Having a high Engagement Score is always great, but the score itself doesn’t tell you enough about your performance. The Engagement Score’s value surfaces when you compare it to other brands’ scores in your app category or your own score over time.

What’s your Engagement Score? You can easily find it on Airship’s App Health Dashboard. 

Now that you know your Engagement Score, how it’s trending over time, and how well you’re performing relative to your category cohort, what then? If the data shows you can improve your score, it’s time to take action. To stimulate app visits, you should promote your app in your general advertising, content marketing, and physical locations if you have them; but the most direct and measurable way to increase app traffic is through outreach channels — push notifications, email and SMS.

Let’s start by determining how much of the audience is reachable via push notifications. The App Health Dashboard is a great source for this information. It provides an at-a-glance view of your opt-in rate and opted-in audience and how those trend over time. 

Once armed with this foundational information,  you can take action. Here are 3 strategies for driving continuous app engagement.

Always Be Communicating (ABC)
Your Engagement Score is your baseline of monthly active users returning on a daily basis. You’ll need to hold your customers’ attention to increase this score. Regularly communicating will build an engagement cadence. Creating compelling content, offers and calls to action will result in app visits.

• Tailor your communications to your app’s typical visitation sequence. Daily communication might make sense for a coffee or health and fitness app;  for a commerce app, daily communication might be too frequent unless you’re running a multi-day promotion or event.
• Align communications with customer value. If the message doesn’t show value, customers are unlikely to act on it, and they may become fatigued with future communications.
• Personalize the communication to the individual. Sure, using a first name can be helpful (sometimes it’s not), but customers expect you to know them. You can personalize by integrating contextual elements, such as recent interactions or shared preferences.

Meet Them Where They Are
The decision to use push notifications is natural when looking to drive app visits, but not all customers have opted into notifications. Also, some communications perform better when amplified through multiple channels. Integrating email and SMS messaging into your communication plan grants customers more options to determine how they’d like to communicate, and it expands the number of channels available.

• Integrate a preference center for collecting profile data. A preference center allows customers to define the types and frequency of messages they want to receive and their preferred channels. It’s an excellent tool for managing opt-ins and expanding your customer reach.
• Preference centers are also an excellent vehicle for collecting deeper customer profile information, which you can use to personalize and contextualize your communications further. Collecting information on interests, product or content categories, time horizons, and social or community interests will enable deeper segmentation and analysis.
• Make the preference center easy to find in your app so customers can continually update their profile as their interests evolve or as you add new options.

Adopt a Culture of Experimentation
Many variables go into crafting effective communications, including copy, content, timing, layout, imagery, subject line and, of course, the value proposition or offer. Improving your app engagement requires traffic-driving communications to resonate with your audience. Not all will be effective, but knowing how to improve them is essential. With an experimentation and testing plan, it will be easier to tell if a particular communication missed the mark entirely or if a minor tweak would have generated different results. The same is true for high-performing messages. Could minor adjustments make them even better?

• Set goals for your messages to establish performance levels.
• Test multiple message variants to measure performance and identify which variables influence your results.
• Consider establishing holdout groups to measure marketing’s entire impact.

Generating repeat traffic to your app is the first step to realizing maximum customer value. A regular, multi-channel, orchestrated messaging plan is the path to driving repeat traffic and improving your Engagement Score. 

Airship’s App Health Dashboard is a great starting point for identifying opportunities. Combined with our out-of-the-box Preference Center and Experimentation Hub, you have robust tools to drive multi-channel opt-ins, increase your addressable audience and refine your message performance. 

If you haven’t spoken with your account manager about these marketer-friendly tools or want to learn more about our integrated email and SMS capabilities, click here, and we’ll help coordinate a demonstration.

Navigator is Airship’s customer newsletter covering the latest mobile industry trends, product updates, use cases and best practices, and other learning resources. It’s yet another resource to help you deliver better mobile experiences and create greater value more quickly. If you’d like to receive our monthly Navigator newsletter, please sign up here. 

The post 3 Strategies for Increasing Customer Engagement appeared first on Airship.

However, having more app visitors doesn’t necessarily translate into more conversions and revenue. If you don’t grab customers’ attention and guide them to high-value actions once they’re in the app, you leave it to chance that they’ll realize the full benefit of your app and take high value actions.

That’s where in-app experiences come in. In-app experiences are single or multiple screens which can be displayed in different formats that guide customers to desired endpoints — thereby enhancing your app’s value. 

Airship research has shown a 31% lift in the Engagement Score 
when push notifications are paired with in-app experiences.

Pairing app experiences with push, SMS and email to drive traffic creates a more complete, contextual and curated experience for your customers. 

Here, I’ll explain the importance of data for experience personalization and then describe four categories of experiences you can include in your repertoire.

