In this half-day session, mobile leaders gathered to discuss trends, challenges and opportunities. Here, I highlight three topics: an essential new retail tool, investment drivers for app experience and some new Airship data on activation and engagement.

Store Mode Is The Tool Retailers Should Be Thinking About 
Patrons of The Home Depot are big fans of “store mode.” That we know coming out of Mobile Leaders Forum, Atlanta. Based on the open-forum conversations, that view is unanimous. 

Sarah Post discussed store mode in her spotlight session. When shopping in-store, navigating a massive inventory is more manageable with store mode, which allows customers to search and locate products using an interactive map. Since every store is different, store mode serves as a wayfinder for customers to find items down to the bay number and provides an up to date inventory of items available. 

In developing store mode, The Home Depot was looking to create a great experience for pros and DIY homeowners alike who connect with The Home Depot via its mobile app. The brand understood that a strong relationship depended on a mutual exchange of value. They began looking for ways to give customers more of what they needed to make their brand the clear option for home repair, improvement and building. 

By making the mobile app an essential part of the customer experience, the brand has moved from having 1 in 8 households to 1 in 3 households in North America using The Home Depot app. Store mode has been used more than 13 million times over the past year and been an integral part of driving over $1B in purchases. Store mode results in up to 5x more interactions than apps without this feature, according to the CFI Group. Sarah advised brands to set a bold, customer-focused strategy, including working hard to understand users’ pain points in moments that matter and looking for ways to let customer behavior fuel their personalization. 

Mobile Experience Investment Drivers
We asked panelists what consumer behavior has most influenced their investment in the mobile customer experience. 

There was broad agreement on the key drivers, including the vast increase in mobile usage over the last five years, as well as the demand for better personalization, speed and convenience. Panelists also noted that today’s consumers expect quick and seamless experiences, especially on mobile, so streamlining internal approvals and processes has been key. 

Panelists also agreed that testing mobile customer experiences is key in meeting customer expectations for brand interactions. A/B testing has become a key part of a successful engagement strategy for these brands, and AI-assisted experimentation is gaining steam as a hot topic of discussion.

Activation and Retention Trends
In this session, Jennie Lewis, who leads Airship’s Customer Insights team discussed three important steps brands need customers to take within the first thirty days to maximize their lifetime value. She showed attendees how top-performing apps authenticate users and encourage opt-ins by showcasing the value of doing so, and discussed the importance of enabling customers to set their preferences (topic, channel and frequency) and share their interests via surveys and other interactive experiences. 

With rising acquisition costs, brands are more focused than ever on retention. According to CommerceNext, most retailers claim acquisition costs have continued to increase since the release of iOS 14, making retention a critical element of mobile success. Brands that consistently drive traffic to the app and continue to progressively gather preference and zero-party data are among the top performers regarding engagement and retention. In her research, Jennie found that brands leveraging zero-party data saw up to a 59% lift in conversion rate when using audience targeting. 

To learn more about how to capture and keep customer attention and see how your brand’s performance compares to its category, download our Mobile Lifecycle Benchmark: Activation report. 

Airship’s Mobile Leaders Forums are the must-attend event for brands looking to gain industry insights, connect with their peers and discover the latest best practices to capture more value from digital customer experiences. A special thank you to our Atlanta sponsors: Radar and Twilio Segment. 

Want to find out when we’re coming to a city near you? Check out our Event Page, where we announce new Mobile Leaders Forum cities.

The post Mobile Is The Key To Unlocking Customer Value for Brands Across Retail, Media, and Finance appeared first on Airship.

2023 had its own new challenges and developments and will be remembered as the year of data privacy evolution, the rise of generative AI, consumer demand for personalization, and an explosion of gamified customer experiences.

Here we take a look back at major trends of 2023 to help you win at mobile in 2024.

Data Privacy and the Cookie Monster
In January of 2023, brands globally prepared for a new era of data privacy. This trend didn’t happen overnight. In 2014, 91% of surveyed adults either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that consumers had lost control over how companies collect and use personal data. Since then, regulatory compliance has been a major topic of conversation, and brands have struggled to create meaningful brand experiences without overstepping privacy boundaries. Until 2018, with the passing of GDPR and CPRa, consumers had little control over how their data was used to serve up digital advertisements.

The year 2023 brought the demise of the third-party cookie — the packet of code that brands have leveraged for years to provide consumers with more personalized content and track their behaviors across unrelated websites. The loss of the third-party cookie will inevitably change the digital marketing landscape as we know it: 41% of marketers believe their biggest challenge will be the inability to track the right data; 44% predict they will need to increase their spending by 5% – 25% to attain the same goals they set in 2021. 

Google is set to complete third-party cookie deprecation in H2 of 2024, and won’t replace it with another method for individual-level user tracking. This means that brands will not only have to thoughtfully implement their own strategies for collecting zero- and first-party data but also connect their marketing stack to gain more efficiencies across omnichannel customer experiences and future paid advertising efforts. Brands are rising to the challenge by focusing on creating mutually beneficial value exchanges with their customers to gain access and consent to use their data. 

Forever21, for example, collects first-party data through customer preferences and app interactions, which allows it to curate personalized experiences without the need for cookies. Similarly, Airship’s Experience Editor helps brands collect zero-party data with interactive, no-code native multi-screen experiences to onboard and survey new app customers and collect their preferences via an out-of-the-box Preference Center.

