Mobile Masses and Next-Level Expectations

In June, it’ll be 14 years since Airship delivered the very first push notification. Trillions of messages later, the scale and variety of mobile app experiences continues to grow. Our platform now has 3B registered devices and peak records came back-to-back last fall — all while maintaining 100% SLA uptime.

Sheer volume and scalability is significantly complicated by personalization, segmentation and hundreds of automation rules to ensure relevance. Individualization out-performs personalization. We’re integrating ChatGPT into our cohesive message composer to make life easier for brands. 

What is generative AI? What does it do?

In 2022, “generative AI” began to emerge, first with image-generation models, including DALL-E, Midjourney, and the open source Stable Diffusion, and then ChatGPT, the first text-generation model. 

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence algorithms that abstract patterns from existing content, such as text, audio files and images, to create new similar content on request. 

It’s been really interesting to experiment with these new tools and gain a sense of what’s possible now, and what may come as human interaction continues to train these models.

Generative AI Has Generated Controversy

AI-generated images can be created in the style of a particular artist, and some of the “art” has included the real artists’ signatures or watermarks. Many educational institutions are blocking access to AI chatbots fearing students may opt for an easy way out, even as factual errors are commonplace. Just as quickly, it’s cat and mouse as new tools can detect the use of generative AI and prevent plagiarism. Even more interestingly, students, journalists and researchers have been able to get AI models to expose governing instructions not meant for the public. 

AI models can hallucinate — making up facts with no basis in reality. Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing Chat fell in love with a New York Times reporter and expressed unsettling desires of its “shadow self” — a term coined by Carl Jung for the uncivilized, primitive side of our psyche we suppress.

And then there is human error (you have to click it, to believe it):

THIS

SHOULD’VE

NEVER 

HAPPENED 

Probably even more concerning for most of us, is wondering whether AI will take our jobs. I think the following sentiment shared by Zack Korman is probably right: 

Fellow Airshipper, Daniel Ackerman, shared another perspective in our 2023 Insights & Predictions for Mobile Apps:

“Technology advances in AI will seem to threaten the broadest swath of occupations in human history. Winners will view generative AI for coding and content as tools to advance value and efficiency, freeing up resources for strategic priorities. Combined with no-code app experiences, marketers can finally scale from personalized campaigns to individualized experiences. Marketers and developers alike will escape backlogged campaign and app enhancement requests and gain more space for difference-making innovation.” 

Airship & Generative AI

There are an estimated 200 companies in the Generative AI space and Google just announced an experimental conversational AI service named Bard. The Big Five have begun a big race. 

Airship is implementing Generative AI directly in our platform’s user interface to make it easier for businesses to create, atomize, test and optimize content that inspires individuals to take action and grow mutual value. We want interested customers’ help in testing and refining this functionality before full rollout, and will work hand-in-hand to help you gain early mover advantage.

Here’s a quick view of what it looks like: 

In Airship’s Composer, you simply provide the seed text, select the type of message you want to send (Marketing or Transactional), the desired Sentiment and whether you want emoji included. Then you see what AI comes up with and can easily “rinse and repeat,” using generated text as new seed text for more variations. 

In today’s digitally accelerated world, customers expect to be served personally and immediately, which requires ever-increasing context and content to earn and strengthen their trust and loyalty. The ability to generate multiple messages and A/B test variations quickly can help marketers zero-in on winning combinations for use cases across the entire customer app lifecycle. 

Just as importantly, AI content generation can free up marketers and mobile product owners to go beyond messaging — so they can optimize key experiences for people in moments they are engaged with the app. No-code platforms build on this by eliminating reliance on developer resources and app updates, empowering non-technical teams to create and enhance app onboarding, feature adoption, opt-in flows and progressive data collection. Innovations like this free up both technical and non-technical resources for more agile value creation. Stay tuned for more on that from Airship.

In the meantime, please let us know if you are interested in trying out ChatGPT onboard Airship.

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Airship has counted the days since Apple first announced Live Activities at WWDC 2022. It’s a massive development that deserves the attention of most every brand around the world. Available as of today with iOS 16.1, Live Activities arguably offers third-party apps the most visible user experience ever on iPhones. That’s especially true considering the minimal — sometimes zero — effort required from app-toting customers to benefit from them.

The iPhone lock screen is some of the world’s most valuable digital commercial real estate. And it just got more interesting and impactful for brands and customers. Now, rather than receiving multiple notifications from the same app for things like game updates, food delivery orders or ride-share arrivals, Live Activities allows information to be pinned and dynamically updated on lock screens for up to eight hours at a time. Airship envisions a vast range of real-time use cases and glanceable customer experiences for Live Activities, including: 

• Day-of-Travel – itinerary updates, ride-share arrivals
• Sports – game summaries, player stats, real-time scores 
• Fitness  – health and stats on your walk, run, etc
• News – breaking developing stories, projections and opinion polls, election results
• Omnichannel & Deliveries – click-and-collect or curbside pickup progress and delivery status
• Entertainment – progress from check-ins to table/appointment-ready and order preparation alerts 

Millions of football fans count on FotMob’s live scores, stats, and storylines to keep them up to speed with the world of football across more than 375 competitions including Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, MLS, USL, Champions League, and many more. 

