We’ve also been busy improving our solution, making it even easier to trigger incredibly relevant and personalized conversations from your existing engagement channels and respond in real-time. That includes three new features designed to help you further elevate your customer communication.

Let’s take a look at these exciting new features!

Quickly Create More Personalized Conversations with Contact Attributes

Today’s consumers expect their brands to know who they are and understand their needs right away. So, when they have an issue or need a simple answer, you can be sure they don’t want to fill out a form or rehash an issue. Now, thanks to our contact attributes feature, your sales and support reps will have that context the moment a chat is initiated. 

With contact attributes, critical details such as customer name, loyalty tier, country, subscription dates and user preferences are pulled from the Airship mobile channel where the chat was initiated and displayed within the Live Chat Manager. With those critical details at their fingertips, your reps can better personalize their chats, enhancing their ability to quickly answer questions about shipping to different countries, renewing annual subscriptions, loyalty tier rewards and more!

Automatically Route Live Chats to the Best Person for the Job

Understanding customer context is key to creating the seamless and low friction experiences your customers demand. For example, when a customer engages with a mobile message about an abandoned cart, you may want to direct those types of chats to a sales representative. Whereas if the conversation is about a shipping confirmation, it should probably go to customer support. With that in mind, you can now define routing information when crafting your mobile message—reducing the need to transfer chats to different departments and improving customer satisfaction!

New Native Action Option Simplifies Live Chat Setup 

To make it even easier to get the most out of Live In-App Chat, we’ve added a new native Live Chat action to the Airship Message Composer. Not only does this simplify the process of adding Live Chat to any message, it gives you greater control of the user experience when linking users from a push notification into the Live In-App Chat. This feature makes it easier to configure the experience, route the conversation to the appropriate Live Chat agent, include an initial welcome message, or even pre-fill your user’s response. 

With these exciting new features, it’s easier than ever to build stronger customer relationships with Live In-App Chat. Want to learn more about how Live Chat can elevate your mobile engagement? Contact us today!

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The post Get Closer to Customers with These New Live Chat Features appeared first on Airship.

Here are just a few ways you can use in-app messaging to reach your retention goals!

Welcome & Onboard New App Customers

First impressions matter, especially to your customers when they first download your app. Use that opportunity to welcome them and guide them to the most important actions that will keep them engaged longer. Message them about setting up their profile or account, setting their preferences, or signing up for the loyalty program. Use the app download to trigger an Airship Journey of welcome messages across channels, starting with an in-app message to grab their attention right away. 

When onboarding with in-app messaging is done right, you can see a 60% expansion in audience like Gasbuddy saw with Airship!

Deliver Relevant, Engaging Promotions

Consumers are more likely to leave your brand if they’re not getting the information they want to receive. In fact, 48% of consumers get so frustrated when they receive irrelevant content from brands, they are likely to switch to another brand. Use customer attributes (such as birth date, zip code, loyalty status or age) to personalize your in-app messages with content that will resonate with your customers. Using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get!) editor will also help make those messages more engaging with bespoke designs and dynamic content.

Make sure that when you’re in a hurry sending out time-sensitive or rinse-and-repeat style messages that you’re not forgetting to personalize those as well. Templates are a great way to get those set up in advance with content blocks and merge fields to make sure all your in-app messages are personalized going forward.

Make Sure You’re Not Over Messaging Within the App

Many of us have had the experience of receiving a promotion for an item after we’ve already purchased it – it’s annoying to be sure, especially for new customers. Using cancellation events to stop an in-app automation can ensure you’re not over-messaging your customers and sending them the most up-to-date and relevant messages. For example, use a purchase event to cancel a promotional message so your customer won’t receive any additional messages about making their first in-app purchase, or cancel messages about the loyalty program as soon as a customer signs up.

Airship’s In-App Messages are Easier & More Engaging than Ever Before

In-App messaging allows you to make the most of every moment you’ve got with customers while they’re actively using your app. We made our powerful, easy-to-use In-App Messaging solution better than ever with new features that help you create personal, relevant messages that will improve retention for your app users. If you want to learn more about how our In-App Messaging & Automation solutions can help you meet your app engagement and retention goals, contact us today!