Forrester predicts marketers will become privacy champions in 2024. As data privacy regulations evolve, make it your New Year’s resolution to transition from third-party data to zero- and first-party data to power your customer experiences and personalization.

Generative AI and Machine Learning: the Saga Continues
You can hardly find media today without some reference to generative AI. More and more brands are adopting it in their strategies and technologies — 51% of marketers are currently using or experimenting with generative AI at work, and 70% believe it will increase their productivity.

Walmart, one of the largest players in the retail space, has aggressively adopted generative AI with the aim of making shopping easier and more convenient for its customers. Building on the success of “text to shop,” launched in 2022, Walmart has begun testing a voice experience in its mobile app that allows customers to shop using voice commands and two-way communication with a virtual shopping assistant. Walmart claims its investments in AR shopping for apparel and home have increased customer satisfaction rates. Now, Walmart is in the early stages of incorporating generative AI and AR in its app to deliver personalized inspiration for home decorating based on budget, theme and preference data.

Airship was quick to offer generative AI capabilities — not surprising, considering its history at the forefront of technological advancements in mobile. Our ChatGPT integration allows brands with ChatGPT accounts to create alternative messaging copy rapidly, populate subject lines based on tone and sentiment, and simplify the testing process without encumbering the creative process. This is a measured integration of generative AI, which doesn’t bypass governance or standard reviews.

Personalization Continues to Drive Consumer Engagement
Airship’s Mobile Consumer Study 2023 showed that consumers want personalization when it leads to relevance and convenience without being creepy. They’re always looking for ways to make their lives easier, and they unanimously agree that “recommendations and offers based on past behavior and purchase” as well as “interests and preferences they supply to brands” are the most useful forms of personalization. 

They also look for unique experiences that come from personalization — 73% of shoppers now expect brands to understand their unique needs and expectations, and it’s no longer adequate for brands to simply personalize with a first name. 

Personalization has proven to generate big gains for brands. Take North American beauty retailer, Ulta Beauty, which has invested in emerging technologies to take personalization to new heights. Personalization is a key loyalty driver for Ulta Beauty, with over 95% of its sales coming from participants in its loyalty program.

Personalization can mean many different things across the mobile marketing ecosystem. For Ulta Beauty, personalization means creating an emotional connection, inspiring brand love and creating lifetime loyalty. VP of Customer Marketing, Kelly Mahoney explains that Ulta Beauty seeks to personalize by understanding who their consumer is intimately, not just transactionally. 

We continue to see more brands focusing on creating a mobile-first omnichannel experience — and personalization is critical to reaching customers where they are. Or, as Mahoney explains, “Leveraging the mobile device is kind of that handshake to experiencing us. We know our consumer is connected, even when they’re shopping inside our stores.” 

As we move into 2024, leveraging zero- and first-party data for personalization will be imperative. Brands should seriously consider the upward-trending demand for useful personalization and evaluate their strategy for capturing zero- and first-party data and immediately actioning it in campaigns and experiences. 

At Airship, we’re helping brands drive deeper personalization here are just three critical ways:

• Connecting to your complete marketing stack with real-time, bi-directional data
• Providing simplified ways of collecting zero- and first-party data as part of the native experience
• Configuring external data feeds to provide the most up-to-date content, such as items left abandoned in a cart, rewards balances and flight delays. 

Gamification Drives the Most Interactive Campaigns on Mobile
This year marked the 10th anniversary of “Starbucks For Life,” a campaign that not only rewards loyalty through its traditional Starbucks Rewards program but provides players with free gameplay for each purchase (and double plays on Monday). It’s all part of a gamified experience where participants win prizes — the grand prize being Starbucks for Life. 

Gamification has become a critical part of mobile app experience. The gamification market for 2023 was estimated at $12.26 billion (USD) and is expected to reach $38.71 billion by 2028. That’s because of the increase in new loyalty customers, customer retention rates and revenue that top gamification brands like Starbucks are seeing.

Why is gamification so impactful? According to science writer Deborah Halber, “Two things drive human actions: necessities — food, sleep, avoidance of pain — and rewards.” Gamification takes rewarding consumer behaviors to a new level. When incorporated into strategic mobile marketing campaigns, it can drive consumers to take actions like opening the mobile app every day or making small purchases for potential large gains, awarding them status points for doing so. 

A significant driver of gamification adoption by brands is giving customers what they want. For example, according to Tapjoy, 77% of Gen Zers play mobile games daily – so when it comes to capturing the Gen Z audience, brands look to gamification to win this segment over and create lasting loyalty.

In 2024, we can expect to see continued growth of gamification campaigns: more than 87% of brands say they’ll adopt gamification tactics in the next five years. 

Airship is making gamification more accessible to brands without the need for hard coding. Initiatives that were once complex to launch can now be built and deployed within a single marketing platform. For example, you can easily create a quiz of the day and harvest the responses as actionable first-party data. Learn more about 3 Easy Engagement Tactics You Can Launch Today with Airship. 

We’re excited about everything that 2024 promises to bring. Rest assured that we’ll stay on top of mobile trends, insights and advancements as the year progresses, and hope to see you all in-person or online. In the meantime, if you have questions about how we might be able to help you respond to these trends globally, contact us today! 

Cheers to the year ahead!

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 The Hottest Mobile Trends of 2023 and What They Mean for the New Year appeared first on Airship.

