Introducing Real-time Messaging: Speed and context together in one canvas

Building meaningful customer connections is the core of great marketing. It starts with knowing your customers well and understanding their preferences enough to deliver relevant, personalized experiences across channels. But to really cap it off, you need one more thing. Perfect timing. 

That’s why GrowthLoop is launching Real-time Messaging as a part of Universal Journeys.

Imagine being greeted with a discount for the shoes you were browsing online, the moment you step into that brand’s store. There’s no chance you’re forgetting that experience, or that brand.

Whether it’s knowing when they’ve purchased from your brand for the first time or that they’ve signed up for your newsletter, a well-timed message at the exact right moment, in real-time, can be the difference between a lifelong customer and one who moves on. 

Real-time and composable data haven’t been friends

Traditionally, marketing in real-time has faced one major challenge: context. Marketers face a frustrating tradeoff between two incomplete solutions.

Deliver fast, generic messages powered by incomplete and fragmented data? 

Or send personalized offers that are slowed down by disconnected data across marketing tools? 

Either way, marketers have been forced to choose between speed and context.

Marketing clouds can handle speed in the form of real-time marketing across channels. But they lack access to deeper data from your data cloud that gives marketers the full picture of your customer, like purchase history or loyalty status. As standalone SaaS platforms, they’re built separately from your existing data infrastructure, which means that they can’t query your warehouse directly, adding latency and data duplication. 

Without contextual personalization from the data cloud, a VIP customer might get the same message as a first-time customer, creating a disconnected, negative experience that could lead to churn. 

Reverse ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools have access to your enterprise cloud and allow your marketing team to access the most critical customer data, with information like transaction history, engagement, and demographic attributes. But these tools also rely on batch data processing to sync that cloud data into your marketing orchestration tools, and these ETLs are usually scheduled at night, once a day. This is great for data accuracy and reporting, but not as much for reacting to customer events in the moment.

By the time the data has synced to your marketing orchestration tool, it’s stale — and worse, the moment of high intent has passed. Your customer is gone, and your ability to deliver the perfect message is too late to matter, resulting in lost revenue.

Over time, continuously missing opportunities to deliver the personalized, customer-centric experiences that drive revenue and loyalty adds up.

We believe that there’s a better way to leverage speed and data context, together.

Introducing Real-time Messaging

Finally, you can send the right messages at the right moment, across channels — all powered by your first-party data and built on top of your existing data cloud. 

Real-time Messaging combines instant triggers and lifecycle marketing in one unified journey canvas. Marketers finally have the flexibility to trigger messages in seconds, without complex workarounds or custom engineering,  while relying on their own data to add the personalization and relevancy that drives purchases, brand affinity, and loyalty. 

All-in-one journey orchestration

Before, marketing teams had to suffer through the manual, error-prone approach of using multiple tools to hack together real-time with lifecycle marketing. Often, that meant marketers would have to use one tool to create a real-time trigger and then use another to place that audience into a marketing campaign, taking up time and effort to not only learn different platforms but find a way to make them work together. Not only did this increase tech stack sprawl, but it was cumbersome, and the system often broke when trying to connect with a customer.

Now, you can build in one Universal Journeys canvas for omnichannel, real-time, batch, experimentation, message delivery, and advanced workflows. Centralize your journey building to ensure that your customer is at the center of your marketing, from capturing high-intent moments to contextual messaging. 

How to build Real-time Messaging in GrowthLoop

Let’s build a journey in GrowthLoop to target customers who have abandoned items in their cart. 

• Start by creating a new journey, naming it, and choosing “Real-time Journey” as your Journey Type. 

• Then, add your Dataset Group, and configure your entry node by selecting a Realtime Event (“abandoned cart”). 

• Once you’ve built your journey, add a destination node to send a message triggered by the Realtime Event you selected. 

Because GrowthLoop is built to be self-service, marketers can easily build and launch journeys like this without the need to involve data or engineering, ensuring that campaigns have fresh, rich data. 

In a few quick clicks, you can create a real-time message in the same Universal Journeys canvas where you build your lifecycle journeys. 

Flexible journeys, built your way

Many marketing tools lock teams into rigid journey templates or prescriptive campaign builders that don’t reflect their strategy or their data architecture, leaving marketers to stitch together workarounds across disconnected platforms. That adds friction, delays, and missed opportunities, especially when timing and personalization make the difference between a conversion and a lost customer.

With Real-time Messaging, you get complete control and the flexibility to build journeys that fit their unique goals, data architecture, and customer signals. Take charge of your marketing by triggering messages at the exact right moment across channels, using any combination of real-time events and pre-joined batch data from your cloud. 

Let’s continue with our abandoned cart example from earlier. 

After triggering an abandoned cart message, your team decides that the best way to keep customers engaged is to place the customer in a re-engagement journey that begins a few days later. All they have to do is connect a Delay node and continue building out your journey. That may mean continuing with a Destination node, which allows you to send customers to a specific marketing channel, or Criteria nodes, which route customers to specific paths based on behavior or attributes. You can use any combination to create a highly specific lifecycle journey.

Then, you can connect your Delay node to a multi-step lifecycle journey that calls attributes from your existing GrowthLoop Datasets, like LTV, loyalty tier, or recent purchases, and will be delivered according to the criteria and timing set. 

With Real-time Messaging you can send a message in seconds, and then follow up with personalization, unifying real-time and lifecycle to truly connect with your customer. 

Composable by design

Modern, high-growth marketing teams are moving toward a composable marketing tech stack that works with their existing cloud infrastructure. These tools are flexible, scalable, and already work with how their data flows. 

Real-time Messaging from GrowthLoop ingests customer events — like page views, cart updates, or purchases — as they happen with message streaming, like Kafka, Pub/Sub, and SQS.

These events are configurable; marketers can define what event to listen for, the field to match against, and what downstream action to trigger — all without writing to the warehouse. 

We orchestrate journeys on top of your data cloud, which means zero data duplication, no delays, and complete governance control. Real-time Messaging runs alongside your warehouse and queue systems, not inside a separate black box, giving your data team full visibility and control over your data strategy. Since you don’t have to sync or extract data into another platform, you retain governance, reduce risk, and ensure marketing is always acting off fresh, up-to-date data. 

Because we don’t store your data or pull it into a separate system, you can take action on your data the way you want, using the tools your team already knows. Real-time Messaging works seamlessly with your existing marketing channels, like Sendgrid, Braze, and more. 

For marketing teams, this means you can launch real-time campaigns in minutes, without having to wait for the data team. Your data team retains full governance, your marketing team gets flexibility and speed, and your customers get perfectly timed, personalized experiences.

Real-time in GrowthLoop

With Real-time Messaging, your marketing team finally has the power to act instantly, powered by rich customer context from your data cloud. It’s our latest step in bringing real-time capabilities to GrowthLoop and building the foundation for an AI-powered platform that can make decisions in the moment, not hours later. 

Want to see Real-time Messaging in action? Reach out to our sales team to see what’s possible in GrowthLoop.