The post In-App Messaging Tips & Tricks to Improve App User Retention appeared first on Airship.

That’s why Airship is excited to announce a new integration with Shopify! Brands who use Shopify to host their eCommerce sites can now use the power of Airship web notifications, email and SMS. By sending personalized and targeted messages based on real-time Shopify shopper data, sellers can dramatically increase conversion rates and decrease abandoned carts.

Here are just a few of the ways you can use this new integration to meet your conversion goals:

Increase Retention with Real-Time Segmentation

Every moment a customer interacts with your site or completes a purchase-related event is an opportunity to engage them further and provide them with real-time information they need. Shopify users can now send these events, such as cart created, purchase completed or order fulfilled, from Shopify to Airship to trigger and target web notifications, email, SMS, including Live SMS Chat for real-time sales and support conversations, such as answering product questions or helping with shipping issues!

Make Every Message More Engaging with Dynamic Personalization

Making each message personalized for your customer is one of the most important parts of engaging and retaining customers. By using Shopify shopper data sent to Airship, brands can personalize each message with the relevant item information, such as what the customer left in their carts or what their order number is, helping to reduce abandoned carts and increase ROI.

Integrate Shopify into Your Cross-Channel Campaigns

Airship Journeys is unique in its goal-based and data-driven approach. By setting end goals such as purchase or abandoned cart reduction, marketers can track how every Journey (and every message within that Journey) impacts that goal and optimize them accordingly. 

Brands can now integrate the personalized web notifications, email and SMS triggered by Shopify events into these cross-channel Airship Journeys, coordinating them across channels to create an end-to-end experience delivered on the channels that make the most sense for every customer. You can then see the direct impact of the messages on your conversion goals and optimize when and how your notifications are sent.

As always, we want to help you meet your messaging goals and deliver customer experiences that create loyalty. Contact us today and let us know how we can help! 

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The post Increase Conversion Rates and Decrease Abandoned Carts with Shopify and Airship appeared first on Airship.

What should marketers focus on to offer the best experience for their customers in 2021? It’s going to be mobile and personalization. Here’s why these two tools have proven to be crucial when it comes to customer experience. 

More and More Consumers Expect and Appreciate Mobile Experiences

2020 will be remembered for a lot of things, but also as a year of rapid and dramatic change when it comes to consumer behavior. Consumers expect convenient, relevant experiences and they’re looking to mobile to deliver those experiences.

Airship’s State of Mobile 2020 report found that mobile app audiences grew 31% year-over-year in 2020 (up from 16% in 2019). Not only are more people using mobile, they’re also spending more time on it. Statista found that 70% of consumers increased their time using a mobile phone during the pandemic. 

In a (Socially) Distant World, Customers Want the Personal Touch

By now, most brands know that personalization means more than just greeting someone by their first name in an email. The kind of personalization that makes all the difference is one that is highly relevant to the individual. Gartner research found that 48% of consumers would unsubscribe from future communications if they receive a personalized brand communication they felt was irrelevant, while 14% said they would stop doing business with the brand altogether.

The best way to ensure relevancy is to use customer data correctly and strategically. By using data, brands can actually create a personalized experience, not just something that feels like one. 

There are many ways different brands can do this. An airline can send reminders of boarding times and available upgrades based on a booking or a loyalty status. Entertainment brands can trigger informational messages or special offers when a customer enters a geofenced physical location. A retailer can send a personalized offer or an abandoned cart reminder to encourage purchases. 

Adobe and Airship Bring Mobile and Personalization Together

To make personalized mobile experiences the cornerstone of your customer engagement strategy, you need the tools that can execute powerfully and quickly. 

Adobe and Airship’s bi-directional integration brings together the Adobe Experience Platform Real-Time Customer Data Platform with Airship’s Customer Engagement Platform. Marketers can easily use Adobe’s customer profiles and audience segments with Airship Journeys and mobile messages in real-time, delivering the relevant and responsive messaging customers want to receive.