DAZN emphasizes onboarding and personalized engagement at every stage of the lifecycle

DAZN’s Tom Burrell, SVP of Retention Marketing, took to the stage to talk all about lifecycle marketing through CRM. With a global fan base of over 3 million, DAZN – an international over-the-top sports streaming service focuses on building the future of live sports while navigating the complexities of multiple channels and ecosystems to meet fan needs through every stage of the lifecycle. DAZN is already at the forefront of the live sports evolution through live streaming capabilities, betting and on-demand content. Burrell has helped position his team to take on new technologies that make understanding customers and catering to them even easier. 

“When customers download a new app, they want to get the most out of the app,” said Burrell. It seems simple, but driving value is something a lot of brands struggle with. The team at DAZN has done extensive work on the onboarding and testing of new app customers. They’ve concluded that a customer who remains in the app moving into the second month is more valuable than a customer in their first month. So the logical conclusion is to help customers get the most out of the app right up front. Burrell explained how the onboarding journey is a critical part of showcasing the app and why DAZN focuses on connecting business goals and objectives to the customer lifecycle, analyzing customer data, and blending qualitative and quantitative research to understand the big picture of its audience. 

For more insight and depth into DAZN’s lifecycle marketing strategies please check out Burrell’s recent appearance on the Masters of MAX podcast.

The BBC automates journeys to create value for its audiences

Ian Wolfe, BBC’s Head of Digital Media, took the stage to discuss the impact of abandonment on brands and how BBC has maintained focus on the customer by creating a digital-first experience for everyone. 

The BBC is well known for its commitment to bringing local and global news into the lives of its viewers and creating “value for all.”  Wolfe, , discussed the four strategic pillars that are the foundation of that commitment — renewing impartiality, focusing on unique high-impact content, extracting more from online, and building commercial income. 

In Wolfe’s view, his job is to help customers cultivate a daily habit with BBC’s online services, including BBC iPlayer, Sounds, Sport, News and Kids. That requires understanding consumption behavior and using automation and reporting to make timely and informed decisions. 

To implement an automated journey, the BBC team focuses on message cadence and audience segments. In one example cited by Wolfe, the team used automation to address abandonment of the iPlayer. Through data analysis, it mapped audiences to find out when it should consider a TV series as abandoned so it could start building out messaging to intersect with customers at the most impactful moments. Then it leveraged Airship’s integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud to build out custom audience segments so the right message went to the right customers. Finally, the team sent targeted, relevant and timely content to listeners to bring them back to iPlayer for additional streaming time. 

Panel discussion: mobile leaders share how they are tackling data challenges

Moderated by Airship’s Steve Tan, panelists included Matthew Nash, Head of CRM & Retention at Immediate Media; Gareth Main, Chief Customer Officer at Olio; Polly Jones of Odeon; Pietro Lambert, VP of Product at OneFootball;  and Greg Turtle, Head of Growth at What3Words. In this session, panelists discussed how to address data challenges across the mobile ecosystem.

To start, brands were asked to talk about their big data challenge or personal data frustration. Odeon’s Polly Jones shared an experience of setting up a new washing machine and being asked her birthday. She said brands need to consider carefully how much data they ask for.

The central concern of the panelists was what data to collect and how to collect it. All agreed that it depended entirely on what the brand was offering. There was also consensus that data latency, data organization, resources and the ability to derive meaning from specific data points continue to be challenges.  Some panelists referenced their goal of building a “progressive” customer profile, an approach that emphasizes data collection over time and at appropriate moments. Onefootball’s Lambert explained the importance of getting critical data — such as customer preferences — upfront during the onboarding process in order to optimize the customer experience from the first interaction. 

They also discussed asking customers directly for information (zero-party data) versus observing customer behavior (first-party data) and making inferences. For panelists, the former approach was the most useful and impactful, offering the freshest insights into customers’ interests and needs. All of them use Airship tools to collect zero- and first-party data. 

Drawing on experience with Airship customers, Steve Tan stressed the importance of being user-friendly and transparent about data, leveraging it without intrusion or creepiness, measuring the impact consistently and iterating on how you collect it until it’s really working for you. 

Airship now helps brands experiment anywhere 

Airship’s Max Azoulay and Sandra Wroe led a discussion about new and exciting innovations coming from the team at Airship. 

For years brands have struggled with three distinct challenges: 

Challenge #1: Brands need actionable data 
In her role as a Customer Strategist at Airship, Sandra Wroe is often asked by brands what they should focus on. The answer is often, “Focus on customer data.” 

Airship continues to address that need. Our Reporting Hub provides real-time insights from all active experiments, as well as customer, channel and campaign data, all in one place. Our new App Health Reporting dashboard provides at-a-glance KPIs to help marketers and product owners understand app performance across the mobile app lifecycle.

Challenge #2: Brands want to test & learn fast 
The vast majority of marketers and mobile product owners agree that feature tutorials and opt-in flows significantly impact app customer behaviors, yet nearly 50% of enterprise brands only improve these critical first experiences quarterly or less. Why? Because they typically had to hard-code app experiences, but development resources were scarce and they didn’t have the data to back up their need for those resources, according to customers we spoke with. They also couldn’t analyze app performance to understand what changes in experiences would make the biggest impact. 

Airship has changed all that as part of our mission is to deliver everything you need to capture customer value —inside and outside the app.