Data Collection Fuels Personalization and Context 
We know customers expect and respond better to personalized brand experiences. Those experiences anticipate customers’ needs and demonstrate that brands are listening. However, most organizations rely too heavily on third-party and first-party data to create the types of experiences customers crave. Don’t get me wrong, first-party data is a crucial tool for segmentation and personalization. It’s easier to collect but still represents past activities and inferred insights rather than explicit preferences and predictions. To truly understand your customers and present them with the types of curated experiences they will appreciate, you’ll need to collect zero-party data — data deliberately and willingly provided by the customer. 

Collecting zero-party data is straightforward and can be incorporated as a natural extension of your in-app experiences. A preference center is a straightforward way to collect zero-party data. It’s often used to gather consent and data, including cross-channel opt-in, message topic and frequency, offering a great way to acquire insights into the content or promotions a customer is most interested in.

Additionally, you can integrate data collection into the experience flow by engaging the customer contextually. Many brands gamify data collection by tying it to a promotion or sequencing progressive collection over time in a challenge format.

Zero-party data serves as fuel for personalizing and curating experiences, but you don’t need to rely exclusively on it. The best experiences balance first and zero-party data with the brand’s objectives for the ideal customer experience. Knowing when to trigger the experience and how to contextualize it for the customer are the keys to success — and for this, you need both kinds of data. For example, zero-party data would capture the customers’ specific interests, and therefore could influence their qualification for an offer or promotion. First-party data captures insights such as previous purchases, page views and product views and might influence when the customer is presented the offer or what variation they receive.

4 Categories of In-App Experiences
Experiences on mobile apps typically fall into one of four categories: educational, engagement, promotional and transactional. 

Educational Experiences 
Educational experiences are valuable tools for helping customers understand the benefits and value of your app, whether you focus on the app’s functionality or your product line and services. Education and orientation are critical during the activation phase of the customer journey as you work to explain the functionality of your app and the benefits of your offering to ensure new users understand the value of creating an account or the benefits of opting into messaging. 

The need and opportunity to educate customers is ongoing throughout the lifecycle. As your products, packages, policies and features evolve, you can accelerate adoption by educating customers on the benefits of these changes or additions.

Engagement Experiences
An educated user will better understand the functionality of your app and product offerings, but understanding doesn’t always translate into higher engagement. Your mobile app is an extension of your brand and a critical hub for driving revenue — that’s why you invest to drive customers to it. But are you maximizing their engagement once they’re in the app? 

App opens are an essential metric to track, but what you want from your customers are high-value actions — purchasing items, consuming content, viewing ads, sharing data, etc. Don’t leave high-value actions to chance when a customer is in your app. 

Engagement experiences are the best way to ensure customers generate the outcomes you want. Whether it be stimulating more content consumption, reminding the customer about an item in their basket or gamifying their experience, engagement experiences will drive interactions on the app and lead to brand exposure, data exchange and monetization.

Promotional Experiences
Although your app provides many benefits to your business, monetization is the primary objective. Regardless of your monetization model — purchases, subscriptions, content consumption, upgrades or ad revenue — a promotional element is usually part of it. 

Presenting users with promotional experiences while in the app and then providing them the path to take advantage of the promotions leads directly to greater revenue. 

Some examples of promotional experiences are “Deal of the Day” or “Upgrade” offers, discounts, cross-sell messaging and product recommendations. The best time to present these offers is when the customer engages with your brand. It works like signage when a customer walks into a brick-and-mortar store, except in the app, you can target the promotion based on a profile or behavior and directly attribute conversions to the experience.

Transactional Experiences

Although less directly tied to monetization than engagement or promotional experiences, transactional experiences play an essential role in customer experience. Leveraging the opportunity to acknowledge a high-value action or a milestone can be re-affirming and reinforcing. These acknowledgments can be as simple as an order confirmation or award announcement, and depending on channel and consent can include cross-sell offers or solicit customer feedback.

They may not be as sexy as other in-app experiences, but don’t sleep on transactional experiences. Gartner states that transactional emails see open rates triple those of non-transactional emails, which means post-purchase they may be more effective in driving customers back to your app than marketing messages. Above all, transactional messages are opportunities to validate the relationship the customer has with your brand.

In-app experiences are the connective tissue of the mobile customer experience since they ensure the app visits you work so hard to create result in the high-value actions necessary to monetize your app. Don’t feel compelled to segregate experiences into categories. You can build immersive and contextual customer experiences by mixing categories together within journeys in response to customer behavior. Thanks to Airship’s Experience Editor, for the first time ever, you can do all this simply and easily in a no-code, drag-and-drop UI that doesn’t require a developer to create, deploy or adapt fully accessible, measurable and performant native app experiences.

If you want to learn more about Airship’s Experience Editor, contact your Account Manager or click here to be contacted. 

Navigator is Airship’s customer newsletter covering the latest mobile industry trends, product updates, use cases, best practices and other learning resources. It’s yet another way for us to help you deliver better mobile experiences and create greater value more quickly. If you’d like to receive our monthly Navigator newsletter please sign up here.

The post 4 Categories of In-App Experiences That Drive Monetization appeared first on Airship.

As mobile practitioners, we strive to meet (and exceed) this consumer expectation but also work within the constraints of our environment. We want to react in real time, but just as importantly, we want to make data-driven and informed decisions. 

