3 Ways to Drive Lift With Real-Time Personalization

If you’re a marketer, you’re familiar with the proven benefits of personalization. But creating campaigns that not only reflect your customers’ past preferences, but also adapt in real-time, takes your brand’s messaging to the next level. 

In this case, “real-time” doesn’t just mean updating a campaign right before it’s sent. It means the content is always accurate at the moment of open. Whether a customer views the email the day it’s sent or a week later, the message will reflect your customer’s—and your business’s—current context. That could look like the latest pricing and inventory, or ensuring you’re not recommending a product that’s already been purchased. And because it’s automated, this approach is scalable, a make-it or break-it factor for brands as those who scale tailored sends generate 40% higher revenue.

Marketers are always looking for smarter targeting, better performance, and faster speed-to-market—and real-time personalization makes that possible. Let’s dive into the three key ways real-time personalization can transform your campaigns.

1: It’s Built for Omnichannel Strategies.

From email and web to countless mobile channels—like push, in-app, SMS, RCS, and WhatsApp—marketers have a lot of ground to cover to maximize the reach of each campaign. It’s an omnichannel world, and marketers who want to stay ahead of the pack need their data in sync. That means that the real-time data within one channel should influence customers’ experience on another device.

‍Pandora maintained this level of relevance by bringing their in-app year-in-review to email. Through automation, their team was able to bring the highly personalized summary across channels with ease, highlighting a wide range of data: top artist and station, mood, decade, spins, real-time recommendations, and more. This relevance-first approach drove a 17X increase in clicks compared to their previous app-only strategy, and ultimately boosted their reach by 6X.

The right data solution brings accuracy to every channel, without the need to recreate content or juggle multiple tools. Just one platform delivering consistency at every touchpoint.

2: Efficiency Is the Natural Byproduct 

Real-time content not only adds relevance to campaigns, it supercharges the content creation process itself. No more building new campaigns every time an offer or audience segment needs an udpate—and let’s be honest, there’s always one more tweak uncovered during QA. With automation, a single template can power countless versions. 

‍Amazon Music used this templated approach for the background visuals in their holiday promotions. Rather than manually updating the image file every two days from October through early January, they used real-time automation. The creative dynamically updated based on the date and screen size, decreasing production time by an incredible 62% for this campaign. Marketers no longer need to choose between relevance and speed-to-market.

This is all the more true when real-time personalization is combined with the power of Autonomous Marketing. In this case, AI chooses the content most likely to resonate with each individual—such as the hero image category—while real-time personalization populates the specific item based on the customer’s browsing history and adds in updated supporting details such as pricing and inventory. According to Forrester, brands that take this two-pronged approach see an impressive 422% ROI—and that’s just the beginning.

3: Revenue Is Always the Goal

It’s no surprise that real-time personalization increases click-throughs, engagement, and conversions. But the bottom line for marketers is always revenue—this is the metric that will actually convince your boss to increase your martech budget next year. 

Luckily, increased revenue isn’t just an educated guess. Brands like Virgin Atlantic have proven that real-time personalization drives unparalleled financial lift. In their Black Friday campaign, they activated a blend of loyalty data, browsing behavior, historical booking data, previous email engagement, and social proofing to create a jam-packed email. A crucial element in driving this campaign’s success was their use of APIs to populate real-time pricing across web and email, enticing customers to book before prices went back up. This resulted in an incredible 285% lift in bookings and a 241% increase in revenue.

With campaigns like this in the market, it makes perfect sense that Boston Consulting Group reports a 6-10X lift in ROI for companies that leverage real-time personalization. The proof there—now it’s time to take action.

Real-Time Personalization Is a Must-Have

Real-time personalization drives efficiency, engagement, and revenue, making it a must-have for marketers who want to stay competitive. The future of personalization isn’t just about targeting—it's about ensuring every experience adapts as context changes to ensure ongoing relevance.

Curious exactly how Pandora, Amazon Music, and Virgin Atlantic are doing it? Book a call with us today and take a deep dive into the related resources below.