Our no-code native Experience Editor streamlines creating and adapting high-value app experiences, giving a brand’s entire team greater agility to achieve their business goals. Marketers and mobile product owners can now skip making enhancement requests to development, waiting for app updates, or settling for disjointed HTML web views, and instead create and optimize multi-screen onboarding, activation and adoption experiences themselves with full native performance, accessibility and measurement. 

Adding even greater focus to ongoing experimentation and optimization, Airship’s Experimentation Hub centralizes all experiments and allows anyone to create, launch and evaluate experiments across messages, channels, campaigns, journeys, app experiences and features themselves. You can now experiment anywhere with Airship, systematically fine-tuning everything and anything you share with your customers. 

Register for our December 5th webinar to learn more about Airship’s experimentation and reporting capabilities and hear from two leading brand experts on driving better results with continuous experimentation and optimization. 

Challenge #3: Brands want the ability to personalize and orchestrate app experiences and cross-channel customer journeys 
Providing tailored experiences to customers continues to be a challenge for 63% of digital marketing executives, said Azoulay, citing Gartner. With a heightened need for better personalization, the question isn’t “Do we need better data?” It’s “How do we get better data?” 

Better data depends on your brand’s ability and agility to collect zero- and first-party data. Airship’s Surveys and Scenes allow non-technical teams to easily create, automate and adapt no-code native app experiences to collect first- and zero-party data while onboarding and activating app customers. Orange France, for example, now gets as many customer responses in a day using Airship as they used to get in a month with their previous HTML webview surveys.

Until next time

Mobile Leaders Forum concluded with Airship’s Altitude Awards, recognizing mobile innovation across the globe. If you missed it, you can watch the awards ceremony or check out our blog celebrating the winners. 

Want to know when Mobile Leaders Forum is coming to a city near you? Sign up to receive Airship’s customer newsletter, Navigator.

The post Brand Executives Talk Retention, Conversion, Data and More at Airship’s Mobile Leaders Forum London appeared first on Airship.

Want to know who and how? Read on!

Submissions were judged on performance, impact, innovation and degree of difficulty, in four separate award categories. 

Distinguished judges included:

Judges were unanimous in their praise for the creativity and results demonstrated across submissions.

“It was an honor to participate in this year’s Altitude Awards as a judge, and much more difficult than I expected! How can you decide between very compelling concepts that are backed up with hard measurements and meaningful business impact and say one is better than the other? I was inspired by how others in the industry are evolving and constantly pushing the boundaries. It was very inspiring.” 

Barbara Spiering, VP of Marketing Technologies, Starbucks

The following brands were recognized as category winners:

Acquisition: MTN Nigeria

MTN Nigeria was awarded the Acquisition Award for their mobile app myMTN NG, a free app developed to help its mobile subscriber customers simplify their mobile lives. 

MTN Nigeria developed their brand new myMTN NG app with the aim of achieving 6 million users by December 2023. Focusing on performance, proposition and promotion, they leveraged Airship’s Push Notifications and In-App Messaging to boost engagement and app downloads. Using custom event-triggered automations, the team saw a 1,000% increase in monthly active users (MAU) over a 21-month period. They used this increase in active users to drive app store ratings, impressing judges with a 65% improvement in one month. In turn, ratings and reviews inspired new app downloads, further increasing their MAU. The judges were especially impressed with their ability to drive big improvements in such a short timeframe. 

Activation: REGIOCAST

German-based radio company, REGIOCAST took home the Activation Award for excellence in activating new app customers and creating a foundation for long-term relationships among listeners. 

Like many brands, REGIOCAST had a goal of increasing app usage and listening time within the mobile app, as well as incentivizing customers to increase the frequency of app opens. REGIOCAST leveraged Airship to do just that by running a contest campaign using in-app messaging.

In naming REGIOCAST the winner, the judges highlighted an ongoing evolution of engagement methods in response to customer inputs; a focus on generating long-term value; notable engagement results; and sustained engagement beyond campaign periods.

Monetization: Boots 

When it came to demonstrating an ability to generate revenue and create sustainable value from mobile apps, pharmacy-led health and beauty retailer Boots walked away with the Monetization Award. With a focus on modeling and testing to drive top performance, Boots showed how well they understand their customers – and how to create a mutual exchange of value within the mobile ecosystem. 

Within their nominate campaign, Boots improved both their targeting and creative content, while cleverly employing a gamification technique. Their approach translated into increased revenue and strong growth in loyalty.

In-App Experience: Warner Media 

This award celebrates brands that deliver personalized and effective in-app experiences. 

Warner Media is one of America’s leading media and entertainment companies. With its March Madness Live project, it streams more than 1.2 billion minutes of live game action across all platforms. 

The 2023 March Madness Tournament attracted the most engaged audience in the app’s history – largely driven by the NCAA Digital’s innovative app strategy using both automated and manually written alerts across differentiated audience segments. Fans not only took to the app, but a unique tone for alerts sparked significant social media conversations about the app’s quick and relevant notifications. 

The brand’s research and data analysis gave them the information they needed to personalize the targeting of each campaign, with total engagement on notifications topping 4 million for a third straight tournament and app opens per alert up 28% from last year. Excitement alerts accounted for 70% of live minutes streamed with over 600k fans interacting with one. In-app messages were used to re-engage fans, emphasizing special alerts for bracket picks, game starts and must-see moments.