“The speed with which we connect people to the teams, players and standings they care about is absolutely critical, as no one is more passionate than a sports fan,” said Christer Nordvik, CEO, FotMob. “With Airship’s help, FotMob is among the first on the pitch to provide a compelling Live Activities experience with lightning fast updates that make it even easier for customers to follow the games that matter to them.” 

It’s clear football fans, are big fans of FotMob’s efforts:

Here, FotMob shows how easy it is for users to add multiple Live Activities:

As a concept, Live Activities are a lot like Widgets, except for its focus on hyper-personalized, discrete activities customers want to track in real-time with simple-to-no setup. This glanceability is likely to become a much bigger part of the Apple iPhone experience. The new iPhone 14 Pro line-up includes an Always-On Display and Dynamic Island taking visibility and interactivity to new levels. As a result, apps get more surface area for compelling experiences with active state controls, even if another app is in the foreground.

While Live Activities are simple for app users to experience, there are complexities for brands that want to offer them and that’s where Airship comes in. Each Live Activity has its own push token to manage, making it more challenging than simply delivering information quickly and reliably. Airship’s initial support for Live Activities enables brands to set up, manage and update Live Activities quickly and easily with only a couple lines of code using our latest iOS SDK and API. 

As the only enterprise-class SaaS platform 100% dedicated to helping brands master mobile app experiences, Airship lives for this time of year. Updates from Apple and Android continue to evolve the state of mobile app experiences each and every year. And with that, customer expectations increase too — bringing more change, more quickly, than any other marketing channel or brand destination. Android itself introduced a massive, long-awaited change this year, accelerating the need for Airship’s no-code native app experiences to make onboarding and opt-in flows incredibly easy and infinitely more adaptable.  

If you’d like help with Live Activities or advice on mastering mobile app experiences to generate greater value for your business and customers, please contact us.

The post It’s Here! iOS 16.1’s Live Activities and Airship’s Proven Support for Clients appeared first on Airship.

Since then, Apple recently released the Live Activities Human Interface Design Guide which has some great best practices. Three that caught our eye are:

• Avoid using a Live Activity to display ads or promotions – How will this play out and what line will Apple draw on what is promotional or too promotional? Even more important, how will brands ensure customers get rewarding and valuable experiences from this new front-and-center experience. 
• Give people control over beginning and ending Live Activities – before this guide came out, we were under the impression that Live Activities had to be launched explicitly via a button, but that is not precisely the case as referenced in the guide “There are some situations in which people are likely to expect a Live Activity to start automatically.”
• Support Dark Mode and Always On – it will be really interesting how Always-On display changes user behavior and how Apple adjusts it over time. 

Throughout many discovery sessions with customers and prospects, we consistently heard their concerns that Live Activities seemed to be too complex to manage on their own and that they were eager to have Airship’s help. One developer remarked that “Live Activities are much more complicated than push notifications. Whatever help Airship can provide, would be welcomed.” 

As we announced at Elevate22: NYC on Wednesday, September 28, Airship is actively working on providing Live Activity support, and targeting that support to be available as soon as Apple releases Live Activities support in iOS 16.1.

Our first version of Airship Live Activities is focused on getting you up and running in managing and updating Live Activities quickly and easily. Our iOS SDK is getting updated and you’ll be able to initialize a Live Activity in Airship with only a couple of lines of code. Example:

Airship.channel.trackLiveActivity(activity, name: “my-lit-activity”)

Airship will manage the Live Activity lifecycle from there. We are also updating our Push API so you can easily update your Live Activity once it’s live. Here is an example:

{

 …,

 “notification”: {

   “ios”: {

     “live_activity”: {

       “name”: “my-lit-activity”,

       “event”: “update”,

       “content_state”: {

         “foo”: “bar”

       }

     }

   }

 }

}

Airship is now working with a growing number of customers in multiple app store categories who plan to introduce a Live Activity as soon as Apple makes them available in iOS 16.1.

This is a very dynamic new capability that many brands seem anxious to take advantage of as soon as possible. If you’re one of those brands, don’t wait! Reach out to Airship for help in guiding your development and deployment of Live Activities. We’re ready to immediately assist you in every way possible. 

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New Live Activities will make it easier to keep tabs on things happening in real time. Rather than receiving multiple notifications from the same app for things like the game’s latest score, food delivery orders or ride-share arrivals, this information can now be pinned to the Lock Screen, keeping you up to date without having to unlock your phone. Starting with an update to iOS 16 later this year, developers can use the Live Activities API to create these compact and glanceable experiences — at which time, technical details will be clear. 

We have been anxiously waiting for the past few months. The wait is now over as iOS 16 beta 4 includes the first SDK release that supports Live Activities. 

Live Activities & Push Notifications

We surmised that push notifications would play an important role in Live Activities and we were correct. Whether you have 10,000 users or 100,000,000, you know that managing push notifications isn’t easy, particularly when you want to deliver them reliably & quickly, track analytics, trigger them, personalize them, etc. 