Marketing in the digital age is by nature iterative — the process of incremental improvements that continually refine and evolve the customer experience leading to better business outcomes. To be efficient, these improvements should be based on quantitative findings. 

I always marvel at the innovation and creativity of brands in the design of promotional initiatives. I’m equally surprised at how infrequently brands test to determine the effectiveness of their initiatives to create impactful customer experiences and whether slight changes can improve results.

The mobile experience is constantly evolving along with the consumer expectations and the key to keeping pace with those expectations while driving incremental performance is to test and learn. While most brands apply some level of testing, it is often inconsistent. Brands that adopt a culture of experimentation design testing into all of their marketing and product activities. They instill the importance of quantifiable insights in their teams and provide the processes and tools required to properly apply their testing plans.

CULTURE OF EXPERIMENTATION

Shifting from intermittent testing to a culture of experimentation can drive improved customer insights, accelerate learnings and increase conversions and high-value actions that lead to more revenue.

We see four common practices among brands that adopt a culture of experimentation: 

1. Commitment to data-driven decisions, including management sponsorship of experimentation for continuous learning and improvement.
2. Defined and documented testing plan that is continually updated based on findings and results.
3. Robust suite of testing tools to support the testing plan across the mobile environment
4. An environment that allows for failure. Not all tests will be successful and the brands with a culture of experimentation foster creativity by allowing employees to explore new ideas without the fear of failure.

TESTING ACROSS THE MOBILE LANDSCAPE

Experimentation should take place across the mobile ecosystem with brands testing the three major components of their mobile experience — app store, mobile app/mobile website, and messages/experiences.

App Store
The app stores are where the majority of consumers discover apps to download, so it’s crucial that your app store listing is highly visible across all relevant keywords and clearly conveys your value proposition. Of course, you’re also cross-promoting your app through your paid and owned channels to drive traffic to the stores. These cross-promotions present great opportunities to experiment with different value proposition descriptions, message copy and methods for linking directly to your app store listing (e.g. QR codes, buttons or short codes). 

Inside the app stores, it’s crucial to continually test and refine your keyword strategy to be sure potential customers can easily find your app when researching options in your category. Marketers may feel that a well-known brand name is enough to drive success in the app stores, but that isn’t the case. Even the largest, most well-known brands must optimize their app for non-branded keywords in the app stores. Insight from Airship Group’s leading ASO provider Gummicube indicates successfully optimized keyword strategies can generate up to 50% of their organic traffic from keywords related to features and functionality of their apps. 

Even if your brand or app name does return your app in the search results, it will also return other apps and/or competitors who rank highly for your brand, app name or relevant keywords. This highlights the importance of a well-designed, informative and impactful store listing to be sure that you are able to convert potential downloads at the highest rate. 

Testing inside the app stores is difficult and knowing what components of the listing are impacting conversion rates is important to know before you make updates to your product page. Running tests on the key components of your listing — visuals, copy, app rating, icon, reviews — will allow you to determine the best-performing variations before you submit your store listing updates to the stores. 

Understanding the nuances between the app stores and how they operate is also important. Testing your app store listing is best performed outside of the stores to allow you to submit only the most relevant changes to your listings. App Store testing and optimization requires a specific set of tools and Gummicube offers the leading keyword optimization platform (Datacube) and the premier store listing AB testing tool (Splitcube).

Mobile App / Mobile Website
The depth of engagement and monetization from digital customer interactions is directly impacted by how easily they can accomplish their desired objective using your digital products (mobile app or mobile web). While the principles of good app and website design are important, the key to incrementally improving results is dependent on knowing what, and how, to refine over time. And the stakes are high. For example, 57% of app users decide whether to delete an app after only two uses¹. When you consider that customers with a brand’s app are 3 – 4 times more valuable than those without the app, and the average cost to generate an app download is between $3.50 (EMEA) and $5.28 (North America) the possibility of losing more than half of them after two uses highlights the urgency of improving the ROI on your acquisition efforts.

The first 60 seconds a new user spends in your app or on your website will influence how long they stay and whether they come back. The user is there because they are looking for something and they hope you can provide it. In the first 60 seconds, they’ll decide if you can, and either continue exploring your app/website or search elsewhere. 

Understanding what actions and behaviors customers demonstrate when they arrive, which ones result in continued interaction or lead to an exit is a starting point for determining what to test. To that end, brands typically need to test the native experience they have created in their design, along with the curated experience they are creating with their messaging content and flow.

For example, despite all marketing and mobile product owners agreeing that feature tutorials and opt-in flows significantly impact app user behaviors, nearly 50% of enterprises² only improve these critical first experiences quarterly or less often. Testing is a tool to achieve optimal onboarding flows, but should also be applied across the app lifecycle. 