With Adobe and Airship data together, marketers can build a deeper understanding of their customers and be better equipped to create a data-driven and personalized engagement experience. Many of the most common messaging use cases will benefit from this partnership, such as personalized mobile shipping or promotional notifications. A retailer could send abandoned cart events to Adobe for personalized emails or upsell loyalty members through Airship mobile channels. There are so many ways marketers can use the data to create those necessary personalized mobile experiences. 

You can learn more about the integration and how Adobe and Airship work together here. 

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The post Why Personalized Mobile Messaging Will be Crucial to Customer Experience for 2021 appeared first on Airship.

For a complete list of all our updates, head over to our docs page, but here are also some of our most noteworthy updates of 2020:

Visualize the End-to-End Customer Journey

While the beginning of 2020 feels like forever ago, one thing we look back on fondly at Airship was our launch of Journey Maps, a major enhancement of our groundbreaking customer journey solution. Journey Maps lets you link multiple Journeys together to advance customers through key lifecycle milestones, and makes it simple to visualize the end-to-end experience to see how customers are engaging with your brand. 

We’ve seen marketers from brands like TGI Fridays and Ding use Airship Journeys to drive abandoned cart conversion, feature adoption, customer reactivation and more with amazing results, and Journey Maps made it that much simpler to connect these experiences together.

Drive Engagement with More Personalized Customer Experiences

If 2020 has taught us anything about customer engagement, it’s that every mobile experience needs to be relevant and personalized for every customer in order to stand out from the crowd of digital experiences. That’s why Airship released several new personalization features this year, including:

• Advanced Segmentation with Attributes: Marketers can now store customer attributes, such as birthdays, loyalty tiers and preferences, with Airship to segment and personalize messages based on these attributes and send more relevant and engaging messages. Airship made several enhancements to segmentation this year, including a new segment builder, to make audience targeting easier than ever, with more to come in early 2021!
• Personalization A/B Testing: Use Airship’s personalization features with A/B tests to optimize your message personalization to see what increases customer engagement. Test different image types based on customer preferences, varying levels of personalization, or amount of content. 
• Snippets: Allows pieces of content that are commonly used to be created and managed in a single place. Save time on campaign creation by using Snippets and updating them at any time to make changes for all unsent and future messages.

Innovate and Optimize Towards Business Goals

This year was anything but predictable, and many brands were asking themselves what was the best path forward for their mobile engagement strategy. The answer?  Experimentation. Only by testing can you know what will positively impact the customer experience and continue to innovate for changing customer expectations. Airship released several new features to make testing and optimization easier than ever:

• Journeys Optimization:  Two new features for Airship Journeys have helped brands easily test messaging content and optimize towards their business goals. With Journey Control Groups, you can use integrated metrics to easily visualize the impact each journey has on your business goals and optimize each step. Similarly, Journey A/B testing lets you test variants for each message in your Journey and optimize content in real-time. Brands like Radisson, Vampr and JCPenneys have already been using these features with huge improvements on conversion and reactivation.
• Apptimize Free Feature Flags: Releasing new features in your mobile app can be risky business. That’s why Airship released a free version of Feature Flags on our Apptimize experimentation platform, to help brands release new features more confidently. Feature Flags let you release new app features to a small subset of users with the ability to rollback instantly if need be.

2020 may have been a busy year with many updates and new features but we are looking forward to an even better 2021 for our team and our clients. You can learn more about our Customer Engagement Platform here and make sure to check out our docs pages for a more in-depth look. 

Happy New Year! 

The post 2020 in Review: The Best of Airship Product appeared first on Airship.

That is why Airship has partnered with Mixpanel; to help brands create more loyal customers with relevant, orchestrated messages across channels powered by real-time behavioral data and customer insights. Through this bi-directional integration, leading brands can now connect with customers with smarter messages triggered by user behavior, and measure its impact on key product and marketing metrics.

Here are a few ways the Airship + Mixpanel partnership can help connect the gap between product and marketing.