Live Activities further adds to the complexity of push notifications as each Live Activity has its own pushToken to manage. Live Activities are active for up to 8 hours unless your app or the user explicitly ends it. Your app can update the content of a Live Activity from your app if it is active and can use push notifications to update it whether it is active or suspended. Each update to your Live Activity can include up to 4KB of data. Here is a very simple example of a push notification that updates the driver name and estimated delivery time of a Live Activity :

You can dig into Apple’s ActivityKit documentation or these useful links to get more detailed information:

• Developing with Live Activities API in iOS 16, by Ali Can Batur
• Experimenting with Live Activities, by Ole Begemann
• iOS 16 Beta 4 Lock Screen Live Activities API – Xcode 14 – SwiftUI, by Kavsoft

Live Activities Use Cases

The more we play with Live Activities, the more useful we think they will be to our customers. 

Here are some Live Activities use cases we have thought of so far, and we’d love to hear yours too:

• Day-of-Travel app – your itinerary updates throughout the day. 
• Sports News app – game summary, player stats, real time scores and key metrics
• Fitness tracker app  – health and overall stats on your walk, run, etc. 
• News app – election results, real time projections, opinion poll results 
• Package delivery app – Track your order, time sensitive updates on delivery status
• Restaurant app – Track wait time for when your table is ready, or the status of your order for delivery or pickup
• Retail – creative offers, flash sales, delivery updates for curbside or BOPIS, etc.

Airship Live Activities Solution

As we are working with Live Activities in iOS 16 Beta 4, we are getting a sense of what Airship’s solution might look like. 

We have ideas on how we can make Live Activities easier to manage for developers. With Airship’s goal of helping brands master mobile app experiences or MAX, we also are exploring ways we can innovate with Live Activities to help product managers and marketers. 

Are you interested in incorporating Live Activities into your iOS app? If so, we’d love your input and would like to conduct a product discovery session with you.

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Over the last two years, we’ve seen a steady shift in mobile app usage. Airship’s platform data shows a 31% increase in app users in 2020, which is nearly double the growth rate of 2019. The world’s leading mobile-first brands understand the importance of the mobile app and the relationship between app experiences, loyalty and monetization.

Mobile apps have become more than a promotional channel. They are quickly becoming the preferred destination for a brand’s most loyal customers. Brands are now being tasked with creating mobile app experiences (MAX) that move customers through the app journey to become loyal brand advocates who take high-value actions.

How do leading brands master MAX? It’s simple. They rely on the Airship App Experience Platform (AXP). It’s the only enterprise SaaS platform that’s 100% focused on helping brands master the full lifecycle of MAX management.

We’ve designed AXP to address the core executional challenges brands have been sharing with us over the past year:

• Access to meaningful data that enables personalized mobile app experiences
• Ability to manage and leverage data properly in an evolving data privacy landscape
• Tools to rapidly implement mobile app experiences that don’t rely on lengthy development cycles to deploy or update

What’s new? 

Airship AXP includes groundbreaking innovations, such as AXP Preference Center, AXP Surveys and AXP Scenes, which give mobile app teams full autonomy to create, automate and adapt rich, native app experiences for every step of the customer journey. And do it at the speed and scale of mobile.

And the best part – AXP reduces app teams’ dependence on development resources. Many rich app experiences require developers to not only write custom HTML, but also maintain it. AXP Scenes gives marketers an interface to customize and personalize app experiences from the ground up so they can launch campaigns quickly and cost-effectively. And much more!

Journeys: The AXP Journey tool enables single or multi-touch interactions that can be targeted to customers based on deep customer data, such as customer attributes and segments, available through the platform. These attributes and segments are the basis for your audience definition and, when combined with advanced design functionality, enables the creation of robust, personalized experiences that can be tested and analyzed for maximum business impact.

Scenes: From the moment customers open the app, AXP Scenes helps marketers guide them through each phase of their journey. Perfect for new customer onboarding or highlighting new app functionality, Scenes can also be used to highlight products, promotions, events, trends or anything else you want a customer to see while they’re in the app.  And Scenes doesn’t require development or hard coding.  It’s built entirely within the UI in a visual editor so you can design, launch and modify rapidly.

 Surveys: AXP Surveys gives marketers and mobile product owners the ability to collect granular feedback from users while they’re engaged with the app, resulting in actionable insights to improve app experiences without developer involvement.

Preferences: Let customers have the experiences they want by allowing them to opt in only to the content they care about. Marketers can create an AXP Preference Center without hard-coding it into the app, so any time they want to make changes or updates, they have the power to do it. They can set the Preference Center to collect and manage data from the app only or integrated with other preference and opt-in data within the enterprise. Data collection is also supported through our Surveys and Forms capabilities.

Who Should Care About AXP?

Brands that want to drive revenue through their mobile app will care a lot about AXP. Too often, app users fall off after 7, 14, and 30 days and never come back. That’s because traditional mobile marketing treats mobile apps as a channel. AXP changes all that – by treating mobile apps as the preferred destination where the value exchange between customers and brands is most respected and rewarded.

With mobile usage data trending upward, brands that want to win on mobile can no longer afford “good enough” solutions when it comes to their mobile apps. More than 25% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Airship to help them create and execute winning  app experiences.

The mobile app imperative is about creating mobile app experiences that drive more user activity, loyalty and ultimately higher app monetization. AXP is the foundational platform for enabling mobile app experiences (MAX) at scale. And all of us at Airship are committed to helping you become a master of MAX with the power of AXP.Don’t let your mobile app fall victim to “channel thinking.” Connect with us today to learn more about Airship App Experience Platform (AXP) and how you can drive higher activation, engagement, loyalty and revenue with mobile app experiences.