Testing the native experience doesn’t have to focus exclusively on components that are fixed like layout, imagery, navigation, text. It’s equally important to test new features or additions to your product before widely rolling them out to your customers to be sure you’ve designed the user experience properly. This can include new short cuts, premium features or pricing. All of these can easily be tested using feature flags to create variations that will be shown to different audiences to measure the behavior of users exposed to one variant or another. Continuously testing the native experience is critical to determining the best combination of variants for driving ongoing engagement leading to high-value actions. Multivariate and programmatic testing allows brands to test multiple variations at the same time to accelerate their learnings and iterate more quickly. This approach also requires a well-thought-out approach to test design and control group management to ensure you have statistically significant findings and avoid indeterminate results. 

Messages and Experiences
The other crucial testing area for optimizing your business results is within the experiences you create to drive activation, feature adoption, engagement and ultimately monetization. Designed to drive high-value actions, these experiences are composed of messages curated and presented once or dynamically sequenced over time. 

There are dozens of individual components that go into experiences so to maximize their impact you must understand which set of components produces the best results. Of course, imagery, copy, layout and offers influence the performance of an experience — but don’t overlook timing, frequency, use of personalization, subject lines and context.

When testing experiences, there are usually two high-level questions to answer:

1. How can the impact of messaging and experiences be measured?
2. How can experiences be improved to deliver the optimal outcomes?

How can the impact of messaging and experiences be measured?
The only way to know if the experiences you are creating for customers are having an impact is through a holdout group. By defining a holdout group that will not be exposed to any of your messaging or experiences you can compare their behavior to customers who were exposed. If the exposed group performs the desired high-value actions at a higher rate than your holdout group, then the incremental performance can be attributed to the marketing efforts and calculated as the lift associated with the experiences you are creating. Important considerations when creating a holdout group is to ensure the group is a random sampling of your audience to eliminate any bias in the test. You will also want to determine whether you want this group to continue receiving transactional messages required for the delivery of your service or goods. If you choose to continue sending your holdout group transactional messages, check to confirm that there aren’t embedded offers or recommendations in those messages as this could influence your test results.

How can experiences be improved to deliver the optimal outcomes?
Once you’ve concluded there’s a positive lift when customers are exposed to a message or experience, the next step is to understand how to drive the most impact through refinement of the experience.

A simple example might be a desire to understand which color call-to-action button drove the best performance. To determine this you would design a simple A/B test that measures the response rate of customers exposed to one variation of the button compared to those who were exposed to the alternative variation. To ensure accurate results it’s important to randomize the control group to eliminate any biases.

While this example is straightforward, there are dozens of components to the messages and experiences customers are exposed to on a daily basis. Testing each of these in a sequential order can be time-consuming but running multivariate tests can accelerate learning and therefore improvements in performance. Multivariate tests require a well-designed testing framework and randomized control group approach to assure the findings are accurate. 

Testing an experience is similar to testing a message but also allows for the evaluation of sequencing in your testing matrix. Understanding the influence that message sequence, frequency, channel orchestration and time of day have on your messages enhances your ability to design journeys that have greater business impact.

Airship has invested heavily in building a mobile testing suite to enhance mobile experimentation. Our Feature Flags offering is available now as a Special Access tool. If you’d like to learn more about the experimentation tools outlined above, please reach out to your account manager or click the link below.

Navigator is Airship’s customer newsletter covering the latest mobile industry trends, product updates, use cases and best practices, and other learning resources.  It’s yet another resource to help you deliver better mobile experiences and create greater value more quickly.  If you’d like to receive our monthly Navigator newsletter please sign up here.

1 The Mobile Consumer 2023 survey, Airship
2 Mobile App Experience Gap survey, Airship

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Why do the Altitude Awards matter?

In today’s digital landscape, mobile apps are critical to connecting with audiences. From acquisition to activation and loyalty, apps play an outsized role in shaping customer experiences. The Altitude Awards aim to spotlight the leaders that have not only embraced this reality but have also set an example for others to follow.

How have brands elevated their mobile app experience?

The 2023 Altitude Awards focus on a range of categories of mobile app excellence. From acquisition to activation, monetization and in-app experiences, the awards recognize the journey that transforms a simple app into a dynamic platform.

Acquisition Award: Recognizing brands that leverage exceptional acquisition strategies to drive app downloads.

Mobile Activation Award: Highlighting brands that excel in activating new app customers and creating a foundation for long-term relationships.

Monetization Award: Honoring brands that excel in driving revenue generation and creating sustainable value from mobile apps.

In-App Experience Award: Celebrating brands that deliver personalized and effective in-app experiences.

The Altitude Awards showcase Airship customers with compelling stories and noteworthy achievements relating to mobile app experiences. If you’re an Airship customer who wishes to enter the awards, please get in touch with your Account Manager for details or check out the FAQ and entry form here.  

And if you’re not an Airship customer, what’s holding you back? Get a demo of how you can use our platform to create powerful app experiences that drive value for your customers and revenue for your brand.

Meet the judges

We’re honored to introduce three of our distinguished judges for the 2023 Altitude Awards who will lead the evaluation process. With their expertise and insights, they will ensure the winners exemplify innovation and best-in-class execution.

