The Real-Time Challenge of Inbound Marketing Strategies

The Real-Time Challenge of Inbound Marketing Strategies

Most marketers recognize the need to prioritize inbound marketing. Whether it involves an exciting travel offer presented on the homepage of a booking website, a message about new mortgage rates on the screen of an ATM, or optional phone upgrades presented during the discussion with any call center (“For English, press 1...” type of conversation);the goal is the same. Companies need to leverage customer attention to offer them something of value and relevance at a specific given time.

Customer attention is one of the most valuable aspects of any inbound marketing initiative. Unlike outbound communications, your organization will struggle less for customer attention. It will also reduce the risk of losing your communication through spam folders or getting deleted. In inbound marketing, the customer comes to the marketer; indirectly giving you and your organization the chance to leave a mark. At the same time, the customer is unknowingly giving you valuable data through their behavioral and browsing patterns as well as their search criteria.

With all this being said, it is important to note that offline batch analytics are still very relevant when making a good number decisions in marketing. When studying a customer, it is always important to look at their past behavior. It is primarily with this information that a marketer can determine relevant offers ahead of time by segmenting the customer into corresponding categories.

However, by not properly setting up a channel for inbound marketing initiatives and a corresponding real-time decision engine, marketers are in danger of losing massive amounts of first party data. If the inbound channel lacks proper marketing capabilities, then communicating with the customer is effectively broken. If the customer’s actions cannot be analyzed and acted on in real-time, then you run the risk of providing irrelevant offers and will essentially fail when addressing the customer. An offer that may have seemed applicable a few hours ago may no longer relevant later.

Naturally, one might question why every single organization does not use real-time offers for all their inbound channels. Simply visit an e-commerce website, log in or create an account, put the products you want into your shopping cart, then empty the shopping cart and log out. Often enough, even after completing all those steps, there will be no immediate response.

So how could something so important not be used on every website? The answer is quite simple: getting it right is not always easy.

Along with the obvious benefits, there are many challenges with a successful real-time inbound marketing channel implementation. There are technical limitations, such as the time limitations the marketing systems have to respond with relevant offers (often below 1 second). Customer error can also play a big factor in the success of a marketing channel. For example, low-quality responses or missing information on customer profiles make it difficult for real-time decision engines to work properly. Just with these simple aspects, basic scenarios get quite complex once everything is accounted for.

Let us look at the examples provided at the beginning of the article and see how companies can easily miss out on some of these crucial marketing opportunities.

  • Travel offers can quickly grow out of proportion with over thousands of possibilities for every destination.
  • The screen of an ATM has very limited space to squeeze more offers and extremely basic interactions to generate specific information. Not to mention the security requirements needed to work with such a sensitive system, makes it difficult to extract certain information.
  • The interface of the call center operative can only be as responsive as the person using it. This sometimes creates very straightforward interactions where the window of opportunity to market anything is just too small (an offer for a phone upgrade would be quite useless if the customer is calling to complain about billing issues).

Unfortunately, to properly address every single case, each one needs to be checked on a individual basis. Sound road maps and deployment plans assist when managing implementation and scope-based risks. Involving key players from across each layer of the organization can help solve interface complexities. Creative solutions provided by technology experts, both internal and external to the company, will collectively address functionality and other technical challenges.

Nevertheless, inbound marketing channels have great potential when implemented correctly. You will have a reduced number of offers presented to each customer, leading to lower customer fatigue. More accurate targeting of relevant and personalized offers will lead to higher adoption rates. Finally, a careful study of behavioral patterns will allow relevant follow-up campaigns to acquire, retain and upsell. All of this is driven by leveraging collected data that has been sitting at your doorstep.

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Plus Company Privacy Policy

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(Canada) EN

Updated as of September 11th. 2023

“PLUS COMPANY” AND “COMPANY” MEAN PLUS COMPANY CANADA INC. AND ITS AFFILIATES AND BUSINESS UNITS IN CANADA.

Plus Company respects the privacy of its customers.

This Policy concerns you. It describes how we collect, use, disclose and protect your personal information, including when you visit our website or any website we own, operate or control (collectively, the “Site”), when you contact us by phone or email or when you communicate with us via social media.

We may update this Policy (see “Changes to the Policy” below).

You should read this entire Policy before submitting information to us or using our Site. If you submit personal information to us, we assume that you authorize us to use and disclose it as described in this Policy.

What is personal information?

Personal information is information that identifies you directly or indirectly, on its own or with other information, such as your name, contact details or IP address.

We may make full use of all information that is de-identified, aggregated or otherwise not in personally identifiable form.

Information collection and use

We collect personal information …

  • From you
  • Using automated technology when you visit our Site or communicate with us through email
  • When third parties, such as service providers, collect such personal information on our behalf

When do we collect your personal information?