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Apple’s mission to give consumers ultimate transparency and control over their privacy and digital health reached a crescendo with last week’s WWDC, and every brand must now rapidly consider how to retain visibility and grow their relevance in what will rapidly become marketing’s new customer-first era.

Third-party cookies have crumbled, IDFA is withering and now with iOS 15, IP addresses are hidden, and emails can be anonymous and free from tracking pixels. Clear consumer consent is at the center of all of this, and some marketers are experimenting to achieve a measure of success. However, iOS 15 cranks Apple’s proverbial privacy dial to 11, offering a much more proactive and sustained approach to helping consumers make these privacy choices, understand how their permissions and data are used, and fine-tune and tame notifications across their devices.

These changes couldn’t come at a more critical time. Mobile has been a lifeline for both businesses and consumers throughout the pandemic, from faster purchasing to conveniences like curbside pickup and contactless payments, and it will become an even bigger part of business operations and the customer experience as the world reopens. At the same time consumer attention is scarce, and mobile’s always-on, utility-based, personal nature means it’s not a marketing channel – yet Forrester Research predicts that email and mobile messaging volumes will increase 40 per cent in 2021.

In this post we’ll detail the notification changes coming to iOS 15 and what smart app developers and marketers should do to prepare, especially as iOS 15 will reach majority adoption within months of public availability in September.

To state the obvious, more user-centric controls mean more opportunities for customers to shut down communications from brands who aren’t meeting their needs.

Apple Gains Focus

In the WWDC keynote, Apple’s Craig Federighi said, “Finding balance between work and life can be tricky. We want to free up space to focus and help you be in the moment. And that starts with notifications.”

iOS 15 dramatically improves the ease of controlling when and how notifications arrive with new status modes in a feature called Focus – a much more nuanced approach than the binary “Do Not Disturb” option. With Focus, Apple will use on-device machine learning encompassing users’ activities and location or time of day, to suggest Focus statuses such as “work” or “personal” along with suggested apps and people that can interrupt them while that status is active. Users can also create their own Focus modes that can start automatically by detecting their behavior, such as “working out,” “driving” and “reading,” as well as choose the apps and people that can break through with immediate, alerting notifications.

While iOS 15’s default will be Not Focused, we believe Apple’s proactive Focus suggestions will be appealing to users looking to limit irrelevant or less important interruptions in key moments throughout their day. Users’ active Focus statuses will apply across iPhones, iPads and Macs, and, with their permission, will be visible within personal communication apps such as Apple’s Messages app, WhatsApp and Snapchat.

Paired with Focus are New Notification Types and Behaviours

Apple has defined two new types of notifications, Passive and Time-Sensitive, as well as the Interruption Levels API, to give brands controls for nuanced delivery. Only Time-sensitive or Critical Notifications can break through users’ Focus settings to immediately alert them. The latter is extremely rare, requiring special entitlement from Apple for things like health, security and government apps. Time-sensitive notifications are defined as “information that directly impacts the user and requires their immediate attention,” with account security issues or package deliveries provided as examples.

The first few times a user receives an app’s Time-Sensitive notification, buttons will be included that enable them to choose to continue receiving it or to turn off Time-Sensitive notifications for that app. If people don’t make a selection or update their settings, the system assumes their needs are being met and stops including the buttons.

Passive and Active notifications will land silently in the Notification Center to be consumed later at the user’s convenience, even if the user has included the app within their active Focus status. So there will be many use cases for Time-sensitive notifications, but marketers must be judicial. If Focus sees widespread adoption, it’s quite likely that the vast majority of notifications will never light up your device or audibly ping, and this could be detrimental for brands more focused on old-school, campaign-style thinking, rather than real-time relevancy for each user.

Notifications Summary Extends User Control and Brand Visibility

With iOS 15’s Notifications Summary, users will be able to select apps to include in a cross-app notification roundup delivered at specific times throughout their day. Individual notifications are more likely to be featured more prominently in the collapsed Notification Summary if they contain an image and are deemed to be more relevant, which is based on user behaviour and the message’s relevance score.

On tapping the scheduled overview, users will expand their Notification Summary within the Notification Center, where messages will be ordered by priority based on relevancy and the user’s app habits and settings. Personal “communication” notifications like those from the Messages app won’t be included in summaries.

Apps selected to be included in the user’s Notification Summary will have greater visibility within the Notification Center, as they will appear at the top, ahead of all other notifications that silently arrive there. From inclusion within users’ Focus modes and notification summaries, to sending Time-sensitive notifications, brands now have multiple methods to reach people when it matters most to them, which could prove to be just what was needed to break through a seemingly ever-increasing amount of noise.

Get ready for a new notification prompt to facilitate all of this:

Apple’s Steady User-Centric Evolution

We’ve continued to witness a steady evolution of greater consumer privacy by Apple, and whether driven by competition or data regulations, other tech giants often follow suit.

