Is your business ready for real-time marketing?

In real time marketing timeliness is everything. A commonly thrown around statistic regarding web channel is that you have three seconds to load images before the customer/prospect loses interest and takes his potential purchase elsewhere. Many respected web companies actually quote two seconds.

Potential to purchase is the key point here, when a customer interacts with you, their proximity to purchase can be orders of magnitude higher than when you interact with them.

But what is two seconds to the rest of the world, is 2000 milliseconds to a real-time marketer - which can be an eternity if you use it well.

The majority of this 2000 milliseconds, however, is actually the loading content (e.g. a website image), so for an interaction to qualify as real-time we typically require a sub 100 millisecond decision.

IBM Interact
IBM Interact is the leading real-time decisioning engine available to the enterprise level marketing sector. It allows you to target personalized offers to visitors of inbound marketing channels.

Through the user interface marketers can configure IBM Interact to decision according to behavioural, event-based, situational, locational, strategic, or some combination thereof. It is integrated into IBM Campaign, allowing alignment of inbound and outbound strategies.

How long does an interaction take?
An effective implementation of IBM Interact will see a next best action decision returned within 40-70 milliseconds.

How is it so fast?
IBM Interact is designed in such a way that decisioning occurs almost completely in computer memory (RAM) only. This means that our main limiting factor is literally the speed of electrons.

In-session data capture
A side benefit of IBM Interact is the ability to capture data in real time. If you have cutting edge analytics then you may already possess this capability, but many companies either don’t have this or more commonly don’t have the analytics data available to their marketing platforms.

This data capture can feed all kinds of areas of your business. One use case was around a retail client capturing a shopping list through a mobile application, giving them a link between the products a customer intended to buy (in the shopping list), and the ones they did buy (in their data warehouse). This data intelligence was revolutionary and fed many areas of their business including store design, supply chain management.