Three-quarters of marketers are using realtime marketing, and 41% have included realtime marketing in their 2014 budgets, according to a new survey from realtime web personalization platform Evergage. The vast majority – 88% – of respondents consider realtime marketing important to their 2014 plans.
So what does realtime marketing really mean to marketers? Three-quarters of respondents qualify real-time marketing as “personalizing content or creative in response to customer interactions” and “responding to customers in the context of their web interaction.”
In terms of response time, 64% consider a realtime marketing response to be within or under a minute, or within the same session.
Are marketers seeing tangible benefits from realtime marketing? Over one-third (36%) of marketers track ROI of real-time marketing; one-quarter of that number see returns of more than 50%, and almost as many see a 75% ROI.
What are the main constraints to implementing realtime marketing? Respondents mentioned lack of resources (43%), lack of time (39%) and lack of knowledge (30%). Feedback was similar when discussing the difficulties around measuring the ROI of realtime marketing: 40% cited lack of knowledge, 40% lack of tools, and nearly half mentioned lack of time (46%).
Nearly two-thirds of respondents came from organizations with revenues less than $25 million, showing that realtime marketing is becoming a reality for businesses of all sizes. “Real-time personalization techniques shouldn’t just be for the Amazons of the world. With the right technology at the marketer’s fingertips, real-time marketing is now attainable for businesses large and small, B-to-B or B-to-C,” says Karl Wirth, CEO and co-founder of Evergage.
Evergage’s online survey was fielded from January 14 – February 12, 2014 and included responses from 114 marketing professionals from 18 countries around the world, with the majority of responses from the U.S.
UPDATE: You can also click here to see an infographic of the results from Direct Marketing News.
A webinar about the survey results featuring Tonia Ries, editor of The Realtime Report, and Arthur Sweetser, CMO of Evergage, will be held on Tuesday, March 25 at 11:00 a.m. EDT. Click here to register for How Marketers Really Think About Real-Time Marketing.