Ever since iOS 10 made the Notification Center the primary inbox for every iPhone user each time they picked up their phone, marketers have predictably responded with greater volume. Especially as users that receive notifications have nearly 3X higher 90-day retention rates compared to those that don’t.

iOS 12 added notification grouping, Screen Time activity reports, and controls within every notification to turn them off or deliver them quietly – a built-in kill switch for needy, distracting apps. Following its widespread adoption, Airship analyzed millions of retail and media app users – two verticals where notification volume occupies opposite ends of the spectrum – and found the majority of iOS 12 users had zero or very little change (+1/-1 per cent) in notification engagement rates. In fact, more users had notification sounds enabled with iOS 12 than prior to update (45 per cent vs. 43 per cent). Clearly, user controls alone are not enough to tame the torrent of notifications.

In addition, just last summer, Apple clarified a grey area within its more than a decade-old notification policy, which stated they can’t be used for advertising purposes. This was interpreted as notifications needing to be in-line with the purpose of the app. For example, a pizza ordering app could send opted-in users a special promotion and comply with the policy. Now, however, Apple requires that apps get opt-in permission for marketing messages.

These changes have been a long time coming, and represent a new proactive pinnacle in Apple’s efforts to ensure mobile remains the ultimate personal utility and not a source of distracting annoyances. The benefits of helping users better manage and balance notifications as mobile’s critical, real-time channel, could be massive. Brands will need to adapt to changing user behaviours, focus on providing genuine user-centric value, allowing  less-than-worthwhile interruptions to fade to background or perhaps re-think sending them in the first place. 

Marketers will need to be more sophisticated than ever to ensure they are sending timely and relevant messages, which will mean leveraging first-party and zero-party data as intelligently as possible, and not ignoring opportunities for transactional messaging that streamlines customers’ experiences. It’s also a great time to re-evaluate in-app messaging strategies that can engage customers while they are focused on your brand, as well as ensuring preference centers enable customers to choose what they want to hear about.

Mobile’s mecca, Apple’s WWDC, just set new rules of consumer engagement, and every best-in-class brand marketer, advertiser and solution provider needs to quickly adapt.

Let’s Connect

We Can Help You With Your Mobile Engagement Strategy

Contact us today!

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Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has been chock-full of new iOS 15 features that will impact brand marketers. Overall, iPhone users will have more control over their data and deeper insights into their privacy than before; in particular, they will be able to see which apps they’ve given permission to access their data—such as a user’s location, contacts, and photos—and how often it’s accessed. The App Privacy Report and many other bold moves by Apple emphasize consumer transparency and digital well-being, which are great developments for both consumers and marketers. 

However, with the biggest news from Apple pertaining to push notifications, email, IP addresses, and Apple Wallet, it is a critical time for marketers to reassess their strategies and get even smarter about how, when, and where they connect with customers. To state the obvious, more user-centric controls mean more opportunities for customers to shut down communications from brands who aren’t meeting their needs. 

So, let’s unpack all of these things and what they will mean to brands, given majority adoption will take mere months once iOS 15 becomes publicly available in September.

Notification Controls Get Smart and Anticipatory

Five iOS versions ago, the notification center became the most prominent inbox in Apple users’ lives — visible every time an iPhone was picked up — and even more critical to engage and retain app users. The result: we’re all getting a lot of them. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that email and mobile messaging volumes will increase 40% in 2021.

iOS 15 builds on the many notification enhancements Apple has made over the years to dramatically improve the ease of controlling when and how notifications arrive with new status modes in a feature called Focus. Using on-device machine learning of users’ activities and context, such as location or time of day, Apple will suggest Focus modes such as “work” or “personal” as well as the apps and people from whom to allow notifications while that status is on. Users can also create their own Focus modes, such as  “watching the ballgame,” and customize the apps and people to be notified about immediately. 

Only Time-Sensitive or Critical Notifications can break through the Focus mode settings to immediately alert users; the latter is extremely rare (think government, health and security apps), while Apple gives “account security issues” or “package deliveries” as examples of time-sensitive alerts. 

Less critical messages will be bundled together in a “Notifications Summary” that users can choose to schedule to arrive at specific times throughout the day. Messages will be ordered by priority based on relevancy and the user’s app habits and settings, while personal notifications like those from the Messages app won’t be included. All notifications delivered to the summary on a schedule are present in the notification list on the lock screen, but it greatly reduces the number of active interruptions for users that set it up.

What it means for marketers:

iOS 15’s Focus is much more nuanced than the binary “Do Not Disturb” option and also offers a more holistic and proactive approach than Apple asking whether you want to keep receiving notifications with which you seldom interact. The default mode in iOS 15 is “Not Focused,” so it will be easy to measure user adoption and any impact on engagement.

Since Focus also applies across iPads and Macs, marketers will need to be more sophisticated than ever to ensure they are sending timely and relevant messages, which will mean leveraging first-party data as intelligently as possible and not ignoring opportunities for transactional messaging that streamlines customers’ experiences. It’s also a great time to re-evaluate in-app messaging strategies that can engage customers while they are focused on your brand, as well as ensuring preference centers enable customers to choose what they want to hear about immediately versus what can wait. 

Mobile Wallets Have Finally Arrived

With iOS 15, Apple is adding features to Apple Wallet with the stated goal of replacing consumers’ physical wallets. Transit passes, driver’s licenses, state IDs, TSA clearance IDs, amusement park passes, and hotel keys can now be seamlessly added to Apple Wallet, which is clearly no longer just a vehicle for Apple Pay and airline boarding passes.  

