Buzzwords, just like stereotypes or cliches, unfairly get a bad rep. Because whether you’re scrolling through your Twitter feed, reading a book, or meeting new people, the truth is that buzzwords, stereotypes, and cliches give you something so valuable it’s essential for our survival – the ability to make quick decisions, to act and react, when information is overloading, and time is of the essence.

They provide us with the ability to make… wait for it (#buzzword_warning!) – REALTIME DECISIONS.

There’s no surprise, then, that in digital marketing – where there’s too much data and decisions are made in nanoseconds – “realtime” has become the trendy, shiny technology everyone wants.

Still, when you do have the time to conduct proper research and make thoughtful evaluations, trendy things should always be thoroughly examined. You don’t want to catch the wrong wave.

That’s why you don’t want to throw all your focus on realtime marketing activities, that don’t take into consideration historical data, and ditch your scheduled campaigns altogether. Of course not.

But while the case for balancing types of data is clear – you’re still left with the numbers. And when it comes to realtime (triggered) marketing campaigns – they say things loud. And. Clear.

Winning Every (real)Time

Here at Optimove, we’re known as big advocates of data-driven and science-first approaches to CRM Marketing.

So, if previously we told you about the critical need to balance your realtime data with historical data, today is dedicated to showing you just how amazing realtime/triggered relationship marketing campaigns are. Because as much as people love talking about realtime data and triggered campaigns, in practice – most marketers are still behind on it. And perhaps seeing how off the charts these campaigns can be will help move a few of them in the right direction, towards this balance – and towards providing their customers with a better experience.

So, in order to do that, we analyzed six months of data from dozens of Optimove clients – both eCommerce and gaming companies – and more than a billion customer communications. Yes, billion with a B.

We compared realtime/triggered campaigns to your must-haves, run-of-the-mill scheduled campaigns, and the results are pretty staggering.

In Gaming, realtime campaigns achieved a whopping 44% open rate, which translated into a crazy 8% sent-to-click rate.

In eCommerce, the primary trend of much, much higher open rates was similar, which you can expect when sending a super timely campaign. However, another result was somewhat surprising as the CTR (open-to-click) was more than double (21% vs. 9%), alluding to the deeper engagement a relevant campaign can generate.

Now,PAIN we know – it’s not fair to compare realtime/triggered campaigns to scheduled ones. Because one type will always come with more context, a timed and immediate reaction to customer behavior, and the other will not. That’s why we have to give the proper credit to scheduled campaigns – they are still the bread and butter of every CRM Marketing operation. You can’t do relationship marketing properly without smart, segmented, and sharp welcome series, daily and weekly updates and deals, calendar/holiday campaigns, birthday/anniversary messages, long-term anti-churn strategies, reactivation campaigns, and more. As we said, they are must-haves.

But you can for sure do BETTER CRM Marketing by doing MORE smartly segmented realtime/triggered campaigns than you are doing today.

From the classic purchase/deposit/cart activity campaigns to the ones driven by softer activities such as submitting a negative review or visiting a specific page on your site – the ideas are endless. Of course, it’s up to you, your team, and the technology at your helm to imagine, create, execute, and measure them. But, one thing is almost inevitable – if you do them properly, you’ll quickly realize that in CRM Marketing, realtime is a buzzword worthy of its status.

Published on July 8th, 2021

Posted in

• Realtime Marketing

Tomer Aronheim

A Marketing Data Analyst at Optimove, Tomer joined the company back in early 2019 after doing some app development. A graduate of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Tomer is a true fan of sunglasses.