1. Know the customer
Companies know a lot more about their customers than one might think. They have a record of all their purchases and relevant customer support conversations, which gives them a baseline of useful information. Using real-time marketing, data can be augmented with other information available from third-party vendors — If they own a house or rent, where they work and approximately how much they make, what they have recently bought from other vendors and so forth. In utilizing all of this information, a customer can encounter an instantaneous, unique, one-to-one shopping experience.

2. Propose a relevant offer
If a customer has ever been turned off by cross-selling or upselling, it’s because the offer was not pertinent to their specific interests or recent behaviors. Real-time marketing takes into consideration information specific to THAT customer, to create an offer or message in which they can very personally relate.

3. Consider a variety of channels
Today’s retail marketers are often focused on leveraging email, direct mail, and in more instances today, social media. There are several untapped channels to interact with current and prospective clients, however, especially in the mobile space. What about your customer support channel? Retailers can and should be extending customer service agents as sales agents, providing them the necessary tools to effectively upsell and cross-sell depending on the customer’s particular circumstance.

4. Enhance the customer experience
The overarching goal of a marketer is to reach customers in a way that is significant and engaging, creating an enhanced overall experience for that customer. If customers feel like they’re being heard, they will be more receptive to offers, suggestions and messages — which will ultimately drive more bottom-line profits.

5. Maintain sophistication
As technology and marketing strategies continue to demand more collaboration, marketers must not forget the tried and true database marketing principles. This includes control groups, A/B testing and experimental designs that lead to accurate incremental sales equations. Launching real-time marketing strategies doesn’t mean the intelligence behind those strategies has to disappear simply because they are associated with a new technology or channel.

The public, having grown wary of traditional advertising, has become more difficult to convince. That’s where the brand ambassador — the person who creates a sense of credibility, likability or interest — comes in. And while “real people” acting as the face of a huge brand is nothing new, the age of social media has made a compelling case for marketers to choose this route over traditional advertising.

Here are five successful ambassador campaigns from the last 15 years that have made a big impact on their respective brands, as well as the marketing landscape. They serve to illustrate how in today’s social media world, conversations with passionate people are an excellent (an often more successful) way to sell a product.

Nice and timely article! Today Fadfind.com announced that they had $10 iPads for sale. Of course with the huge popularity of the iPad the site was bombarded with iPad buying hopefuls. So many hopefuls that the site went down and couldn't handle the traffic. This blog does a great job turning this into a marketing lesson for us to learn from.

I've been researching app marketplaces for a possible Buzz Blog post, and this is certainly interesting news. Adobe has a website with AIR apps on it, a few of them for $$$.. I wonder what this new marketplace concept (it's in beta) will be like.

Richard Branson started his first business selling mail-order records when he was 20 years old.