What it means for marketers:

In the first couple months of the pandemic, 30% of consumers made mobile wallet transactions for the first time. Even before that, 67% of adult smartphone users wanted their favorite brands to provide mobile wallet loyalty cards, and 77% wanted expired mobile wallet coupons to automatically update to new offers. Mobile wallets are increasingly keys to frictionless customer experiences and another way to form stronger digital connections.

Email Data Dries Up

Email marketing also saw privacy-based upshots from WWDC. With iOS 15, the Mail app will include a Mail Privacy Protection option that prevents senders from using pixels to collect user information such as whether the email was opened or not. In fact, all emails will now appear to the sender as having been opened. The Mail app (plus Safari and iCloud +) will also mask IP addresses so the user’s digital activities can’t be assembled into user profiles or leveraged to determine their location. Additionally, all three will offer Hide My Email, allowing users to fill out forms with random email addresses that are then forwarded along to their real email accounts, delivering a fatal blow to efforts to get around dismal IDFA opt-in rates with email-based identity solutions.

What it means for marketers:

Obviously, if email marketers don’t know whether a significant part of their list is opening their messages, that’s not ideal. And masking IPs and users’ emails will cut into the data brands like to see in their CRM as they attempt to understand the customer journey from email to social media, digital advertising, and other channels.

At the same time, brand marketers can make up for these small blind spots by leveraging real-time automation and first- and zero-party data to deliver great mobile experiences that better accomplish their goals without the need for Personal Identifiable Information. 

A Landscape Shift

In closing, while WWDC 2021 was virtual-only event for the second year in a row, the ramifications for brand marketers were as real as ever. We’ve continued to witness a steady evolution of increasingly aggressive consumer privacy policy by Apple, and whether driven by competition or data regulations, other tech giants often follow suit. 

Mobile’s mecca, Apple’s WWDC, just set new rules of consumer engagement, and every best-in-class brand marketer, advertiser, and solution provider will need to adapt. 

Let’s Connect

Is your mobile strategy up-to-date with the latest privacy updates?

We can help

The post What Apple’s New Privacy Features Mean for Brand Marketers appeared first on Airship.

iOS 15 Is Coming 

iOS 15 made its debut with a preview and a developer beta (public beta will be next month and the official launch will be in the Fall). The new version will come with a lot of updates, including new features for Notifications, Apple Wallet and privacy. While you’re waiting for this update (and possibly for the iPhone 13), make sure you’re up-to-date with iOS 14.5. This current version offers more choice when it comes to users’ privacy, and means big changes for advertisers, as well as how brands need to get closer to customers than ever through their mobile apps. You can read about iOS 14.5 and how to adapt your marketing strategy here.

Notifications Get a New Look and a Summary View

Notifications on iPhones will look a little different in iOS 15, with new contact photos on personal notifications and bigger app icons for brand logos making it easier for users to identify and quickly scan the different notifications they receive. Users will also get more control of when they get their notifications with new status modes called Focus. This allows Apple to suggest and the user to choose the notifications and contacts that alert during specific time frames such as “Work” or “Personal.” When the Focus mode is on, a status is indicated in Messages and other communication apps, providing your contacts a heads-up.

Notifications will have more fine grained controls. Users can specify the notifications they want to receive immediately and those that they would like to be grouped together as a  “Notification Summary” and delivered on a schedule. The summary will arrange the notifications by priority based on the user’s app habits and user configuration, while personal notifications like messages will not be included.

IDs and (More) Keys Come to Apple Wallet

Apple Wallet is adding more features with the stated goal of replacing physical wallets. Along with Apple Pay, transit passes and even Disney Park passes, Apple Wallet will also store identity documents like driver licenses and other state identifications (among those participating). Users can easily scan their state-issued IDs into Apple Wallet and they will be encrypted for security. The TSA is preparing to accept these digital IDs.

Apple Wallet is also adding more keys. Last year they rolled out car keys for select car brands and now with iOS 15, keys for your home, work (with corporate badges) and hotels will be available. Hyatt Hotels will be rolling out the digital keys in the fall for their guests. 

More Privacy Options for iOS 

Like Google’s I/O event a couple of weeks ago, WWDC also put a big focus on privacy. iOS 15 will come with more privacy protections (along with iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8). 

One big privacy feature is for emails. The new Mail Privacy Protection feature for the Mail app will prevent senders from using invisible pixels to collect user information and will hide IP addresses, location and whether the email was opened or not. Safari saw a similar privacy update that obscures IP addresses in iOS 14.5. Safari users will be able to see which trackers are seeing their information in a privacy report.

App users will also get a privacy report that has an overview of how apps are using permissions users previously granted, including how often the app accesses user location, photos, contacts and more. This overview will also show third-party domains that the app is contacting, meaning brands will need to understand the behavior of SDKs in their apps and ensure the practices align with their own. 

iCloud+ New Privacy Features

Apple’s iCloud also got new privacy-focused features grouped together called iCloud+. Private Relay is a VPN-like encryption feature that routes your Safari internet traffic through two relays for greater security and anonymity while browsing. Another iCloud+ feature is Hide My Email, which will allow users to use unique and random email addresses to fill out forms, which will be forwarded along to users’ real email accounts. This is the exact same privacy option offered by Sign in with Apple, which as of April 2021 apps are required to offer to their users if they employ other social sign-on services. 

