Sunday, December 14, 2008

Instantaneous Marketing Brings Results To Your Site

By Yasmine Tan

Instantaneous marketing is the value added service that is done by the many companies. Instantaneous marketing is good utilized tool by the organizations. The Instantaneous marketing is bout the online support system in which all the time people can communicate with the representative for some problem. At first glance, the business case for real-time marketing is a winner for most firms. By using customer data and analytics applications, companies can tailor their best offers to specific customer segments that actually want to receive them.

The reality, though, is that few companies have reached this ideal. It is not that the concept of real-time marketing is a failure. It is just that a number of business criteria must be in place for a real-time marketing initiative to work. Real-time marketing can add value to any company, But it only adds value in certain areas, and determining those areas can be a big challenge. There are some obvious cases in which real-time marketing clearly is not suitable. Manufacturing firms, for example, would have little interest in deploying such technology. Neither would large purchasing groups.

The most ideal situation is in which there are a high volume of contacts, most of which are impersonal. But beyond those basic parameters, there are other considerations that might give a business pause. Your sales, service and marketing operations are not well integrated. In most cases, the sales pitch will be made by a customer service. For this to work there has to be real integration between customer service and marketing and sales, for that matter. Obviously, when a customer calls in to complain about something, this is not the best time to pitch an offer. However, this is one of the premises of real-time marketing cross selling at the point of customer interaction.

Unfortunately, most interactions occur when the customer has a problem. It takes real skill to be able to turn that situation around to the point where a rep can make an offer to an irate customer. Your customer data is not ready. True, this could apply to almost any firm. Managing data is notoriously difficult, with bits and pieces residing here and there throughout the IT structure and enterprise functions. When marketing to customers in real-time, though, using data that is not completely relevant is a prescription for failure. The best tactic is to proceed carefully. Companies need to be very careful about using real-time marketing unless they specifically have asked permission.

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