  • When you browse our site
  • When you contact us by phone or email
  • When you communicate with us via social media

What type of personal information do we collect?

  • Usage information – IP address, information on the device, domain name, browser used to visit our site, pages displayed, time spent on a page, link clicks
  • With your consent, we may have access to your geolocation and
    site-navigation patterns.
  • Information you provide to us, such as personally identifiable information or contact information, as well as your comments or questions.

Why do we need it?

  • To better understand how you use our Site.
  • To modify or improve our Site, services and business activities.
  • For marketing, research and legal purposes.
  • To comply with our policies, procedures and legal obligations, including complying with law enforcement or governmental authority requests, investigating fraudulent activity, resolving disputes and enforcing our legal agreements and policies.

With whom do we share this personal information?

As part of our business operations, we may disclose personal information to the following categories of third parties:

  • Consultants, service providers and contractors we use to support our business and operations (e.g., hosting or operating our Site and services, data collection, reporting, Site metrics and analytics, data analysis, fraud detection services) who have agreed to keep the information confidential and use it only to provide the applicable services.
  • Government authorities, agencies, if required to do so by law, regulation or court order, or to respond to governmental and/or law enforcement requests.
  • An acquirer or successor in interest in the event of a reorganization, merger, sale, change of control, consolidation, joint venture, assignment, transfer or other disposition of all or any part of Plus Company or its affiliates, including any negotiation thereof.

Where is your personal information stored?

We currently retain personal information in North America.

We may disclose personal information in locations other than your country, province or state of residence, where privacy laws may differ.

If your personal information is used outside your country, province or state of residence, it is subject to the laws of the place where it is located and may be disclosed to governments, courts, law enforcement agencies or regulatory bodies of that place, or disclosed in accordance with the laws of that place. However, our practices regarding your personal information will remain governed by this Policy and by applicable privacy laws.

Retention of personal information

We will retain your personal information (collected through online and offline methods) for as long as it is necessary for the purposes described in this Policy. We will also retain and use your personal information to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our legal agreements and policies.

Intended audience of Site

Our Site, social media accounts and online activities are intended for persons aged 17 and over. Therefore, we do not request personal information from minors aged 16 years or younger, nor do we knowingly collect such information from minors aged 16 or younger. If you are not 17 or older, you should not visit or use our Site.

How do we protect your personal information?

We take reasonable, appropriate steps to protect personal data from loss, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration or destruction, whether in transmission or storage. Remember, however, that no security system is infallible and that transmission over the Internet is not perfectly secure or error-free.

We use a secure server. Only authorized persons have the right to access this information, which they are required to keep strictly confidential.

Your rights with regard to your personal information

Right to access and correct

You may request access to and obtain a copy of the personal information we hold about you.

If any personal information about you is inaccurate, incomplete or ambiguous, or if the collection, disclosure or retention of such personal information is not permitted by law, you may require that it be rectified.

You can also ask us for information about the source of your personal information (if it was not obtained from you), as well as the names of persons who have access to your information and details about how long it is kept.

Right to withdraw your consent

You may request to withdraw your consent to our use or disclosure of your personal information.

In most cases, withdrawing your consent means that we will no longer be able to offer you certain services. Otherwise, we will inform you of the consequences of refusal in our request for consent.

To exercise your rights, please send a request in writing, along with proof of identity, to our Privacy Officer at the contact information provided under How to contact us.

Once your request has been received, we will respond in writing within 30 days.

Cookies and other automated technology

A “cookie” is a small text file that is placed onto an Internet user’s web browser or device and is used to remember and/or obtain information about the user. A “web beacon” is a small object or image that is embedded into a web page, application or email and is used to track activity. Web beacons are also sometimes referred to as pixels and tags. We and/or third parties, including our service providers on our behalf, may use cookies, web beacons and other similar technology to collect information for the purposes described in this Policy, including analytics and monitoring performance and improvement of our Site (traffic, errors, page load time, popular pages, etc.). Before using these technologies to geolocate you or evaluate certain characteristics about you, such as your personal preferences, interests or online behaviour, we will ask for your permission by informing you how to enable such features. We use Google Analytics to understand how our Site, services and products perform and how you use them. To learn more about how Google processes your data, visit https://policies.google.com/privacy. To change your settings relating to cookies and other automated technology, visit our Cookie Manager.
For information and questions about the use of your personal information or this Policy, you may contact our Privacy Officer at privacy@pluscompany.com.
This Policy may be revised from time to time for any reason. In such a case, we will notify you of such changes by indicating the date of the last update. Review the Policy before submitting personal information or using our Site, services or social media pages.
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