketers may also need access to data such as inventory levels that update in real-time, geo-location data, shipment tracking data, etc. In fact, your success in real-time marketing depends upon the accessibility of your entire data set, not just customer data.
So now you know. While a huge marketing budget or a massive marketing team the size of a small army doesn’t hurt, the real secret to personalised real-time marketing lies in how you manage and access your customer data.