Judges highlighted the innovation behind this project, including its introduction of Live Activities for Apple, systematic processes for continuous experimentation and data-driven customer interactions. 

Cheers to our 2023 Airship Altitude Award Winners & Finalists

A huge congratulations to the extraordinary brands who innovate and inspire in their use of Airship’s App Experience Platform. These brand experiences impact millions of customers around the world, and Airship is proud to be part of making their lives (and yours!) better. 

Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry to Airship’s Altitude Awards. We look forward to seeing you again next year. If you missed the livestream of the awards, you can watch it now.

Want to know when the next Altitude Awards submission process begins? Sign up now for Airship’s customer newsletter, Navigator.

The post Presenting the Winners of the 2023 Airship Altitude Awards appeared first on Airship.

The holiday season is when you need to be on the top of your game, but alas, certain challenges may get in the way. We hear from prospects how they struggle with accessing usable first-party data for personalization, how they’ve been forced to rely on scarce development resources to create hard-coded app experiences, and how they need  to get better at segmenting campaigns to target relevant audiences. 

We’re here to help. 

Spur Activation After Black Friday 

Downloads are critical. And Black Friday is the peak moment of the year for downloads. But downloads don’t amount to anything unless they’re followed by activation. That’s when customers open your app and sign up for things. 

Brands looking to capitalize on Black Friday downloads need to consider what happens after the download takes place. We call this the activation phase.  Here’s what you need to do to maximize activations: 

Encourage App Authentication: Getting customers to authenticate in the mobile app will help you identify who the customer is across all channels and points of interaction. Authentication, which means the customer self-identifies and signs in, makes it easier for you to leverage data and get complete customer information wherever you interact with them — so your post-holiday communications deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time. 

Create Attributes and Tags: Mobile app experiences give you an easy way to add attributes or tags to a customer’s record. You should be adding tags and attributes to customers when they take specific actions. For example, if a customer completes a form fill to tell you their birthdate, include that as an attribute to show your love on their special day. 

Implement Surveys: Surveys provide you a great way to collect zero-party data and then use that data to improve the customer experience. Surveys also help you understand customer sentiment so you can improve each customer’s experience. 

Deepen Engagement With Airship’s No-Code App Experience Editor!

Realizing the potential of your mobile app is challenging work. Marketers and developers have to collaborate under the pressures of tight timelines, bottom-line profit margins and constant demands to deliver faster.

A recent Airship study found that 96% of marketers rely on developers to improve the app experience for customers, while only 13% say all their requests for app enhancements get done.

To make marketers less reliant on developer support, Airship created the App Experience Editor, a no-code app editing engine that allows anyone to create and adapt rich, personalized native app experiences for onboarding, feature adoption, opt-ins, zero-party data collection and more. Now you can respond to customer behavior in real time, making life better for you and them —  so everyone wins!

5 Campaign Ideas To Boost Holiday Engagement 

To boost activation and engagement, we recommend the campaign ideas below. Our customers across Retail, Media, and Travel have used them with great success. These are all quickly and easily implemented with Airship’s App Experience Editor — no developer support or app update needed. Give them a try and let us know how it works out!

1. Countdown to Savings
   A unique way to show a timeline of available deals that will keep your customers coming back to the app as they learn new ways to save. This creates an opportunity to train customers to return to the app regularly and form a daily habit to get the best deals. 

2. 12 Days of Deals 
   Incentivize customers to return to your mobile app by offering a new deal every day for 12 days. Generate fear of missing out by having exclusive offers every day. You can even test different offers to determine which ones are more appealing to different audiences. 

3. Scavenger Hunt 
   Turn any page of your mobile app into a clue for the next big deal or sweepstakes. This helps customers familiarize themselves with your mobile app by gamifying the experience and encouraging them to view pages of your app they may not otherwise visit. You can even offer personalized and unique promo codes for customers who find the right page. 

4. Wish List 
   Capture what items your app customers are shopping for this holiday. Take this as an opportunity to learn about your customers, and do it early in the season. Find out who they are shopping for and what their needs are. You can then personalize future suggestions based on what you know. 

5. Give Loyal Customers a Boost 
   Customize coupons and offers for customers based on their loyalty tier, interests or history, then send them a personalized, festive mobile wallet pass to add to their device. 

See our Mobile Guide for 5 Campaigns to Accelerate App Engagement and Drive Customer Value This Holiday Season for more details.

The post Holiday Mobile App Experiences Make the Whole Year Merry appeared first on Airship.

…brands are doubling-down on how mobile
wallets can streamline customer experiences
and provide the convenience and rewards that
high-value, loyal customers crave.

As a result, brands are doubling-down on  how mobile wallets can streamline customer experiences and provide the convenience and rewards that high-value, loyal customers crave.  In this blog post, we detail some of the top-level benefits of mobile wallet marketing and present a sampling of the use cases brands are actively deploying across different industries. 

Convenience Beyond Checkout
Contactless payments saw a massive increase during the pandemic because customers wanted to avoid touching highly trafficked payment terminals. As of 2022, 90% of retailers across the U.S. now take Apple Pay. However, the value of mobile wallet goes way beyond touch-free checkout. As shoppers pay with Apple Pay and Google Pay, loyalty rewards can be automatically applied and new points seamlessly rewarded, enabling a seamless payment-to-loyalty checkout experience in seconds. According to Forrester Research, Inc., 63% of U.S. online adults agree that loyalty programs influence where they make purchases (“Forrester Infographic: US Consumer Attitudes Toward Loyalty Programs,” February 4th, 2022).

