Indian Brands Get Personal With Real-Time Campaign Management

For marketers, the days of a launching a big, expensive, one-size-fits-all campaign into the world and hoping their messages stick are over. Instead, it has become vital to remain agile and adaptable and to be able to evaluate success in real time.

For marketers, the days of a launching big, expensive, one-size-fits-all campaigns into the world and hoping their messages stick are over. Instead, it has become vital to be agile and adaptable when executing campaigns, and to be able to evaluate success in real time.

The ubiquity of data in the digital space means that each time an individual interacts with a brand, a new data point is created for marketers to understand. As such, the brands that are serious about getting noticed are employing strategic ways to leverage real-time campaign management and, more broadly, customer experience management (CXM)-the orchestration and personalization of the entire end-to-end customer experience, moment to moment, at scale, on any channel, in real time.

In the lead-up to this year’s Adobe India Symposium, CMO.com spoke to two of India’s online heavyweights to find out how they approach real-time campaign management. Here’s what we learned.

Use Email And Analytics–It’s Real Time And It Works

Given the rise of real-time instant messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, it’s easy to think of email as being a bit old school. But don’t be fooled: Email remains a particularly effective marketing channel, one that is primed for tracking campaigns in real time.

FreeCharge, an India-based digital marketplace for financial products and services, is one company that relies on powerful email marketing tools and analytics to understand how customers are interacting with its messages and progressing through the sales funnel.

According to Himanshu Chopra, FreeCharge’s head of growth and analytics, real-time measurement comes down to understanding which recipients are opening the company’s email, which ones are clicking on the content, and which ones ultimately go on to make a payment on the FreeCharge platform.

“We use email to target consumers and to follow up with them once they have registered on our platform,” Chopra told CMO.com. “We use email analytics to understand their behaviour and to make offers to customers that we can track their response to in real time.”

The company can tell how long consumers have spent on its payment platform and when they visited, he said. If, for example, a customer hasn’t used FreeCharge in the last 30 days, they will get an offer via email that could include bonus credit or incentives including prizes from FreeCharge’s payment partners to return to the company, make a payment, or recharge their phone accounts.

Emails are also highly focussed on educating the customer about available offers, and then making the experience of using FreeCharge as personal as possible.

Understand How Your Customers Are Behaving–And Make It Personal

With 75% of its business coming from repeat buyers, it stands to reason that Indian beauty retailer Nykaa puts relationship-building and customer loyalty at the core of its real-time marketing strategies.

“Beauty, as a whole, is driven on impulse to form long-lasting habits,” said Hitesh Malhotra, Nykaa’s chief marketing officer. “It’s therefore imperative for us to understand what leads to that habit.”

To develop this understanding, Nykaa charted the consumer funnel and set micro-goals for every strong buying signal the customer gives to the organisation.

“Instead of simply setting up goal conversions for visits, add to carts, and purchase, we went above and beyond and started creating segments out of elementary consumer signals, like which product they searched, what type of filter they used including price, discount, popularity, and so on,” Malhotra told CMO.com.

Nykaa also looked at the product descriptions customers were reading and which items they wish-listed.

This approach gave Nykaa the material it needed for both on-site recommendations and off-site retargeting through advertising. Malhotra explained the efficacy of both is measured in real time on both a “last click” and “view through” basis.

“You can customise infinite segments, but at the end of the day no more than four to seven will be your most profitable ones,” Malhotra said. “To get to those, you have to experiment and invest in over 100 campaigns over a few months. You have to be very patient and get all stakeholders to understand that this is an investment for the future.”

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