If personalization is the holy grail of marketing, real-time personalization has been the missing piece. Optimove, the customer-led marketing platform best known for its “Positionless Marketing” approach, is taking a swing at it with Live Formulas, a new capability designed to trigger campaigns the instant customer behavior crosses a threshold.

Instead of waiting hours—or worse, a day—for signals to be processed, marketers can now act in the moment. For example, a high-roller depositing $1,000 within a 12-hour window can trigger an immediate VIP retention campaign, or a shopper browsing multiple luxury items without buying can receive a personalized offer within the hour.

What It Does

Live Formulas, now in closed beta, is baked directly into Optimove’s orchestration engine. It lets marketers create custom, real-time triggers using streaming customer data. The tool supports single or multi-step calculations, like:

• Tracking the sum of deposits within 90 minutes.

• Calculating the ratio of abandoned carts to product views in a two-hour span.

• Flagging churn risk when a player’s deposit-to-withdrawal ratio spikes.

When conditions are met, campaigns fire instantly—no analyst handoff, no engineering intervention, no stale data.

Ben Tepfer, Optimove’s Director of Product Marketing, put it plainly: “Marketers know the pain of seeing customer signals too late. Live Formulas gives them the power to act in the moment with no waiting, no handoffs, just real-time engagement.”

Industry Use Cases

The flexibility means wide-ranging applications:

• iGaming: Trigger retention offers when a player loses above a certain threshold within three hours.

• Retail: Serve up a time-sensitive discount if a customer views multiple high-ticket products without converting.

This kind of speed could help brands pivot from reactive marketing to proactive engagement—intervening before a customer leaves, rather than wooing them back after.

Why It Matters

Real-time engagement has been a buzzword for years, but execution often requires complex data pipelines, engineering resources, and lagging workflows. By embedding Live Formulas into its platform, Optimove is pitching marketers not just automation, but independence—the ability to design, monitor, and launch behavior-driven campaigns without outside dependencies.

Tepfer frames it as the evolution of Positionless Marketing: “Consumers don’t wait, and marketers shouldn’t have to either. With Live Formulas, we’re giving marketers the control to meet their customers in the moment with relevance, speed, and empathy.”

That emphasis on control aligns with an industry trend where marketing teams are demanding autonomy from technical bottlenecks, particularly as personalization becomes table stakes across retail, gaming, and subscription services.

The Bigger Picture

Optimove’s Live Formulas drop into a competitive landscape where rivals like Braze and Iterable have also been building real-time orchestration capabilities. The difference here is how flexible the logic can be—marketers aren’t confined to simple triggers like “clicked an email” or “visited a product page,” but can build multi-variable formulas that calculate ratios, sums, and thresholds across dynamic time windows.

If it works as advertised, Live Formulas could tilt the balance toward truly dynamic, customer-led marketing at scale. The challenge, of course, will be how easy it is for marketers to design these formulas without creating overly complex or error-prone logic.

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