Sarah Gilchrist 

Director – Group Multi-Channel Performance Optimisation 
JD Sports Fashion

With a keen eye for digital innovation, Sarah boasts over a decade of experience spearheading Digital Performance for JD Group and subsidiaries across the UK, EMEA and APAC. During her time at JD, she has built a digital centre of excellence for the Group spanning the entire end-to-end customer journey and all digital channels.

Mark Hursh

Managing Director of Product & Digital Experience
Southwest Airlines

Mark is an experienced and versatile Travel industry digital leader with a focus on Airline, Hotel, and Car Rental verticals. He is passionate about digital product management, experience design, business strategy development, cross-functional program management and project execution. Prior to working in the Travel industry, Mark spent over ten years in the Financial, Insurance, and Entertainment industries.

Barbara Spiering

VP of Marketing Technologies
Starbucks

For nearly thirty years, Barbara has been relentless in harnessing technology for optimizing business practices and amplifying market share. As a technology leader and executive, she has led high-performing teams in building transformative digital capabilities, spanning customer data and marketing platforms to drive engagement, increase loyalty and maximize revenue. Overseeing a substantial operational budget, she and her team implement strategies that encompass AI-driven personalization, omnichannel marketing, content management and performance metrics.

Stay tuned for updates and announcements as we celebrate the brands that have taken their apps and businesses to new heights. Learn more about the Altitude Awards and browse FAQs here.

The post Introducing the 2023 Altitude Awards: Celebrating Excellence in Mobile App Experience appeared first on Airship.

We’re all experiencing the acceleration of interest, debate, excitement and fear surrounding AI. The origins of AI go back decades, but the heightened interest has certainly been driven by recent Generative AI (GAI) alternatives. These promise advancements in AI application through the availability of larger learning data sets.

On a personal level, you may have found lots of ways to leverage GAI to make your day-to-day tasks more efficient — whether it be creating slides for a presentation, writing or refining a paper or crafting a note to a friend. 

In our professional lives, we see potential applications for GAI in virtually every department, but these use cases also introduce concerns about when, where and how to apply AI and what implications can arise. 

GAI Concerns
Speaking with customers, we generally hear three primary concerns about applying GAI in production environments: 

• What regulatory decisions will be made governing the use of AI and how could that impact my use case?
• Who owns data inputs/commands that are feeding the AI-enabled use cases?
• Who owns the intellectual property rights for AI-generated output, and what are the legal ramifications?

Absent additional clarity on these topics, it will take time for brands to implement widespread use of AI in production environments, and perhaps longer before brands are comfortable allowing GAI to automate decisions. 

GAI at Airship
At Airship, we have a long history of being first. We take pride in providing innovative solutions to address the needs of the market and we see lots of potential in applying AI to mobile marketing.  We believe GAI can be an important tool for enhancing the efficiency of marketing departments.

We’re proud to announce that we added GAI to the Airship platform in April to enable mobile marketers to iterate on copy, offers, subject lines and other content.

For our purposes, GAI is all about generating and refining content according to your editorial needs. You control all the inputs, as well as the decision rights on use of the output. You can use GAI to create variations of messages for testing or to accelerate the development of creative options.

Of course, Airship’s GAI tool supports multiple languages and the ability to leverage emojis (which we know can drive engagement).

The hype, focus and evolution of GAI are sure to continue in the coming months, but there are real-world applications for the technology today. When used under the right conditions, GAI can drive efficiency and time to market, while ensuring that decision processes and governance remain unchanged.

To learn more about Airship’s Generative AI capabilities contact us today.

Navigator is Airship’s customer newsletter covering the latest mobile app industry trends, product updates, use cases and best practices, and other learning resources. It’s yet another resource to help you deliver better mobile app experiences and create greater value more quickly. If you’d like to receive our monthly Navigator newsletter, please sign up here.

The post Practical GAI Applications While the Dust Settles appeared first on Airship.

So many of these activities happen in the early stages of a customer’s app journey — usually the first hours or days. Then what? Should you just wait for them to come back?

Your customers will spend most of their mobile app journey with your brand in the Engagement phase as you work to maximize their monetization and create app loyalists. That only happens by continually driving customers back into the app.

Your app’s Engagement Score (DAUs/MAUs) is a good indication of how well you’re generating traffic. Our benchmark data shows that after a slight dip in Q3 of 2022, Engagement Scores have been steadily increasing and now sit at their highest point in over a year at 19%.

Push to Pull Customers into Apps 
Push notifications are the natural mechanism for driving customers back into your app. It’s worth noting that using targeted push notifications improves the open rate by 76% over non-targeted notifications.

But push notifications aren’t the only channel you should be using to drive app visits. In an omnichannel world, consumers consume information across channels in an almost seamless manner. What’s important to them is that you present them with relevant and contextual information, which demonstrates that you know them and are listening to them. Amplifying those messages, and coordinating them across channels, reinforces your commitment and respect for their continued brand loyalty. 

You Never Write!
At most brands, email is an important promotional channel, but often operates in a silo. Beyond encouraging the initial app download, email campaigns do not typically focus on driving mobile app re-engagement.