Create Sophisticated Customer Journeys

With the power of Airship Journeys, brands can respond to customer actions in real-time and move them through critical paths — such as welcome, retention, or purchase flows — across any channel.

Now with Mixpanel and Airship together, brands can leverage product usage data from Mixpanel to create sophisticated cohorts, which can be used in Airship to trigger even more relevant Journeys. As customers enter or exit Mixpanel cohorts, Airship can move them into the most relevant Journey for their behavior. For example, Mixpanel can identify power users of your app, and Airship can target them with a Journey of special messages to reward and continue to grow that subset.

Being able to respond to customer behavior in real-time will provide customers with a more personalized experience and boost your engagement metrics overall.

Deliver Personalized Engagement

Mixpanel data can also make sure each individual message is as relevant and engaging as possible. Airship users can target and personalize messages on Airship with Mixpanel user-level data, such as their customer profile, preferences and purchase behavior. This level of personalization can be critical in driving new customers towards their first purchase, re-engaging at-risk customers or re-targeting and upselling customers after a purchase with more relevant content.

Gain Real-Time Insights

Finally, the bi-directional integration allows brands to gain a more holistic view of customers by combining Mixpanel in-product user data with Airship campaign engagement insights. 

By measuring the performance of your engagement campaigns on Airship and sending that data back to Mixpanel in real-time, you can see how new features or product updates influence engagement across the funnel so that the product team can prioritize the most impactful product investments going forward.

We have already seen some data-driven top brands benefit from using Airship and Mixpanel together to create sophisticated, yet easy to implement, customer journeys with the in-depth data needed to convert, engage and retain more users. We would love to talk more about this great partnership. Contact us to learn more about how you could use Airship and Mixpanel together! 

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The post Airship + Mixpanel: How Brands Can Create More Loyal Customers Using Insightful Data & Smarter Messages appeared first on Airship.

Feature flags are a tool that separates deployment of code from the feature release process in an update, allowing you to gradually roll out new features and code to whom you want, when you want. Brands like Quizlet, Stash and Western Union are already using Feature Flags to maintain multiple branches of code within apps to gradually release new features to a small subset of users first — quickly rolling features back if needed, or fully deploying them as they are proven successful. 

With app installs growing across many industries, and businesses rolling out new services to meet changing needs, feature release management maximizes opportunities and mitigates risks. You can use feature flags to test new curbside pickup experiences, appointment booking processes, or implementing enhanced recommendations or social selling features, easily choosing when and to whom new features are accessible, and turning them on or off.

Whether you have a new app or an established one with a large audience, you can use Feature Flags by signing up for a free account, or take advantage of newly reduced pricing for unlimited Feature Flags from Apptimize.

To learn more about this offer, check out our press release. We also have this helpful whitepaper that explains what Feature Flags are and how you can use it for your mobile app. 

The post Innovate Faster and Mitigate Risk with Apptimize’s Free Feature Flags Solution appeared first on Airship.

And now, in this moment of uncertainty, the ability to run test — especially in your app — is even more important for identifying growth opportunities, understanding new customers, optimizing and accelerating conversions and much more. 

In our latest white paper, “5 Reasons COVID-19 Is Making App Experimentation Essential,” our team shares the reasons to get a testing solution anyone can use (from product owners and marketers to engineers and beyond — ) to build and grow a culture of experimentation. 

Even small tests can lead to big results like these:

• 16% increase in conversions to a premium membership for Instasize after they tested and optimized their app onboarding flow 
• 15% increase in bookings after Hotel Tonight experimented with their registration process
• 12% increase in adoption of a key feature for banking app Stash after testing design variations

Download your copy of the white paper today, and get in touch anytime with questions or to chat about the small experiments that can make a big difference for your brand. 

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Let Us Know How We Can Help You Reach Your Experimentation Goals

The post 5 Reasons COVID-19 Is Making App Experimentation Essential appeared first on Airship.

With click retargeting you can automate another text message or trigger an Airship Journey to start or end on any channel when a customer clicks on a link in the message. Click segmentation automatically adds or removes a tag when a customer clicks on an SMS link to segment our future messages based on interest. 

