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The Past, Present and Future of Interactive Marketing
Introduction
The advent of interactive marketing
Most corporations must now "market in a digital world". The "always on" consumer (and business consumer too) is able, and increasingly likely, to search, enquire, interact, complain, buy and pay through mobile devices. Marketing for most corporations is becoming increasingly interactive and "always on". Delivering an efficient (for the customer and the company), relevant (personalised) and engaging experience increasingly relies on a deep knowledge of the consumer; who they are, the devices they use to connect to the company and the content they want to see.
Modern interactive marketing demands deeper understanding of customers and their behaviour and how they like to interact with the company and the ability to deliver personalised experiences which they find useful and engaging. There are few marketing, sales and service situations where the corporation is not able - at least in principle - to gather the logistic, operational, marketing, sales and service data which tells the corporation whether the customer has been served well or not, and the number of situations where it cannot are diminishing. So long as customers have smartphones, data can be gathered from customer to support all these activities.
The volumes for accesses and transactions on the internet are large and still growing very fast, so that by the time this article is published any figures given here will be outdated[1] . The internet now hosts a rapidly growing proportion of human dialogue, in ways that are open to viewing and influencing by companies. Ti, combined with the growing reach and capacity of mobile telephone networks, means that dramatic changes that have taken place in the volumes, frequency and effectiveness of use of the different media by which companies and customers exchange communication and in the devices and software used by consumers to exchange communications with companies and individuals and to organise and enjoy their lives, and the problems companies have in coping with these volumes.
Interactive marketing and its associated analytics, particularly real time high performance analytics, are opening up new marketing opportunities, leading to improved marketing return on investment, and then identify why so many companies fail to obtain the expected benefits[2] . The value of the social approach...