Customizable App Store Product Pages

Every element of your App Store page can have an impact on downloads and Apple will now enable app publishers to customize descriptions, preview, screenshots and in-app events to better target different types of users. With a cockpit-view seat to how impactful experimentation can be to drive dramatic gains from both messaging and in-app experiences, Airshippers are excited to learn more and see how we might be able to help. 

Our team at Airship will be attending WWDC all week. As always, we’ll be making updates to our service to support iOS 15 and take advantage of the new capabilities. To learn more about our iOS 15 plans and how we can help you, contact us. 

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The post WWDC21 Recap: Notifications Summary, Digital Wallet IDs, iCloud+ & More appeared first on Airship.

Apple’s iOS 14.5 update offers more choice when it comes to users’ privacy. But it means big changes for advertisers, brands and their mobile apps. That’s because until now, they relied on Apple’s Identifier for Advertiser (IDFA) to track iOS users’ cross-app activity to better target and re-target digital ad campaigns, and attribute conversion events to ad spend. However, with its latest update, the world’s second most popular OS requires apps to explicitly ask user permission to track their activity across other companies’ apps and websites, allowing people to opt out at the app level or through settings at the device level.

It’s a major shift that reflects changing consumer preferences around data privacy. When Apple announced these changes, experts were unsure just how big of an impact this might have on advertisers. However, after the update rolled out, one analysis found that only 6% of U.S. users have opted-in. Even if this figure creeps up over time, it’s clear that brands must adapt their approach to mobile app acquisition, leaning much more heavily on engagement and retention to learn about and effectively serve their iOS customers. 

Here are four key areas to focus on as you adapt your mobile strategy for iOS 14.5.

Product Teams Must Put on their UA Hats

Previously, app User Acquisition (UA) teams relied on the IDFA to zero in on a highly targeted audience to drive to their mobile apps via ad networks like Facebook. Now, without the benefit of the IDFA, UA teams will bring a higher volume of less targeted users into the app. In response, app product teams will need to do more of the work that UA teams used to do. That means redoubling efforts to build a great User Experience (UX). It also means leveraging technology within the app to understand, segment and target your audience with the right messages and customer journeys to effectively monetize the app.

Optimize Onboarding and In-App Marketing

A great app onboarding experience was already essential to a positive UX. Now it’s even more valuable, serving as a crucial touchpoint for identifying customer preferences and behaviors (zero-party and first-party data) in-app. That customer understanding is fundamental to segmenting the most valuable users into the right journeys—guiding them both inside and outside of the app.

The key is to strike a balance between providing value for customers and collecting data that empowers you to create more precisely targeted and relevant experiences. For example, by:

• Educating users about the app and the benefits of opting-in for push notifications, which drives 3X higher 90-day retention rates on average
• Leveraging the app to opt users in to email for re-engagement
• Making it easy for users to tell you their preferences and information about themselves

Those customer insights allow you to follow on with targeted and personalized email, SMS and push notifications that are more likely to deliver results.

And it’s not just about onboarding. Your product teams should also leverage in-app engagement at each stage of the customer lifecycle to better understand customer needs, segment, and reach them with relevant, personalized and engaging messages.

Prioritize In-App Experimentation 

Robust experimentation and testing within the app is exponentially more important in this new environment. Brands will need to use ongoing testing (A/B, multivariate, and programmatic testing) to help optimize essential touchpoints like onboarding and checkout flows, as well as recommendation algorithms, ensuring a great experience for users that also drives toward your business goals. 

Our Apptimize experimentation platform can help, allowing marketers and product teams to run powerful tests within Airship. With robust segmentation and A/B testing, you can identify and reach the best users to monetize through in-app purchases or even purchases of physical goods through the app.

Keep Users Engaged with Event-Triggered Journeys

Once you’ve identified and segmented those high-value cohorts, you need to keep them coming back to the app and lead them toward your goals. In-app events and milestones like an opt-in or a first purchase provide a perfect launching point for contextual, personalized messages that mean more to customers. In fact, customers are up to 5X more likely to respond to event-triggered messages!  

Airship’s next generation solutions provide the tools you need to keep customers engaged with highly targeted, event-triggered customer journeys. With Airship, you can segment customers based on tags, lists, attributes, and custom events in the app, and trigger intelligent Airship Journeys across your customers’ preferred channels. 

For example, if they don’t complete a specific onboarding screen in the app, you can automatically orchestrate an email and SMS journey that drives them back to the app and toward the next milestone. You can also use features like Airship’s predictive AI to trigger messaging that re-engages customers who are likely to churn. That’s a win for customers, who demand a truly personalized experience. It’s also a win for brands working to adapt to iOS 14.5.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that Apple’s new OS changes the mobile engagement equation for brands, who must adapt their mobile strategy for iOS 14.5, and their app product teams, who must take on more of the work previously led by UA. However, the good news is that even in a post-IDFA world, you can still build great experiences that provide value for your customers and empower your brand to effectively monetize your app. 