Mobile wallet adoption among airline travelers, concert goers, diners, gym goers, movie theater enthusiasts and practically every other out-and-about spending cohort you can think of continues to grow year over year. In fact, the ubiquitous use of mobile wallet boarding passes has airlines redesigning lobby areas to get travelers on their way more quickly.

Reward Customers Everywhere
Customers want to be rewarded for what they spend with your brand, whether it’s time or money.

Mobile wallet is the most seamless path
for not only distributing rewards and coupons,
but also for encouraging redemption.

Mobile wallet passes are location aware, allowing customers to be notified when they’re near the brand’s physical location and have rewards or coupons available to use. Coupons and loyalty passes can also be updated to seamlessly show new offers on the pass, and notifications can let passholders know when they’ve achieved a new loyalty status or if coupons are about to expire. Dynamic pass updates and change notifications can be easily personalized based on a customer’s unique profile and purchase history, and language and images can be A/B tested to optimize performance. 

Powerful & Flexible Distribution
Since the beginning, Airship has worked closely with Apple and Google to enable some of the most successful brands in the world to build, distribute and update mobile wallet passes with ease across their entire customer bases. Airship’s innovative Adaptive Link   technology unifies cross-platform mobile wallet marketing by allowing brands to distribute passes with a single link that auto-detects the customer’s mobile operating system to serve the appropriate pass.  

Adaptive Link can be embedded within any digital channel — a social media post, email, SMS, online ad — or displayed via a QR code on in-store signage, print ads or product packaging. In a single tap or scan, customers can download the pass directly onto their smartphones. If sent through an addressable channel, Adaptive Link pulls in customer information from a business’s different systems to instantly personalize the pass. Details like the customer’s name, OS, member ID, loyalty status/points and product affinities can be displayed on the pass or replicated as tags to use in messaging segmentation or as automation triggers. It’s really just that simple. And has been since we invented this capability in 2017. 

Gaining a foothold on customers’ phones with mobile wallets can go a long way to forming a direct connection, especially in instances where brands and customers are somewhat removed from each other, like on third-party marketplaces, for example. 

A Trusted Mobile Wallet Leader 
Our close work with Apple and Google allows us to stay ahead of mobile wallet technology changes, and evolve with them to bring you best of breed mobile wallet solutions. We worked closely with Google Pay to help create streamlined and engaging ticketing and boarding pass experiences, leveraging our expertise in mobile wallet for travel, hospitality and entertainment. Our partnership with Apple has given global brands better loyalty program data and faster enrollment with support for Apple’s Value Added Services.   Learn more about Airship as a certified pass provider with Apple. 

Mobile Wallet Use Cases
Airship enables a vast number of mobile wallet use cases for our customers. Following is a small sample: 

Airlines — Many of the world’s largest airlines leverage Airship to power mobile wallet  boarding passes, drink coupons and airline mileage loyalty cards, in addition to powering their apps. Airship was first to support mobile wallet boarding passes in 2013, and today works with many airlines to  create, distribute and update passes instantly with flight delays, gate changes and cancellations, as well as notify travelers of seat upgrades, in-flight entertainment, food and drink available for purchase, and lounge accessibility. 

Retail — Retailers have limitless options when it comes to mobile wallet. Everything from loyalty cards, gift cards and coupons can leverage mobile wallet. Retail brands can use Airship to seamlessly update loyalty status, points and rewards and alert customers when they’re near a physical location. What’s more, when brands use Apple’s Value Added Services, customers are more likely to share real contact information rather than fake email addresses. Why? There are no forms to fill out. They just click a button or two and are instantly enrolled in your loyalty program with information from their iPhone or Android device.

Entertainment — When it comes to concerts, movies, sporting events and players’ cards, mobile wallet brings digital first to the next level. Gone are the days of  hunting down a printer or waiting in line for tickets. Mobile wallet passes for events can be easily distributed via SMS, email, websites or apps, making it that much easier for fans to enjoy the event, knowing their tickets are always accessible. In addition, venues can remind passholders  before the start of an event or inform them of seat upgrade offers. 

Restaurant — It’s no secret that some of the world’s largest quick-service restaurants leverage  mobile wallet to distribute  loyalty  rewards. They even gamify the use of wallet passes to grow the number of customers adding it and keeping it on their phones. Mobile wallet offers an additional means for restaurants to grow loyalty program participation and dining frequency,  keeping customers in the know on select seasonal fare without the clutter and competition of an inbox.

Mobile wallet continues to improve the customer experience across all industries, but many brands don’t know where to start. When it comes to questions about implementing enterprise-grade technology for instantly updateable mobile wallet passes, many global brands trust Airship. Airship can also help  drive more customers to adopt your full mobile app experience with solutions to optimize every stage of the app lifecycle.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s connect and find out how we can help you leverage Airship’s Mobile Wallet solution either alone or in combination with your app and cross-channel strategies to start simplifying your customers’ lives. 

The post It’s Time for Marketers to Advance Their Use of Mobile Wallets appeared first on Airship.