Today’s leading mobile app marketers leverage email, push notifications and SMS to drive traffic to the app. Then, onboarding and adoption experiences can guide customers to complete high-value actions that monetize their visit.

We’ve Got This
If you haven’t already explored adding Airship’s email and SMS capabilities to increase your app traffic, you’ll want to evaluate how these powerful add-ons can aid mobile app marketers and drive more app revenue. It’s an easy way to save money and stretch your budget.

To learn more about how Airship can drive more app visits, increase your Engagement Score and save you money on email, contact your Account Manager or support@airship.com. 

Navigator is Airship’s customer newsletter covering the latest mobile app industry trends, product updates, use cases and best practices, and other learning resources. It’s yet another resource to help you deliver better mobile app experiences and create greater value more quickly. If you’d like to receive our monthly Navigator newsletter, please sign up here.

The post Don’t Just Wait For Traffic. Generate It. appeared first on Airship.

Airship’s new Mobile App Maturity Assessment evaluates your MAX capability across six key dimensions and ranks each dimension at one of four maturity levels. We also provide an overall maturity score.

Six Key Performance Dimensions 

App Growth 
We assess how you acquire new users to understand how much of a priority the app is to your business, how you’re promoting it and how your team is tracking and measuring growth.

App Experiences
App experiences delivered in the context of the customer’s engagement drive higher conversions, so timing is everything. This section will ask you how you apply mobile app experiences to critical moments and milestones in the customer journey. 

Personalization
App users who receive personalized mobile app experiences are more likely to engage. In fact, according to SmarterHQ, 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized offers. This section evaluates how you use data to personalize your mobile app experiences. 

Automation
Trigger-based messages are automated responses to behavioral signals. In this section, we evaluate how your brand calibrates message frequency and what processes you have in place to deliver personalized app experiences at scale. 

Experimentation 
Data tells a story, and one of the best ways to get usable data for your strategy is to A/B test each component. This section is about evaluating your current A/B testing process and finding out what elements of each campaign, experience and new feature you’re actually testing. 

Orchestration 
In the final dimension of the assessment we evaluate how all the elements of your strategy work together. This includes seeing to what extent you’ve established cross-channel collaboration, governing processes and a single view of each customer.

Four Levels of Maturity 

Now that we’ve taken a look at the performance dimensions, let’s look at how we rank each dimension. Below are the four levels of maturity. We not only rank the maturity level for each dimension, we also aggregate your dimension rankings to provide an overall ranking. 

Basics 
We all have to start somewhere. Basics means you’re still green in this area of mobile maturity. But that’s why you’re here – to learn more about MAX and get strategic insights on how best to improve. 

Executing 
When you see Executing on your assessment, it means you have a great foundation for MAX, but might need a little help in identifying areas you’ve overlooked in your strategy. 

Accelerating 
If you’ve made it into the Accelerating category, you have definite momentum and are likely seeing strong ROI from your mobile app investments. Imagine what you could do with even more powerful mobile app experiences. 

Leading 
When it comes to building out a mobile app experience strategy, we all strive to be leaders. Brands that find themselves in the Leading category are producing and tracking ROI, retaining customers with key experiences in moments that matter and have made their mutual exchange of value crystal clear. 

Why Take the Mobile Maturity Assessment 

Mobile is the digital center of customer experience. Brands that fail to meet customers’ growing expectations on their mobile apps will see declines in revenue and loyalty. Conversely, brands that get it right see 3.5x more revenue from app customers than their other customers. 

Not sure what to do? Find out by taking the free MAX Maturity Assessment.

Go to the Mobile Maturity Assessment

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Captivating customer success stories from Indonesia’s GetPlus, Malaysia’s YTL Group and Singapore-based ridesharing brand Ryde were among the many highlights at the forum. 

Here are a few highlights from the session. For more insights and ideas, view the full event here.

Insights & Preferences Create Better Experiences & More Loyal Customers

All presenters spoke about the importance of understanding meaningful customer insights in order to shape more personalized communications, experiences and products. GetPlus cofounder, COO and CMO Adrian Hoon described how rich and relevant customer data has powered GetPlus’ incredible growth, enabling the Indonesian multi-brand loyalty program to deliver customized rewards and incentives that keep customers engaged, happy and loyal.

Hoon explained that “consumers today are willing to share personal data with the brands they love, but in return they expect those brands to reward them and tailor their offerings.” This recognition of an honest value exchange is at the heart of GetPlus’ strategy. With automated, data-driven and personalized messaging, and tailored offers and rewards at every touch point, GetPlus drives more connections and revenue for its hundreds of merchant partners, both online and offline. 

To achieve this degree of personalization, Hoon said that brands need a 360 degree view of their customers as well as the right marketing stack. In GetPlus’ case, they collect data from every transaction and track over 1000 customer attributes, from basket size to brand preferences. By integrating that data with Airship’s App Experience Platform, GetPlus is able to interact with those customers personally in real-time and at scale, which has driven a 62% increase in MAU and a 14X increase in monthly transactions per member for GetPlus.