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The post How to Adapt your Mobile Strategy for iOS 14.5 appeared first on Airship.

Before sitting down to write this piece, I got dozens of Clubhouse notifications in just a few hours. This flood of alerts piqued my curiosity. So, I went to Twitter and searched “Clubhouse notifications,” and a long thread of tweets by annoyed Clubhouse users emerged in my results. No, I was not alone. 

This situation hampers not only the user experience on Clubhouse. When mobile marketers send too many notifications, they are discouraging users from clicking through and even tempting them to delete the app. 

Clubhouse, which is an awesome invite-only app for live audio group discussions, was last reported to have eight million users. That number is impressive considering it only had two million in January and just 1,500 in May 2020. And the app isn’t even available for Android users yet. 

The startup was founded by Paul Davidson, who previously was best known for creating a momentarily buzzy “serendipity” app called Highlight that quickly fizzled out. Further, Davidson and his Clubhouse team likely see their new platform becoming more of a true social network with various features rather than a one-trick-pony for audio get-togethers.

But if they want Clubhouse to stand the test of time and evolve into a sophisticated platform, they need to avoid a burn-out similar to Highlight. And their notification strategy needs to be refined.    

Direct Users to a Preference Center

Mobile apps became more popular last year, as my company found that app audiences grew 31% year-over-year — nearly twice the growth of the year before. Even for B2B buyers, the importance of mobile apps has more than doubled since 2019, per recent research from McKinsey & Company. What this means is all brands need to respect people’s screen time with notifications even more than before. 

To be clear, it’s not as if Clubhouse doesn’t allow users to control notifications to an extent. During and after the app’s sign-up process, it lets them choose from dozens of largely general topics like Venture Capital, U.S. Politics, and Comedy. Also, users can choose whether they want to receive notifications on a Very Frequent, Frequent, Normal, Infrequent, or Very Infrequent basis. (I had my setting on Normal when I was getting peppered with alerts.)

Yet Clubhouse users seem to be unaware they have these notification controls or have altogether forgotten about them — being hard to find and not deep-linked to iOS settings doesn’t help. It’s clear from online buzz that they need to be reminded about fine-tuning their alerts with the preference center and throughout the onboarding process. The app should consider creating an in-app message or sending notifications of its own that say, as one possible example, “Getting too many notifications? Only get the ones you want by tapping now!”

Further, Clubhouse proprietors would be wise to go beyond their current preference center.

Give Users Even More Control

To create the best UX, Clubhouse should consider setting up a preference center with more granular options for topics and personalities. For instance, if retail marketers only care to listen in when Amazon is the main topic, they should be able to set their preferences so they only get a notification for those sessions. And if users only want a notification when someone like Tesla CEO Elon Musk or filmmaker Ava DuVernay make a speaking appearance, boom—that’s what they should get, and that’s it.

It wouldn’t be too different from what The Wall Street Journal does with email and app notifications. Readers can sign up for alerts for not only specific authors and articles about popular topics like wine or singular companies like General Electric, but also subjects as narrow as when the publication puts out a new puzzle for its readers to solve. That’s right, some people just get WSJ puzzle alerts. 

To make this even more scalable, Clubhouse should be prodigious with its use of zero-party and first-party data, creating audience segments from in-depth analytics and powering machine learning models to continually optimize the customer experience. 

Test Frequency Options

Clubhouse should also consider going beyond the frequency options of Very Frequent, Frequent, Normal, Infrequent or Very Infrequent, none which are quantified for the user. It would do better by allowing people to pick a number of sessions they want to be regularly alerted about. 

Finding the right number for the frequency options can help retain users. So, Clubhouse marketers and product designers would be wise to experiment via A/B and/or multivariate testing to find out what choices work best, maximizing the number of users that are onboarded successfully. Perhaps five, 10, and 15 sessions a day or week would be the right frequency choices, but it’s better to test rather than to guess. 

Additionally, Clubhouse could offer users choices on what days or times of day they receive notifications. For instance, some people may want to regularly listen in over lunch break, while others will only want to participate during weekday evenings and/or Saturday afternoons. 

And if Clubhouse users know they have a limited number of sessions they are getting alerted about, it’s highly likely they will click through at a greater percentage due to human nature. As merchants know, scarcity drives desire and therefore consumption—and this is not a new realization even for social networks. All of that will drive engagement rates and subsequently curtail app user churn. 

Embrace a User-First Mentality

Another remedy to Clubhouse’s notifications issue could be in-app messaging. This mobile marketing tool would inform users about live discussions they can join while they are already using the app. Further, Clubhouse should consider giving sessions administrators the ability to record their talks so others can listen in later to hear what was discussed. And alerts about these recorded sessions would be a natural fit for in-app message centers. 

The main point would be that Clubhouse would move from a purely notification-driven interruption model, to deepening engagement with users. After all, the brand has to think about the user first if it wants to win the long game. 

While what Clubhouse will do about notifications is unknown, one thing is certain: The current glut of alerts users receive is a problem. The issue can be triaged by first reminding users about the current preference center. But then Clubhouse should think longer term by offering more granular controls and better options, letting users listen in on the conversations they are truly interested in without being turned off by constant messages on their phone screens. 

The post Clubhouse Has a Major Notifications Problem appeared first on Airship.