Airship has been a long-time Shoptalk sponsor, and you likely saw the Airship team in the expo hall, at Commerce Next’s Topgolf event or perhaps one of the many networking events the team participated in. On the side, we got to talking with many of our customers and with other retail brands looking to Airship to help solve the universal problem — meeting customers where they are and providing customer value that drives loyalty. 

With all this in mind, here are our key takeaways from another amazing Shoptalk event: 

Show Them You Know Them
Customers’ expectations require that brands show them they know them across channels and devices. To comply, brands depend on their technology partners. As Best Buy CMP Jason Bonfig said:

To serve customers today, brands must show up wherever they are. It’s not enough to just have an e-commerce website. Brands must be there for customers throughout the customer experience, not just digitally, and the only way to do that in a streamlined way is through mobile apps. 

During Sunday’s session on Powering Brand Discovery through Transformative Shopping Experiences, CEO of Verishop (an online retail platform), Imran Khan said this: “Advertising 101 is that customers need to see you in multiple places to build trust.” We agree. That’s why the Airship platform is designed for omnichannel and hybrid digital-physical experiences. 

ChatGPT and Generative Ai: Friend Or Foe?
ChatGPT was the shiny new toy of Shoptalk. It’s no secret that brands are watching to see the evolution of generative AI and how it can improve the customer experience. For many retailers, it’s a highly anticipated technology, but they’re waiting to see how it will evolve to enterprise scale. Brands can personalize content with ChatGPT, atomizing content to individuals’ behavior and even mood. Time will tell if consumers experience this as groundbreaking. 

Shoptalk’s VP of Content, Joe Laszlo, shared that “ChatGPT has been the focus of much media coverage, which seems to alternate between the view that it is the most revolutionary thing ever, or risky, half-baked and a disaster waiting to happen.”

Industry experts at Shoptalk generally regarded ChatGPT with caution. If it could increase profit margins and provide a better customer experience, they could see increased adoption. Otherwise, it had all the markings of another metaverse. 

Loyalty Is Money 
It goes without saying that loyal customers are what all brands are striving for, but brands are being forced to get even more creative than they have been, while continuing time-tested methods for building loyalty. 

We had the pleasure of hearing American Eagle Outfitters explain their approach. It isn’t to focus on the physical or digital per se, but on “customer first.” Brands with a customer-first approach will continue to see increases in revenue. As previous Airship data shows, consumers shopping on mobile apps spend 3.5x more than those who don’t. Is the key to unlocking loyal customers to drive them to your mobile app where you can maintain a reciprocal exchange over time? We think so. 

Economic uncertainty is a phrase that’s been passed around for much of Q1 this year, and brands like Ulta are preparing for an environment where consumers are more thoughtful about how and where they spend their money. During their session on Winning Despite Industry Disruption, Dave Kimbell, ULTA Beauty CEO said that for brands to deliver great experiences “means understanding and staying close to users” and understanding what’s on their mind and what’s motivating them.” 

There’s no greater proximity to customers than on the mobile device, and there’s no better way to understand what motivates them than by asking them directly. We’ll provide new insights on customer preferences and behaviors in our upcoming report, “Enhancing Shopper Value,” which details findings from more than 11,000 global consumers. Sign up to get a copy as soon as it is published.

Final Takeaway of Shoptalk 2023
Shoptalk 2023 saw more than 400 exhibitors and facilitated more than 15,000 meetings — it truly was an event to connect, inspire and educate brands. Our final take is that brands must focus on the complete customer lifecycle — acquisition, activation, engagement and loyalty. With the ever-changing ways that customers interact, it’s an imperative for every brand to leverage strategies and technologies to be as nimble as possible. Airship’s no-code App Experience Platform can help your entire team accelerate zero- and first-party data initiatives, and be much more agile in serving up dynamic and hyper-personalized content. New Airship platform enhancements are coming soon, making ongoing dependencies on development resources a thing of the past.

The post Airship’s Key Takeaways from Shoptalk 2023 appeared first on Airship.

When it came to supporting registration, scheduling, and real-time notifications for an event of this magnitude, it’s no surprise that SXSW would deploy a mobile app to stay in touch with everyone attending. And to cultivate the most effective mobile app experience, SXSW turned — as it had in previous years — to their technology partner Airship. 

When registrants downloaded the SXSW Go app, they were welcomed by a helpful onboarding workflow. From start to finish, this experience was powered by Airship. If you attended the event and got your hands on the mobile app, you were using Airship’s App Experience Platform. From before you arrived until you were long gone, Airship delivered everything you needed — recommendations, session information, passes, urgent notifications and even a post-event survey — all tightly integrated with lifecycle messaging to guide and inform you throughout the conference and festivals.

Inside the app, you could easily locate your personal inbox, which housed critical updates, such as weather impacts on outdoor events, need-to-know information for Industry Day, and how to get special access to apps like SXSW TV. The inbox, powered by Airship’s Message Center, remained persistent within the mobile app, so no matter when you needed the information, you could find it with ease.

Airship also partnered with Infillion’s Gimbal to make it easy to set up location-targeted messaging so you could receive customized messages based on your location, including machine learning recommendations to fill gaps in your personalized schedule. The app not only helped you get to your desired sessions on time, it also promoted nearby sponsor events relevant to your interests.