Automated Customer Journeys Elevate the Customer Experience

For rapidly-growing APAC brands, automation is key to delivering great customer experiences at scale. For example, Dora Poturi, product architect for 4G mobile telecom brand YES (part of YTL Group) shared how the automation of mobile personalization and relevant customer journeys keeps YES ranked among the top 10 most used apps in Malaysia, and the highest rated telco app among competitors. 

Poturi highlighted the impact of using automation to deliver the right message at the right time to their rapidly growing mobile audience, beginning with an automated welcome series educating customers about how to use YES. When customers don’t engage or are at risk of churn, YES uses automation to trigger reengagement messaging with details about valuable features the customer may have missed. They also use automation to launch customer journeys around important dates such as tax season or peak travel times. Not only does this timely and relevant messaging create a more seamless experience for customers, Poturi explained that it has actually cut down on call center volumes as well. YES has grown its user base by approximately 15X over the three years since moving to Airship. 

Hoon from GetPlus also reiterated the importance of establishing a great welcome journey. “The most critical time with a new customer is the first two weeks. If you lose them then you may lose them for good, which is challenging given the high costs of acquisition.”

James Tan from ridesharing app Ryde also described how they leverage an automated cross-channel welcome journey, which includes reengagement messages to keep users moving through key milestones. “If they drop off at any point in time, we actually bring them back by sending reengagement messages to make sure they complete the registration process.”

Great CX Translates to Loyalty and Results

Our panelists were unanimous in the impact of word of mouth in driving organic growth for their brands. In the roundtable session with Ryde and GetPlus, each expert emphasized that a great customer experience is essential to creating that word of mouth. To achieve that, their teams are focused on leveraging behavioural data to automate communications according to different levels of segmentation supported by a ‘test and learn’ culture. With this internal cultural mindset towards testing, their teams can take small steps to experiment and learn how users behave with new communications and channels before rolling them out more broadly. And while doing that, they’re careful to avoid over communicating as this can lead to higher unsubscribe rates and churn. 

First & Zero Party Data Are Critical for Mobile Brands

When asked about future trends, GetPlus’ Hoon addressed the importance of brands collecting first and zero party data, as he believes iOS and Android will continue implementing new privacy restrictions to protect the user. The sooner brands can step away from relying on third party data and instead focus on directly asking customers to indicate their preferences, the less impact they will see from new data regulations. Hoon also stressed how important it is to work with technologies like Airship’s new Preference Center to enable them to do just that, through features that make it easy for customers to share their information.  

These are just a few of the fantastic insights from the Asia Pacific session of Elevate 2021. If you missed the event, don’t worry! You can still access all of the great presentations, panels, roundtables and technical labs. All you have to do is go here.

The post Highlights from the Asia-Pacific Session of Elevate 2021 appeared first on Airship.

Delegates were treated to observations and data-driven actionable approaches from Disneyland Paris, Shell, BBC, Kilo Health, as well as a series of networking sessions led by event partners mParticle, Mixpanel and Appsflyer.

COVID-19 Accelerates Digital Transformation

Speakers recognized how COVID-19 significantly drove digital growth, revealing how the pandemic has caused brands to refocus their resources into the mobile app space to keep up with consumer behavior and preferences.

Airship CEO Brett Caine stressed the importance of mobile apps in our day-to-day lives. Caine cited Airship findings that mobile app audiences from its global customers grew 31% year-over-year in 2020, which was almost twice as fast as growth in 2019.

The pandemic shifted the position of the internet within the e-commerce funnel according to renowned tech analyst Benedict Evans.  “Because people are now using the internet to decide what to buy… it’s no longer just a price comparison engine. Now, it’s a much more fundamental part of the purchasing journey.”

Apptopia CEO Jonathan Kay shared data revealing the upside of investing in mobile app development to meet ever-increasing customer demand versus the downside impacts of not doing so. 

Mobile Success Requires Prioritizing the User Experience 

Examples from all speakers highlighted the necessity of ensuring every app ultimately addresses consumer preferences for a respectful, easy and respective experience. The more those experiences feel personal and contextual, the better for all involved. 

Benedict Evans noted that consumers expect digital-first experiences because they know what a great experience looks like. What might work inside brick and mortar stores doesn’t necessarily translate into what works in a mobile app. As he so aptly put it, “there’s digital and there’s good digital.” The difference will make the difference between winning and losing.

Joseph Brookes, Digital Product Lead at Shell highlighted the importance of establishing better internal cross-functional collaboration when they rebuilt their app, bringing different teams together towards a ‘connected customer’ strategy. This meant that Shell redefined its product team to bring teams that would otherwise work in silos, from loyalty, digital payments, data and CRM, working towards the same shared objectives. By making this internal change, it enabled them to bring the product to market quicker, and to take actions within the app at scale and globally. 