Here’s what you need to know to make the best of these new SMS features:

You Can Send Intelligent and Contextual SMS Campaigns 

Knowing which customers are engaging with your text messages and which messages and products are most compelling to them is key for optimizing your SMS campaigns. You want to make sure that every one of your text messages has value to the customer, and an easy way to know what works is with our intelligent link features. Use branded links (with a shortened link with a custom domain) and unique link tracking to see what is working at the user-level and then use click retargeting and segmentation to personalize each message based on past engagement, ultimately creating more contextual customer journeys.

Build Deeper Customer Journeys with SMS

With click retargeting and segmentation, customer engagement on SMS can now sync with Airship Journeys to create a holistic engagement strategy across the customer lifecycle. Here’s how you can use these features at these lifecycle stages:

• Acquire: Create an Airship Journey to drive app acquisition and trigger the Journey to end when the app download link is clicked in a text message.
• Retain: Create an Airship Journey to drive loyalty member sign-ups via SMS and trigger the Journey to end upon sign-up click.
• Grow: Track SMS engagement at the user-level and segment future Journeys based on past product interest.

This suite of intelligent link features for SMS can power your brand to make the most of each customer interaction by tracking engagement to personalize future text messages. To learn more about SMS, check out our SMS product page (and request a demo!) and our SMS resource library.

SMS

Learn more about SMS intelligent links in our latest datasheet

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The post Level-Up Your SMS Engagement with Retargeting and Customer Context appeared first on Airship.

Link shortening transforms any URL within your SMS messages by creating a shortened link with an Airship or custom domain and only 25 characters, while Link tracking allows brands to track the performance of their links within SMS messages. 

Read on to learn more about these new handy features and how you can use them to engage with your customers through text messages. 

Link Shortening Reduces Characters and Cost

Every character counts for SMS marketing, especially when messages are limited to 160 characters. Link shortening can open up valuable message real estate so marketers can create even better customer experiences, and being able to shorten links within the same UI as your message composer makes it that much easier. Airship can even create a custom domain that’s unique to your brand for your shortened URLs to create a more branded experience! Here are some other benefits of shortened links:

• Increased Click-Through Rate: Shorter links can have a higher click-through rate since longer URLs with query strings can detract from the message and look spammy. Custom domains also significantly improve CTRs as they are more branded and trustworthy.
• Cost-Effective: Long URLs may result in multi-part messages, ultimately increasing your SMS costs. 
• Automated: Link shortening can also be used in auto-responses for keywords texted in, such as requests for app download links or coupon links. 

Link shortening is especially exciting for brands using our Mobile Wallet Adaptive Link technology.  Adaptive Links take your customer data and automatically personalizes the Mobile Wallet pass. A single URL can then be distributed through any channel for a higher likelihood of customers seeing and installing the passes.  The Adaptive Link then automatically detects the device type and adapts the pass accordingly. With Airship’s link shortening functionality, these dynamic links can also be shortened and it is that much easier to text the Adaptive Link and achieve high install rates of your Mobile Wallet passes.

Track Your SMS Link Performance

Airship also allows brands to now track the performance of their links within SMS messages.  Brands can track aggregate clicks and view reporting through Airship’s reporting dashboards to see how messages and campaigns are performing. Furthermore, through Airship Real-Time Data Streaming, brands can correlate audience members with clicks on Airship-shortened links to get engagement data down to the user-level.

This data can be especially important for A/B testing of different marketing campaigns and comparing click-through rates for various audience segments

Get the Most Out of Your SMS Marketing Campaigns 

With average open rates of over 90%, you can’t afford to ignore the power of SMS messaging. Now with link shortening and tracking, you have more room to write impactful messages and more visibility to use your data strategically. Start creating deeper connections with customers on SMS today.

Yes-m-s!

We have more great SMS resources for you in our Resource Library.

The post The Big Short for SMS – Sending Big Content with Short Links and Link Tracking appeared first on Airship.