While this year saw the debut of Airship’s no-code native app experiences at SXSW, our company has been a technology partner of this world-renowned festival for more than 10 years. Airshippers were also active participants at SXSW 2023. You may have heard our Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer Tom Butta speaking alongside Lego Creative Director James Gregson in a fireside chat hosted by Brand Innovators. Or perhaps you attended Avocados From Mexico’s House of Good and watched me, Airship’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, talk about the Future of Food with Sprinkles Cupcakes CEO Dan Mesches and CMO Michelle Wong. Airshippers could also be found at the Creative Industries Expo and networking with the best and brightest at Porsche House, Austin City Limits and Wax Myrtle’s.

The most effective technologies are usually invisible to end-users who benefit from them. That’s how it was with Airship at SXSW. In the background — along with partners like event app platform Eventbase — Airship helped SXSW create great app experiences that made life easier and better for everyone involved. That’s what we mean by “the leader behind the leaders.”

The post The Leader Behind the Leaders: Airship Powered SXSW GO Mobile App Experiences appeared first on Airship.

This year we analyzed more than 665 billion notifications sent to more than 2.5 billion users across 13 verticals — offering the most robust push notification performance benchmarks available anywhere. Findings suggest that:

Segmentation and personalization are driving more efficient and effective use of push notifications, resulting in higher open rates and fewer sends. Notification opt-in rates continue to grow as well.

You can’t evaluate the success of your mobile app campaigns unless you can measure and compare them to others in your industry. Our Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2023 aggregates last year’s push notification performance across nearly 5,000 apps to provide clear benchmarks and a starting point on your journey to optimize your own push messaging performance. 

Get answers to these and other questions:

Verticals with performance benchmarks include:

Take the first step and get depth and data on the following key takeaways: 

Push notification opt-in rates 

Many brands anticipated a decrease in opt-ins following the 2022 release of Android 13, and they still do. However, our benchmark study shows an increase in median push opt-in rates across both iOS and Android. As brands continue to focus on the customer experience across the mobile app lifecycle, consumers will continue to see the value of opting in. 

Push notification direct open rates 

The median push notification direct open rate increased over the previous year. As we continue to see brands using more robust segmentation and personalization, we anticipate further increases. Past Airship research has found that highly targeted and personalized messages produce nearly 7X greater open rates, compared to messages broadcast more widely.

Average monthly push notifications per user 

Brands often ask us if they are over- or under-messaging their audiences. The answer is usually “it depends.” Our benchmark data provides detail for each vertical about what, exactly, it may depend on. 

For example, media, sports, entertainment and social apps send a myriad of messages related to real-time updates and customers’ preferences. As we continue to see increased adoption of Live Activities, we anticipate companies in these and other industries will replace sending multiple push notifications with a Live Activity that dynamically updates directly on the customers’ lock screen — from match scores, major developing news and workout stats, to updates on deliveries, ride-share arrivals, reservations and order-ready alerts. 

Download Airship’s Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2023 now. 

Have questions? Get in touch.

The post Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2023 Have Arrived appeared first on Airship.

As a title sponsor of the event, Airship had a front row seat to hear from app teams and industry experts on the  current state, challenges  and future of mobile. Here are the 5 key takeaways we’ve identified coming out of MAU 2022: 

1. Brands are struggling with app user retention
2. Brands are changing the way they do advertising – because they have to
3. Brands are grappling with user privacy and content effectiveness
4. The tension between development and marketing hasn’t gone away – it has grown
5. The mobile marketing landscape is quickly evolving 

More and more, brands are struggling with the fallout of departed app users. When we spoke with  global brands and partners about the challenges they face with their mobile apps, they almost unanimously cited user attrition as the central issue. Downloads may be increasing, but overall app usage is flat because brands are consistently seeing new app users leave, never to return after 7, 14, and 30 days. They’ve fallen into what we call the chasm of no return.  With mobile apps becoming the digital center of customer experience, brands need to solve this in order to unlock the full potential of their app customers. 

The way brands are advertising is changing – because it has to. When Apple announced its App Tracking Transparency in early 2021, it gave app customers more control over their mobile app data. As a result, brands are grappling with user privacy and the way they collect data. The consensus of the Mobile Performance & Measurement in a Privacy-First World panel was

that “brands can’t just keep doing the same thing.” With changing data privacy regulations, we’re seeing a strategic focus on first and zero-party data.  That’s why we’ve created an eBook, “Practical Privacy:  8 Privacy Principles and Practices for Building Better Mobile App Experiences,” and held a webinar on the same topic yesterday (view on-demand). 

Marketers’ dependence on developers has been an ongoing struggle for brands since the dawn of apps, and for many it’s still a problem. Brands have relied on development resources to launch personalized, segmented campaigns, provide feature walkthroughs, devise opt-in explainers and much more. As consumers demand more relevant content, these needs are only growing, as are marketers’ requests for engineering resources.

 As a result, brands are looking for out-of-the-box solutions to create richer and more relevant mobile app experiences without being delayed by sprint cycles and app store approvals. No/low-code solutions are an obvious remedy, but many have not found a way to adopt them. As the mobile app landscape continues to evolve, brands are doubling down on testing and experimentation, setting baselines, measuring customer interactions, and optimizing executions.

MAU Las Vegas 2022 put the best and brightest in mobile apps back in the same room after a two year hiatus, and we were glad to see some familiar and new faces as we all strive to maximize the value of mobile apps to brands and customers alike. 

Interested in learning more about Airship at MAU? Connect with us and we’ll walk you through how Airship is helping brands master the complete customer app lifecycle.

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