In the case of Disneyland Paris, their approach had the unique challenge of transferring Disney’s magical moments in its theme parks into magical digital experiences, especially in the app. User feedback has been key in streamlining Disney offerings to ensure a purpose-built app experience that complements their physical spaces. Yasmin Kouchouk, Director, Digital Experiences, stated, “2019 for us was about ensuring basic functionality so that we could grow from there and drive business value.” This data-driven approach has allowed for a consistent schedule of introducing new elements based on user information. In 2021, Disney continues to optimise everything from maps, booking ride slots, meet and greets, guest itineraries, and planning mealtimes based on a multitude of factors that contribute to more personalized guest experiences. 

Honesty Pays with Consumer Data Use

Consumers are more conscious than ever before of how their data is being utilised. Speakers including Benedict Evans; Airship’s SVP, Technology, Mike Herrick; and, BBC’s Digital Product Manager, Carolyn Letts raised how privacy-centered changes across Apple and Android operating systems underline the importance of allowing their users to easily customize their preferences. It’s a tricky situation: consumers want relevant, customized offers that anticipate their needs. Companies need to collect data in order to achieve this, but consumers are increasingly more reluctant to share. So how do we navigate this complexity?

Yasmin Kouchouk from Disneyland Paris addressed this, stating that significant resources and screen space were devoted to making sure their app made clear to users how specific permissions would benefit their experience in an easy-to-understand, clear and accessible manner.

Carolyn Letts stressed the need to “stay ahead of mobile platform changes and where possible get ahead”. With 20+ BBC apps under her direction, she advised a granular approach to permissions so as not to overwhelm users and retain some of the control as a brand.

Product Manager at OneFootball, Inga Teserskyte noted the importance of user privacy and data sharing being a huge concern of their partners and the all-important balance between utilising customer data to personalise experiences and not bombarding clientele with messaging. 

In the right circumstances, personalized yet respectful messages can drive real revenue. Research shows how personalization can boost revenue by more than 10% and deliver a 10 to 30% increase in marketing-spend efficiency. It certainly makes sense for brands to make investments to achieve this, but they must be tactful in the way they do it.

Build it Yourself Doesn’t Scale

From the keynotes to our speakers, it was consistently highlighted that no brand is an island. Mantas Ratomski of Kilo Health stated, “If you want to scale efficiently, you can’t build everything yourself.” Making use of Airship’s automated messaging capabilities allowed them to achieve target retention rates within the time scales they had set along with a 50% decrease in app refunds.

Yasmin Kouchouk of Disneyland Paris underscored how contextual messaging using Airship’s location-based targeted push notifications was “a great tool for us,” stating “timing is everything when engaging users”.

Carolyn Letts spoke about the importance of integrations, especially for cross-channel promotions, and pointed out how team-wide inclusion making use of Airship strategic services sessions helped them discover and use features they might not have considered otherwise. The formation of the BBC’s Notification Strategy Group has worked well to ensure all app content managers are working cohesively and staying on top of the ever-looming conundrum “how many notifications is too much?” When running multiple apps under one organisation, it is important to weigh the risk of cross-promoting the same message across too many platforms to singular users. Airship integrations provide tangible metrics that allow them to fine-tune this balance. 

Organisational Commitment to Mobile Wins the Day

If there is one stand-out theme noted throughout the sessions it is that organisations must commit to digital experiences for their consumers if they want to succeed in today’s marketplace. Airship’s SVP of Customer Success, Michael Lavoie, aptly summarised, “Apps are central to our lives. The world has gone mobile and apps are the future of commerce”

Jonathan Kay emphasized the importance of mobile apps to brand and customer success from his unique position as CEO of his top mobile competitive intelligence company. Kay looked at the example of AndroidAuto and Apple CarPlay and how apps that integrate with them (i.e. Dunkin’ Donuts) are seeing huge gains. When Dunkin’ Donuts integrated with CarPlay, app usage increased by 40% over benchmark. Apps must integrate with the vessels and tools existing in the consumer’s life to become a part of their everyday lives. Investing into your app and rewards programs will drive revenue and engagement, Kay added. 

Nick Dymott, Head of CRM at Manchester United advised marketing teams to “fight for space in development, and ensure commitment on all sides of the business is aligned and in synergy.” He pointed out that their editorial team have been utilisting the Airship platform to make data-driven decisions on what sort of content should be promoted across different users and channels, leading to an uptick in engagement rates.

Meko Elmekway, Head of Digital Sales Capabilities at EnBW noted that shifting the mindset to understanding digital as a priority has taken some time in an industry not traditionally considered digitally-forward. Yet now the business takes a mobile-first and mobile-only approach, having seen tangible results and growth from investing in its digital services. Meko summarised, “Whatever journeys we are designing, we must be conscious that our customers are in the driving seat. Consumers have choices and we have to convince them and build trust. Ultimately they have choices. So it’s up to us to stay relevant.”

This is just a fraction of the great takeaways from our Elevate 2021 EMEA session. Don’t worry if you missed the event. You can access all of the presentations, panels, roundtables and technical labs, starting Tuesday, November 2nd. All you have to do is go here.

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